Westar's Fall national meeting will take place in San Antonio, Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, the state of Texas is 77 percent Christian, though only 42 percent of Texans say they attend church at least once a week, compared to 46 percent of Texans who say they meditate weekly. The city of San Antonio boasts a much smaller religious population, according to one study that puts religious affiliation in that city at just 56 percent. 

San Antonio has a rich history as a border city with a contested identity, sometimes as part of Mexico, sometimes the US. This second largest city in Texas, which is famous for the River Walk (a network of walkways along the banks of San Antonio River one story beneath the streets of downtown) and for the Alamo, embraces a fusion of Anglo, German, and Mexican beliefs and practices. As some readers no doubt already know, the Alamo was founded in 1718 as a Spanish Catholic mission. When the mission became the notorious military outpost for which it is best known today, its occupants were still largely the descendants of the mission community. Beyond its many waves of mainline Protestant Christian movements, San Antonio also served as America's second largest port of entry for Jewish refugees in the late 1800s according to the Beth-el Temple, which was founded in 1874 and proved instrumental to establishing the Reform Judaism movement in Texas.

Freelance experts once wandered the ancient Roman Empire not unlike missionaries do today, peddling exotic practices and teachings from one end of the world to the other. Unlike today, however, most of these ancient experts were vying for authority without the help of a larger supporting organization like a church or temple. In this interview, Heidi Wendt of Wright State University invites us to consider how our ideas about the Apostle Paul and other early religious experts would change if we thought of them as freelance purveyors of ideas in competition with one another.