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The more things change, does anything stay the same? This emerged as a theme question of the 170th meeting of the American Society of Church History, which I attended last weekend in San Francisco.

I first heard this question in a Friday morning session titled "Food and Its Functions in the History of Christianity." Ffor those of you who have never attended an academic conference, a session usually consists of two to four papers, which presenters read from prepared manuscripts. (I used to find this extremely boring, but after hearing a couple of presenters improvise on sketchier scripts, I now appreciate pre-written polish.) Each paper takes about 20 to 30 minutes, and ideally they all relate to each other in some useful way. After they have all been read, a scholar who has read the papers ahead of time gives brief comments, to which the presenters usually have a few minutes to respond. If time remains, audience members raise more questions.

Most sessions focus on one era, or even one person, but the food session followed debates about eating among the desert fathers, scholastic theologians, early Methodists, and modern mainline Protestants. In the question period after this dizzying 1,750-year sweep, Brooks Holifield, the society's incoming president, asked what continuities—if any—could be identified regarding Christian views on food. Can scholars ask or answer any of the same culinary questions when studying the ancient church, the twentieth century, and everything in between? Does the desert fathers' renunciation of meat have anything to do with World Vision's 30-Hour Famine program? Holifield didn't really get an answer.

Issues of continuity and discontinuity came up again in the Friday evening panel session called "Writing the History of Christianity in the New Millennium." The panelists are all working on different volumes of an overview project, and instead of presenting papers on their research so far, they shared thoughts on their approaches to their respective eras.

The two early church specialists spoke of increased reliance on non-textual and non-theological sources to recreate a picture of the past, use of methods and theories from other disciplines (art history, social sciences), and the importance of explaining that Christianity was never unified or uniform, even in its earliest years. The medievalist stressed the otherness of the past—a "foreign country" in which now-familiar terms meant very different things, people did not write in the modern English of our translations, and most Christians knew almost nothing of life or religion outside their local spheres. The Reformation scholar introduced the impact of French theorists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault on his discipline and argued that new contextualizations of the Reformation threaten to obscure the contributions of Martin Luther and John Calvin. The modernist addressed shifts in Christianity (and the way its history is written) related to socialism, feminism, Vatican II, and the fact that Christianity is rapidly becoming a religion of the two-thirds world.

From the audience, Holifield again raised the question of continuity. Several others picked up the theme as well. If the study of church history is really an investigation of multiple "Christianities," a term used by more than one of the panelists, how do we know if we're discussing the same subject? What makes a person or a church "Christian"? One audience member went so far as to ask if Christian history should, maybe, consistently reference Jesus Christ, a suggestion that went absolutely nowhere. In fact, the whole line of questioning merely elicited fuzziness and a bit of annoyance from the panel.

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January (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46