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.
