Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, McGill University. “Rejoicing and Lamenting: Imagining the Unborn in Early Christian Literature.”

Early Christian literature of the first through third centuries C.E. contains few references or descriptions of unborn children. A prominent exception is the story of the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke, a story that narrates the joyful recognition of the unborn Jesus in Mary’s womb by the child in Elizabeth’s womb, the unborn John the Baptist. The second-century Protevangelium of James also tells of Mary’s perception of “two peoples” in her womb, one lamenting and the other rejoicing. The story in Luke sets up the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist in their adult lives, a narrative technique widely argued to speak of the inclusion of John’s disciples into the Christian movement. The phrase “two peoples” in the Protevangelium of James has been interpreted as referring to Christians and Jews. This paper examines the unborn as a rhetorical site in early Christianity for establishing the relationships between competing religious groups. It argues that the practices of joy and lamentation as projected onto the unborn provide a means for negotiating religious differences. The relative behaviors of the unborn, as imagined in these two stories, function, moreover, to structure the relationship among the religious groups through stories about “origins” and originary emotions.

Christopher J Anderson-Irwin, Humber College. “Realizing Eternity: The Significance of Liturgy in Hegel and Rosenzweig.”

Even though the “new thinking” of Rosenzweig is explicitly anti-Hegelian, his philosophical interpretation of the significance of Judaism and Christianity parallels that of Hegel in crucial respects. However, each thinker holds very different views on the nature and significance of ritual practice in these traditions. Whereas Rosenzweig thinks that liturgy is essential to the truths revealed by both Christianity and Judaism, Hegel maintains that religious practice is limited by its attachment to “representations” (e.g., mythical narratives, ceremonial objects) and that this attachment can only be overcome by translating religious ideas into the conceptual language of philosophy. In this paper, I will argue that certain problems created by Hegel’s attempt to reconcile the truth of religion with philosophical interpretation are addressed by Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Jewish and Christian liturgy as two ways of realizing the eternal in time (a goal which Hegel describes as “Spirit’s” self-knowledge and Rosenzweig as redemption).

John V. Apczynski, St. Bonaventure University. “‘Introduction to Catholicism’ as Religious Studies.”

The approach that has dominated, at least at private, Catholic colleges, the introductory course to Catholicism, is heavily theological. Since theology is parasitical on the living heritage of a tradition, an important presupposition for its practice is missing among most contemporary students for such an approach to function effectively. In this essay a “religious studies” model for introducing the Catholic tradition will be explored. This will emphasize the importance of narrative, ritual, material expression and the like for developing the theoretical framework for introducing Catholicism. The differences from and relative advantages over a theological approach will be examined. Objections (especially from within a religiously oriented college) will be examined and responses will be proposed. Suggestions from colleagues will be sought.

Chris Austin, McMaster University. “How it All Ends: Layered Religious Paradigms in Mahabharata 17 and 18.”

What really happened to the Mahabharata's principal characters at the end of the epic? The standard answer to this query in contemporary scholarship is that they all went to heaven. This simplistic summation of the story’s two concluding books is unsatisfactory since this final portion offers us anything but a simplistic world-view. Books 17 and 18 of the Critical Edition (CE) in particular seem to offer a rich but apparently inconsistent account of the death and afterlife experiences of the story’s heroes. This paper attempts to gauge books 17 and 18 of the CE against the 2 final books of Kshemendra’s Bharatamanjari in order to argue that what appears in the CE as an indiscriminate mixing of religious paradigms is not the result of “anything goes” redaction but rather is the natural appearance of a text whose main purpose is to ask and answer basic religious questions.

Alice Bach, Case Western Reserve University. “Trading in Souls: Terrorism and Tourism in the Middle East.”

In my recent political and scholarly life the geographical nexus of my world has been Ohio and the Holy Land. The two geographically separate lands have been united by the American Christian Right, an imperialist group that has used evangelism and biblical literalism as tools of colonization. The two edges of the colonizer’s sword inscribe Christian Jihad’s desire to evangelize the Muslim Middle East and Christian Zionist’s defense of ‘eretz Israel as the site to which Jesus will return. A less inflammatory term for Christian Jihad and Christian Zionism might be colonialism, our scholarly designation for the phenomenon in which the power group struggles to dominate the geographically separate Other, in order to deny the colonized a sense of place, to magnify the feelings of exclusion and inferiority. However, we have internalized terms like colonialism so that they no longer produce visceral reactions. This indifference has allowed genteel gentiles like Rove and Pat Robertson to turn hollow boasting into political triumph.

