I’ve just returned from the 2018 SBL IM in Helsinki, where I presented two papers on early Christian pneumatology (one on the Epistle of Barnabas and one on Irenaeus). Despite the heat wave pummeling Finland along with the rest of Europe (oddly, the saunas still seemed wildly popular despite every non-air conditioned environment (read: everywhere) itself feeling like a sauna, Helsinki was a wonderful city to visit: beautiful, clean, welcoming. Expensive, too, but that’s par for the course in the Nordic countries.

This conference was particularly memorable because I at long last got to see a book of my own for sale and because I now had grad students coming up to me with questions about their research and so on, as if I were in fact a “grown-up” who has “made it.” If only they knew!

What’s next? There was a particularly fine group of Apostolic Fathers scholars present for my Barnabas presentation, and they gave me some really helpful suggestions and guidance for perhaps turning that into a published article. Besides that, I’ve got research to do for my Denver presentation that brings issues related to the development of the regula fidei into discussion with my work on prosopological exegesis. Ever onwards…