ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

A common literary and dramatic theme in many cultures from many different time periods is the confrontation between humans and divine beings. These confrontations take many different forms, from imparting wisdom to imposing judgments, from playing pranks to threatening death. This seminar seeks papers that address literary and dramatic accounts of the meetings between humans and divine beings. (While papers addressing specifically religious narratives and texts, e.g., the Bible, the Qu’ran, are welcome, they should address these narratives and texts as literary productions rather than sacred scriptures.) We are looking for a slate of papers that examines a range of cultural backgrounds, time periods, and media. Topics of interest include, but are by no means limited to, the following: the status of knowledge/information gained in the divine human encounter; patterns or variations within and across different cultures; gods as dramatic personae; the fictional as revelatory and the revelatory as fictional; film/drama as religious spectacle.

Friday, March 24

Rebecca Lartigue, Springfield College
“Imitating the Humble Handmaiden, Mourning Mother, and Bride of Christ: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Their Visions of Jesus”
Laura Scales, Harvard University
“A Fire in the Bones: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Prophetic Voice”
Meredith Neuman, Clark University
“Poets and Confessors: Edward Taylor, Puritan Conversion, and the Problem of Divine Address”
Doug Harrison, Washington University
“Thomas Shepard, Experiential Theology, and the Inscrutability of God’s Plot”

Saturday, March 25

Kathaleen Amende, Alabama State University
“Resolving the Sexual and the Sacred in Works by Lee Smith, Rosemary Daniell, and Sheri Reynolds”
Lesliegh Cushing Stahlberg, Colgate University
“Into the Whirlwind: God’s Retreat in Biblical Fiction”
Jay Twomey, University of Cincinnati
“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Damascus: Johnny Cash among the Theorists”
Olivia Gabor, Western Michigan University
“Literary Expressions of a Christian Paradox: Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Faith through Doubt”

Sunday, March 26

Nathan Faries, University of St. Francis
“A Member of the Chinese Avant-Garde Meets God; US Fails to Notice”
Matthew Baldwin, Mars Hill College
“The Apocalypse on Mars: an Ancient Genre and Contemporary Film”
Glenn Whitehouse, Florida Gulf Coast University
“Human Identity and Religious Otherness in Film”
Nicole Jowsey, University at Buffalo
“The Death of God: Melancholia and Finitude”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Gods Absent and Present