You have your suspicions when you first spot them, but you have to wait to confirm it. You’re flying in mid-to-late November and they’re concentrated around one particular destination. They won’t be the only ones going there, of course—families with kids, late vacationers, others traveling for business—but they will be among them and you can learn to spot them. The attendees of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting. Pre-pandemic there were reliably about 10,000—a biblical myriad—of them. We’ll have to wait to get the figures on them this time around. In any case, I make a game of spotting them at the airport. Well, if you’ve got a connecting flight you need to wait until the final leg. It’s possible some got on with me in Allentown, but I didn’t spot any likely candidates.
The male of the species is easier to identify at a glance. Bearded, serious demeanor, slightly out of touch when it comes to fashion. Incongruously sometimes they’re wearing jeans but you know that’s just their traveling raiment; once they arrive and get tweeded up they’ll be easier to place. Otherwise you can identify them on the path by their talk. If they enter into discussion with a seat mate or someone walking to the baggage claim or getting onto the public transit, or even in restaurants, they will speak of strange things. Their language will grow technical and their frowns will be discerning. They are assessing, you know, assessing the ideas that don’t fit with their personal theories about samsara, or Origen, or Jeremiah. And they don’t mind saying so, right out in public.
As important as I know religion to be, and as much as I know that to understand it deeply you must spend years and decades studying it, I sometimes wonder just how others must view us. I still dress like them, although I travel in my tweed because it makes my suit-bag too bulky to pack it. On the plane I read an actual book (likely about religion, but that’s not a guarantee), and once in a while someone who hasn’t realized that the conference is over will want to talk business in the airport while waiting for a flight when all I want to do is pull out a novel and try to get the shop talk out of my head for a little while. This is the unusual experience of attending AAR/SBL. I’m sure there’s enough material here for a sociological study, but I think the sociologists have conferences of their own to attend.