The annual joint meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion last weekend brought 7,760 scholars, authors, publishers, professors, graduate students, and clergy to the San Diego Conference Center, an 8% increase over last year's meeting. They chose from among 1,200 talks, panels, and meetings, angled for job openings, shopped from thousands of books offered at 100 exhibition booths, promoted their current books, and pitched their next ones.
But even as they celebrated accomplishments and pursued careers there was a low hum of worry. Attendees were uncomfortably aware that universities, colleges, and seminaries continue to reduce or eliminate their programs in religious studies and the humanities. Meanwhile, President-Elect Donald Trump touts his intention to reshape the government, the economy, education, and media.
"People are talking about politics, politics, politics," AAR president Jin Y. Park told PW before presiding over a Saturday morning session called "Exploring Nonviolence, Social Justice, Gender and the Brain." That evening Tamara Cohn Eskenazi, the outgoing president of the SBL, gave a talk on "The Bible in Politics and Politics in the Bible," reminding the audience that "in the ancient world, religion and politics were of one cloth. But to focus on the political is to examine the mechanisms, teachings and ideology, and practices in the Bible that aim to shape communal life in all of its facets and to critically assess it for its own time, and for ours.... The goal is not to promote this or that religious tradition, but to explore critically how it can contribute to the critical challenges of our time."
Sunday morning's special session on the presidential election featured 15 panelists, including Stacey Floyd-Thomas, a professor of ethics and society at Vanderbilt University, who asked, "Do facts even matter in contemporary politics?" It was a rhetorical question because, she said, this was a "vibe election" in which how people felt—not what they knew—was the driving factor in how they voted. That afternoon she took her manuscript for When the Good Life Goes Bad: The U.S. and Its Seven Deadly Sins to University of Illinois Press.
University of Illinois Press is also publishing a revised and expanded version of Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans through January 6, 2021 in February. One of the book's coauthors, Christina Littlefield, an associate professor of journalism and religion at Pepperdine University, told an audience for Sunday afternoon's panel on "Evangelicalism and Political Violence" that zealots are out to "reclaim the country for Christ and politics is their battlefield."
In session after session, speakers challenged their audiences of scholars, authors, and academic publishing editors to address the same question: "What is the role of the scholar in society? What do we do now?"
And what don't they do now? Trump books. New York University Press senior editor Jennifer Hammer, who booked appointments at the conference with dozens of current and potential writers and lost her voice talking to more than 50 of them, whispered late Sunday that none were pitching Trump titles.
Prolific author (48 books and counting) and activist Miguel De La Torre, a professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at the Iliff School of Theology, circulated among the editors at the conference but didn't round up colleagues for a third collective book on Trump for Orbis, one of his frequent publishers. The first, Faith and Resistance in the age of Trump, published in 2017, had fast sales for a week at the start then quieted, said Robert Ellsberg, Orbis publisher and editor-in-chief. The second, 2021's Faith and Reckoning After Trump, predicted that the fracturing of facts and the fostering of racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and environmental damage would be the legacy of Trump's term. It didn't sell, Ellsberg said, and he doesn't see a market for more. De La Torre agreed, telling PW, "What more is there to say? What would I call it? The Empire Strikes Back?"
In the exhibition hall, however, the mood was buoyant. The latest report from the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program showed the religious press category was up 18.4% in sales in the first nine months of 2024. Although academic religion publishing sales aren't specifically tracked, high interest was evident on the floor. People crowded booths to order titles from display samples or loaded up their tote bags at the few booths, such as one for Westminster John Knox, that displayed stacks of take-'em-home-now titles.
Alicia Samuels, VP of marketing for WJK, pointed to their hottest sellers, including the new Westminster Study Bible. Several books by conference speakers also sold out following their author' talks, with Samuels pointing to Beverly Roberts Gaventa's Romans: A Commentary and Hanna Reichel's After Methods: queer grace, conceptual design, and the possibility of theology as examples. "What people are looking for now are books with high energy ideas," Samuels added, "and for books that will help with pastoral care needs, particularly now, at a time when so many people are distraught."
Among the distraught are emerging scholars and grad students seeking tenure-track positions in academia and book contracts that could boost their efforts. Michelle Sybert, assistant director for Notre Dame Press, said she sees fear in the eyes of job-hunting grad students. To ease their way, the press offers a "5+1 doctoral program," which Sybert said "gives a grad student a year working with the press to consider publishing as a career."
Laura Gifford, a historian and Lutheran deacon who is editor-in-chief of Augsburg Fortress Press, saw people reaching for ethicist Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda's early November title, Building a Moral Economy: Pathways for People of Courage. The author "looks at ethics in the light of lived experience," said Gifford, "and asks, 'What does it mean as the economic landscape changes but people still have needs? What scholarship will be helpful?' "
Richard Brown, a senior editor for Rowman & Littlefield Academic (which was acquired by Bloomsbury earlier this year), logged more than four dozen meetings at the conference, and was cheered by the possibilities ahead for distributing R&L's titles through Religion Online, a subscription service offered by Bloomsbury. "The prospects for growth are phenomenal." He was also enthusiastic about the growth of the Theological Book Network, which sends books to under-resourced libraries and seminaries in the "majority world." When the SBL/AAR conference concluded, the remaining books from the R&L booth will go to the Network.
