UPCOMING CONFERENCES
SOUTHWEST
Words and the Word: Bible as Literature, Literature as Bible
University of Dallas | Dallas, TX
November 15-16, 2024
Christians recognize in one way or another that, in Sacred Scripture, God’s self-revelation occurs through literary form and in interaction with a literary type of comprehensibility. The Bible is in fact a complex collection of diverse forms and stories, not a theological manual or catechism; it is a literature – and yet, if we recognize that the Bible is all poetry, would we also say that poetry is really all a Bible? What distinguishes the two and how do they inform each other? This conference considers the ways in which sacred literature is related to secular literature, and how the understanding of the one can inform our approaches to the other. Avenues of inquiry include:
Scripture in literature
the nature, purpose, and meaning of Scriptural allusions in literary works
the relationship between Scriptural forms and authorial self-understanding: the author as prophet, or as engaging in parabolic discourse, or delivering beatitudes, etc.
literary characters and Scriptural types: the patriarch, prophet, sage, preacher, wonder-worker, leper, Samaritan, Apostle, Redeemer, Savior, etc.
the relationship between preaching and literature – and acts of preaching within literature as models (good or bad) of Christian preaching
The Bible as literature
the nature, methods, and value of literary approaches to the study of Scripture
Scripture translation: literary analysis and consideration of the influence of great Biblical translations
Biblical approaches to literature
Scriptural approaches to secular literature: What is a Christian, Biblical way to interpret literature?
the character of secular literature as quasi-scripture or scriptures
how literary/poetic inspiration is related to Scriptural inspiration
The conference most eagerly invites papers that not only offer theoretical or practical considerations but also appeal to and interpret specific works of literary art. Other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals and creative works, are welcome. Please note that presenters should be members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature by the time of this conference. By September 1, 2024 submit abstracts or proposals of 150–250 words, along with a short CV or biographical note, to Fr. Stephen Gregg: fr-stephen@udallas.edu.
Undergraduate students must submit their entire papers for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize. Graduate students accepted to the conference are encouraged to apply for the CCL Conference Travel Grant.
WEST
Dreams, Fears, and Transformation: Theological Roots in Literary Mythologies
Hope International University | Fullerton, CA
March 20-23, 2025
Many works of literature are also mythologies—orienting (or disorienting) narratives that establish a worldview or community identity. Mythologies may depict origins and apocalypses, dreams and fears, transformation and redemption. Amidst a spectrum of literary mythologies (“The Dream of the Rood,” Shakespeare’s Tempest, Hawthorne’s Puritan stories, Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s Waste Land, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, etc.), the threshold between theology and literature often blurs. In such texts, dreams and visions sometimes fill the liminal space between religious belief and the mythological narrative. In others, fear shapes religious limitations and ideals. And transformation often lies at the center of such narratives. Where, then, is the intersection between theology and representations of dreams, fears, or transformation in literary mythologies? How might integrating these parts help us understand Christian thought and practice?
Hope International University invites you to contribute your original research on the topic of Dreams, Fears, and Transformation: Theological Roots in Literary Mythologies through an examination of these themes in literature and storytelling. We welcome papers, panels, creative works, and presentations that include theological or philosophical insights into these themes provided the primary grounding is in and through literature.
The conference aims to address questions that include, but are not limited to:
· What is the relationship between faith and fear in literary mythology?
· How might readers’ religious beliefs alter their interpretation of a mythological narrative?
· How do stories of transformation affect readers’ openness or resistance to religious thinking?
· How do stories of transformation or redemption shape cultural mythologies?
· What role does religion play in origin narratives? In apocalypse narratives? In eschatological narratives?
· How are postmodern mythologies influenced by spirituality, Christianity, or religious practice?
· How do postcolonial readings view Christianity in mythological narratives?
· How does religious belief influence dreams or visions for a community? Which literary forms serve this function well? Poetry, short fiction, etc.?
· How do dreams function in literary mythology? Do they answer questions, raise more questions, or lead to transformation?
Please submit abstracts of 250 words by December 1, 2024, to Dr. Fay Ellwood at feellwood@hiu.edu. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize and publication on the CCL website. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for the CCL Travel Grant.
Keynote Speaker – Lori Anne Ferrell, PhD is the dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Claremont Graduate University, and the director of the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was a 2018–19 Dana and David Dornsife Fellow at The Huntington Library. Ferrell is the editor of volume 11 of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Oxford University Press, 2016), and author of The Bible and the People (Yale University Press, 2008). Her research concentrates on the effect of religious and political change on early modern texts—theological, literary, theatrical, and practical.
REGIONAL CONFERENCES
Regional conferences afford members an opportunity to learn from one another and to build networks of support for their scholarly and professional endeavors. They also offer graduate students an opportunity to gain valuable experience presenting at conferences.
For the themes of past and recent regional conferences, please click on the regions below:
UPCOMING CONFERENCES
SOUTHEAST
"Growing Younger": Literature and Child-like Faith
Southeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
Covenant College
Lookout Mountain, GA
October 10-12, 2024
Keynote Speaker: Malcolm Guite (Poet and President of the George MacDonald Society)
To commemorate the bicentenary of George MacDonald--the nineteenth-century Scottish novelist, fantasist, theologian, and poet--this conference welcomes papers pertaining to his life, work, and legacy. More broadly, we invite papers that explore motifs of childlikeness, particularly as they relate to faith and imagination. MacDonald’s children’s stories, such as The Princess and the Goblin, The Golden Key, and The Light Princess, remain a favorite with fantasy readers of all ages, and MacDonald insists that he writes not “for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” In fact, his interest in childlikeness pervades his creative and theological output, resurfacing in his realistic fiction, essays, and elsewhere. Human hearts, he recommends, “should always be growing younger.”
