He greeted me with a friendly embrace that confirmed the warmth of his missives over the past year. David and I are from two different worlds. Son of a Polish immigrant, he was born in Cuba before moving to Brooklyn as a boy; I grew up just blocks from the cold waters of Casco Bay in South Portland, Maine. He studied at City College and then the University of Wisconsin and teaches history at SUNY New Paltz; I went to my denomination's school, Eastern Nazarene College, did my graduate work at the University of Maine, and returned to teach at my undergraduate alma mater. Yet we are friends.We met last year at the first national conference of a fledgling society of historians, The Historical Society (THS). He saw me reading something before a session, and we struck up a conversation. As it turned out, we learned that we both teach courses in historiography and the philosophy of history. In the weeks and months that followed, we shared syllabi and interesting articles, gave each other books, and most of all we connected as persons. Now, we had returned to Boston University for the second national meeting of THS.Last year's inaugural THS convention was a huge success. Over 500 people heard papers and reactions by luminaries such as Eugene Genovese, Donald Kagan, Mary Lefkowitz, Orlando Patterson, John Patrick Diggins, Harvey Mansfield, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and John Lewis Gaddis. By the way, Christian historians were well represented last year: Eastern College historian Allen Guelzo gave a paper on Abraham Lincoln; University of Tennessee at Chattanooga historian Wilfred McClay (with whom I played hooky and spent a delightful couple of hours in leisurely conversation at a coffee bar) was moderator of a session on "Religion and ...