Presidents of our Society have usually delivered annual addresses based on some aspect of their research interests. Few of these customary presentations (13 of 80) have self-consciously grappled with questions of method, definition, or interpretation in the larger context of historiographical concerns. My effort tries to honor both precedents, reporting on my current studies of twentieth-century American church historians while making some normative observations on perennially difficult philosophical problems, particularly those dealing with sacred references in a secular framework. Some of you might think that speaking to historians about historical procedures comes close to violating the injunction in Exodus 23:19 against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. But I suggest that such an exercise is beneficial because all of us can derive greater professional awareness from surveying the options found in scholarly practices past and present.
