I never thought I’d be asked a question about Iraq in a phone interview. Go figure.

And the fun never ends… Thursday, I get to have a phone interview with a place that will hire non-Christians, but they won’t tenure them. I get the odd feeling that after I ask the college’s position on hiring Christians who don’t buy into scriptural inerrancy or young-Earth creationism, this one’s going to be over pretty quick.

The interview with the place I thought might turn out to be Fundie U went somewhat better than expected, although I’m still not entirely sure why I got the interview in the first place—the job description listed two courses (and only two courses) that I’ve never taught before.

On the topic of the broader market, the prospects seem to have slowed to a trickle; things will probably pick up again in January, as some of the places where people have moved up in the world (usually the ones who can’t afford, logistically or otherwise, to do searches two years in a row) decide to take a crapshoot on the leftovers from the first wave.

In the meantime, it’s strangely liberating to have only sent one job application in the past month and only have a couple on the “I am seriously considering applying” pile—a two-year postdoc at a liberal arts college and a research-only job in my field that is quite a longshot but would be a ticket to the top of the Social Sciences Citation Index, the latter of which I just found out about today.