The AAR Left Its Heart in San Francisco

Paul Harvey

So many friends and colleagues gathered in San Francisco this weekend for the American Academy of Religion meeting, highlighted by a reunion dinner yesterday evening for those lucky enough to be part of the Young Scholars in American Religion program.

As you will have seen already from Kelly's roundup post last week, the conference was full of intellectual fare. Our bloggers here were on panels discussing everything from twentieth-century fundamentalism, to religion and the AIDS crisis, to the famous self-taught artist and street evangelist Sister Gertrude Morgan (hope you'll blog about that here, Emily!), to subjects in Mormon studies, to "narrativity" in the construction of our American religious history courses and survey writings-- and much more besides. You can survey a lot of reactions/experiences at panels at the twitter hashtag #sblaar.

My friends and colleagues took care of cogitating over these important subjects. As for myself, I spent more time re-indulging the delights of Korean tacos and kimchee fried rice from the Namu food cart at Ferry Point Plaza at the Saturday farmer's market, which surely ranks as one of the best 2 or 3 places in the United States (especially for foodies). On a chilly and rainy weekend, nothing conjures up a pre-Thanksgiving weekend of food and intellectual fun like kimchee fried rice.

Blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope, sorry for the silence, and thanks to many at AAR who said kind things to me about the blog. And finally, congratulations to RAndall, who is very soon, in just a couple of weeks, off to Norway for 6 months as a visiting lecturer/scholar as a Fulbright Fellow in Norway!