Recent Presentation

 I wrote earlier this year regarding some research I've done on the Spanish flu and how it intersected with religious bodies in North Dakota. I was able to give a broader talk on the state of my research recently in Colby, Kansas, at the Max Pickerill Lecture at Colby Community College. The college recorded the talk and put it up on its YouTube Chanel. Here is the video of the talk: 

First Post-COVID Conference Presentation

The COVID-19 pandemic upended academic conferences, much as it did industry conferences outside of the profession, along with many other activities we took for granted. I attended a couple of conferences virtually while social distancing precautions were in place, but they did not really have the same vibe, even though the sessions were generally informative. 

I attended the Conference on Faith and History for the first time in March 2022. I'd been a member of this professional organization in grad school and rejoined in late 2020. I was living in Kansas at the time, and I flew to Waco to take in some of the sessions. While there, I ran into a professor I'd shared a session with at the now-defunct Missouri Valley History Conference back in 2013. I met some more historians in one of my major fields of interest, i.e., religious history. A few folks wore masks and they were still required on flights, but otherwise, it was very similar to my previous conference experiences. 

This past week, I attended the Baptist History & Heritage Society's annual conference. I've been a member since about 2008, before I started my doctoral studies. I'd attended this conference in person a couple of time previously, including one in Sioux Falls in 2014 and the last face-to-face meeting in Raleigh, NC, in 2019. This year, the society held the conference in San Antonio, and I decided to submit a paper proposal, which was accepted. The paper was title "The Landmark Influence on the Ecclesiology of Jack Hyles," and it looked how the ways in which Hyles's teachings largely agreed with earlier Landmark Baptists who believed that the Baptist Church, or rather, Baptist churches, descended in basically a straight line directly from Jesus Christ himself. 

The presentation received no negative comments, although the session was sparsely attended outside of the participants and the moderator. We were also limited in terms of time because a lunch session went a few minutes over. This presentation was a part of a longer paper that I'd written on the authoritarian leanings of Hyles and their broader impact on the independent fundamental Baptist (IFB) movement. The major impact came through the status Hyles held as the pastor of the church with the World's Largest Sunday school, along with his annual Pastors' Conferences and his unaccredited Bible college. All flowed from his theology, and this ecclesiology was a major component.

My paper was a capstone for a ThM program I completed late last year, and I decided to submit the entire paper to a journal after tidying it up a bit during an unexpected overnight layover at Chicago's O'Hare airport (in a hotel comped by United Airlines). It will likely be weeks or months before I hear from that journal, if past experience is any guide. I've never published through this journal before, so I'm not entirely sure of the speed at which my submission will progress. If it's not accepted by my first choice, I have a couple of additional journals in mind, although I may have to cut some of the paper for length purposes. Different journals required differing manuscript lengths.  

Overall, the conference was an enjoyable experience. I was able to reconnect with a couple of people I'd met before, including one who had also done a dissertation on North Dakota Baptists, and I met a few other folks from a university that's in the neighboring state of Kentucky. I met a couple of editors who I'd worked with in getting a couple of my articles and book reviews through the society's journal, Baptist History & Heritage. Talking history in general, and Baptist/Christian history specifically, with people who are sympathetic with most of my beliefs is aways a positive experience. 

Spanish Flu and North Dakota Churches

 Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I've been researching the way North Dakota experienced the Spanish flu. North Dakota History published an article that I wrote in 2021. This article looked at how North Dakota's newspapers provided coverage of the Spanish flu to residents of the state. At first, I thought an article would encapsulate basically everything I wanted to address, but there was way more information available the deeper I dug. 

Therefore, I decided to keep digging and prepare a book manuscript (a draft of which is already completed and submitted to a potential publisher). One of the chapters deals with how religious groups in the state dealt with the flu. Laura Spinney's Pale Rider and a few other secondary sources have noted that many parts of the world took a religious approach to explain the appearance of the deadly contagion. One bishop in Spain asked for a series of prayers to appease the wrath of God. This impulse was not terribly different than the one that drove medieval flagellants to beat themselves in light of the Black Death. God is mad; we must appease him. 

However, when looking at some of the major denomination in North Dakota, there was no real reflection, other than the people lost to the disease (some pastors were among this number) and the ways in which the flu kept the churches from carrying out their organizational plans for the year. There was no attempt to tie the Spanish flu to God's wrath, nor was there any question as to what God might be attempting to tell the world. I found this interesting, given the fact that the world was engaged in a war that was among the more senseless in world history. 

Additionally, this varied from the response by Christians to more recent tragedies that have caused some ministers to claim that some natural or man-made calamity was the punishment of God against wayward people. For example, Pat Robertson claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of God's wrath, tying this to abortion and the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. 

My primary question for the chapter revolved around the ways the churches reacted to the Spanish flu. The article noted above found that churches were a part of the ban on public meetings. Grand Forks was effectively closed for about seven weeks in the fall of 1918, and churches did not meet from early October to late November. Some churches in the town were actually concerned over the possibility of large meetings when the city's health officials decided to allow for public meetings to resume. Schools in the town did not reopen until January. This reaction to the flu in Grand Forks differed from the one evident in Fargo, where ministers petitioned the city to end the public meeting ban before it did in late October. 

Needless to say, these findings were interesting, and they tended to provide some interesting historical context for the actions that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.