The Two NAPS

Saturday, May 23, marked the end of the 2009 meeting of the North American Patristics Society -- the field's most acronym-challenged organization: While I'm sure we could all use more NAPS in our lives, perhaps a young scholar ought to be leery of publishing her work in the Patristic Monograph Series.

Bad jokes aside, however, the conference is a consistent highlight for scholars of Patristics or Early Christianity: WIth roughly 250-odd attendees, it's not quite the Cheers of the scholarly world ('where everybody knows your name'), but it's close enough: NAPS is much smaller than either AAR or SBL (... nevermind the combination of the two ...) and grad students (or those still aspiring to becoming grad students) can expect to rub elbows with the likes of Dame Avril Cameron, Daniel Boyarin, and Brian Daley. (In at least one respect, NAPS is nevertheless more hierarchal than those larger gatherings -- nametags identify participants as either "DR. John Doe" or, for the un-titled or at least insufficiently titled, merely "John Doe.") With three "plenary addresses" in the course of three days, the conference further capitalizes on a show of unity even as its impressive number of break-out sesion -- 7 and 8 deep for any given time-slot -- attest to the bredth of members' interest.

During one of those break-out sessions -- a fine panel discussion of Patricia Cox Miller's equally fine recent monograph -- one of the audience members nevertheless pointed out that the unity is perhaps a smidgen more precarious than the group's size and collegial spirit might suggest. In short, she -- and for purposes of her point her she-ness is indeed relevant -- noted that there appeared to be "two NAPS" running parallel to one another, remaining largely distinct. Of these, one was colorfully attired, the other primarily tastefully gray, one focused on materiality and sensuality, the other on ontology, one composed of earnest Christian men, the other of a mix of men and women, agnostics and atheists, Christians and Jews, monastics and muslims. In short -- one "patristic" NAPS and one "socio-historical, theoretical" NAPS. And never the twain shall meet.

The latter is, of course, rank exaggeration: The scholar in question would not have been able to point to the disparity between the groups, had she not partaken of one of the "other camp's" sessions herself. On the whole, though, I suspect the comment directed itself at the elephant in the room -- the tensions between those who "do theology." and those who may be grateful that there are others who "do theology," if only because they wouldn't care to touch the topic with a ten-foot diptych.

That NAPS-ers have been reluctant to name the elephant has, I suspect, a lot to do with the recent and infelicitous split between those larger umbrella organizations -- AAR and SBL -- for reasons supposedly similar to those creating divergent entities within NAPS. While, I think, the split has been roundly recognized as unhelpful (not to mention, or so my SBL colleagues tell me, perceived as a kind of coup) and a reunion is on the horizon, the step from recognizing that two kinds of minds dwell in the same body to the initiative to surgically separate the two is a small one indeed.

Intriguingly, the session immediately following the one yielding the insightful comment was a plenary gathering to hear Dame Cameron address the conventioneers. Somewhere towards the very end of her talk, Cameron noted the necessity of theologians remaining in dialogue with historians, historians with textualists, Patristics scholars with medievalists, etc. (... unmentioned, but vital in my view is the addition of -- the whole sorry lot of scholars of late antiquity with Islamicists.)

Cameron's exhortation is, of course, as obviously correct as it is necessary: The field of Early Christian studies has now officially passed out of adolescence in the U.S. (... while still remaining in frustrating infancy in Germany and other parts of Europe ...); accordingly, its necessary period of individuation from all manner Patristic is, perhaps, drawing to an end. I thus find that the best, most incisive young scholars (... Catherine Chin comes to mind ...) are those who navigate as readily within a theological framework as they do within a theoretical one and are as adept at handling liturgical sources as they are with "pagan" philosophical materials.

The generation of scholars immediately below these, the current grad-students and just-barely-out-of-grad-schoolers are coming of age in an academic climate largely devoid of the binaries and syzygies that dominated scholarship as recently as 10-15 years ago -- body/spirit, individual/society, theology/theory are becoming perhaps less obsolete as they are coming to appear interpenetrative, yin-yangs rather than polar opposites. I suspect, then, that this generation can and will substantially revise the currently so obvious (if only haltingly named) elephant in the cozy quarters of NAPS, or even the holy halls of AAR/SBL.

The imperative to do good scholarship does not, of course, go away -- but what it means to do good scholarship and how such a task might be accomplished is changing ... for the betterment of the field, I surmise.