The child is a complexly evocative figure in scripture, literature, and culture. Christ exhorts his disciples to become like little children, and scripture abounds with imagery of God’s people as beloved, obedient, and dependent children. Conversely, Proverbs recommends strategies for curbing childish folly, and Paul encourages the Corinthians to put aside childish ways. While literature sometimes romanticizes childhood as a time of innocence, imagination, and endless potential, it also depicts the vulnerability, waywardness, and ignorance of children. Bildungsromane focus on the transition from childhood to adulthood as both a linear and a recursive process. Young Adult fiction enjoys popularity among adult readers, but suffers criticism from the literary elite. Narratives of secularization often characterize dissociation from religion as a cultural coming of age, while postsecularity might be construed as a return to former openness. Humans, it seems, wrestle with simultaneous desires for maturity and for childlikeness, and such internal conflict constitutes a suggestive analogue to the interplay between doubt and faith. Literature offers a medium for this wrestling, as well as imaginative alternatives to the false dichotomy between maturity and childlikeness. We welcome papers and creative works
- George MacDonald’s novels, fairy tales, poetry, sermons, essays, etc.
- MacDonald’s Romantic precursors, literary peers, or twentieth and twenty-first-century successors (for instance, the Inklings)
- Children’s literature and literary depictions of childhood
- The role of literature in child rearing, pedagogy, or spiritual formation
- Bildungsroman narratives
- Fantasy and mythopoesis
- Themes of rebirth and restoration
- Sacred, secular, and post-secular accounts of childhood and maturation
- Retrospective, recursive, or otherwise non-linear narratives
- The competition, coexistence, and/or conversation between faith and doubt
- The role of liturgy as return and renewal
- Recovery: literature that bestows fresh or clarified vision; literature that recovers lost or marginalized voices; literature that anticipates new creation
Other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals and creative works, are welcome. Presenters should be members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature by the time of the conference.
Submit abstracts of 250-300 words by July 15, 2024, to Dr. Heather Hess, heather.hess@covenant.edu. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize. Graduate students accepted to the conference are encouraged to apply for the CCL Conference Travel Grant.
EAST
Complicity and Hope in Wendell Berry's Membership
East Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
Grove City College
Grove City, PA
February 21-22, 2025
Keynote Speaker: Andrew Peterson (author and musician)
This conference marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the more significant events in the life of Wendell Berry’s fictional Port William community: the loss of Andy Catlett’s right hand to a mechanized corn picker. This may seem an odd episode to inspire a conference, but as the autobiographical character in Berry’s fiction, Andy Catlett’s life story and tragic accident offer a way to consider the central drama of Berry’s imaginative work. Unlike Andy, Berry himself has the full use of both his hands, which invites readers to consider why he would narrate Andy’s life history in this way. As Andy reflects in “Dismemberment” on the meaning of this loss, he comes to the conclusion that the machine took his hand “as the price of admission into the rapidly mechanizing world that as a child he had not foreseen and as a man did not like, but which he would have to live in, understanding it and resisting it the best he could, for the rest of his life.” This sense of inescapable complicity haunts Andy:
And so the absence of his right hand has remained with him as a reminder. His most real hand, in a way, is the missing one, signifying to him not only his continuing need for ways and devices to splice out his right arm, but also his and his country’s dependence upon the structure of industrial commodities and technologies that imposed itself upon, and contradicted in every way, the sustaining structures of the natural world and its human memberships. And so he is continually reminded of his incompleteness within himself, within the terms and demands of his time and its history, but also within the constraints and limits of his kind, his native imperfection as a human being, his failure to be as attentive, responsible, grateful, loving, and happy as he ought to be. He has spent most of his life in opposing violence, waste, and destruction—or trying to, his opposition always fragmented and made painful by his complicity in what he opposes.
Andy’s missing hand becomes a perpetual reminder of central questions that we all must live with: How do we imagine our complicity in and responsibility for systemic evils? How do we respond to our failure to live up to our ideals? How do we make do as maimed members of wounded communities? Christians have long wrestled with what it means to dwell on earth as exiles, and Berry’s writings offer us ways of living with this longing for a home and a wholeness that we know can never be realized on this side of the new creation.
In keeping with the tenor of Berry’s writings, we welcome papers from disciplines beyond English (e.g. history, theology, philosophy, political science, ecology, music, visual arts, etc.), and we prefer papers that avoid what Hannah Coulter calls the “Unknown Tongue” of stilted academic writing. Papers might address
• Any topic related to the writings of Wendell Berry
• Writers from the many communities that Berry has belonged to: Kentucky writers, writers who studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford, members of the Temenos circle, etc.
• Literary responses to these questions from across history, particularly from those whom Berry has turned to for guidance: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, Thoreau, and others
• Authors from other places or times who consider related questions of complicity, despair, and hope
• Issues related to the genre of fictionalized autobiography
• Agrarian, regional, or local literature
• Representations of nostalgia and exile
• Considerations of the interactions between local and global
• Ways of imagining the relationship between our present condition and the eschaton
The conference will take place on February 21 and 22, 2025 at Grove City College. Andrew Peterson will give a keynote address and an evening concert.
Submit 250-word abstracts to Jeff Bilbro (bilbrojl@gcc.edu) by December 1, 2024. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize and publication on the CCL website. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for the CCL Travel Grant. For more details on these undergraduate and graduate opportunities, visit https://www.christianityandliterature.com/Awards-and-Grants