Michelle Bakker and Daniel Bernard, Concordia University. “Left Behind as a Commodity in Consumerist America.”

A publishing phenomenon is taking place in America, in the surprising form of a Christian apocalyptic series of novels called Left Behind. These books have exploded into a pop culture happening in the American Evangelical milieu. We suggest that one reason for their extraordinary popularity is their function as negotiator between American consumer culture and American Evangelicalism. Though the principles of consumer and Christian cultures are often seen as incompatible, Christians nevertheless have little choice in the matter of what sort of culture they participate in. Considering that consumer culture caters to and is governed by what are perceived to be ungodly values, for many Christians a tension is inherent in mundane interactions with “secular” society. Examination of Left Behind’s narrative reveals models by which Christians can navigate the worldly sphere of modern politics, economics, technology, and media. In addition we examine how these models are buttressed by the very commodification of Left Behind itself.

Bilal Bas, McGill University. “The Concept of Divine Monarch and the Church in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Imperial Theology.”

When the process of Christianity’s becoming religion of the empire was initiated by Constantine in the early fourth century, two essential developments took place: 1) Christianity embraced this model of political absolutism through a theological justification that found its expression in Eusebius of Caesarea’s “Imperial Theology” and the church became part of the structure of the empire; 2) The empire received the church as a new element which was itself a political body, and therefore a process of church-empire relations on a common ground began.  The central concept of Eusebius’ “Imperial Theology” is the concept of “Divine Monarch” who is considered to have a divine authority over both material and spiritual well being of his people. As many modern scholars pointed out this concept was by no means original and it had its roots in the previous developments of Hellenistic political thought. Moreover, we see a second element in the development of this concept: Old Testament models of kingship especially with an emphasis on the priestly role of the king. However, due to the Church’s unique establishment as an independent political body, the situation required certain amount of novelty in terms of the emperor’s relation to the Church. Eventually this political model of Eusebius of Caesarea was at the same time traditional and novel. This paper will try to shed more light to the concept of divine monarch of Eusebius in this tension between novelty and tradition by looking at the two developments before the fourth century: Church’s establishment as a political body and development of divine monarch in the previous Hellenistic political tradition.

Eric Bellevance, McGill University. “The Creation in Second Isaiah (Is. 40-55): A Postcolonial Interpretation.”

The creative activity of YHWH is one of the major themes of Is 40-55. YHWH is presented or presents himself as the sole creator of heaven, earth and humanity more often than in any other prophetic book. Moreover, the way Second Isaiah is using the creative power of God is completely new. To understand why and how the creation motive is used in Second Isaiah, we believe that the colonial context in which these chapters were written must be reinterpreted, by applying new theories developed by postcolonial criticism. The concepts of hybridity and colonial mimicry prove particularly helpful for that matter. Second Isaiah, as a culturally hybrid subject within the Babylonian empire, is indeed re-producing two themes that circulated in Babylon during the judean exile, both concerning Marduk. The first one was traditional (Marduk is the supreme creator of the universe) and the second one was created soon after the fall of Babylon (Marduk is the only actor behind Cyrus’ victory over Babylon, a version that was officially accepted by the Persian conqueror). It seems that in order to convince the exiled community to leave Babylon, Second Isaiah adopted, adapted and combined these two themes to demonstrate (or re-present) that it was not Marduk but YHWH that was the only true creator of the whole world and hence, the unique responsible not only for Cyrus’ victory but also for his decision to free the peoples that have been previously deported in Babylon.

Brian P. Bennett, Niagara University. “Myths of Mice and Men: Some Russian Lubki (Broadsheets).”

Myths are made up of words. But these words are typically imagistic; they compose a picture. What Freud said about the content of dreams-that it is expressed in a "pictographic script"-could well apply to myths. This paper suggests that Russian lubki (popular prints or broadsheets) may be understood as myth. They represent a hybrid form, normally containing both pictures and words, narrative and imagery. Cheaply produced and widely disseminated, lubki exhibit another characteristic often associated with myth: namely, the existence multiple variants. Certain significant themes—regarding religion, politics, etc.—are returned to over and over again. The paper looks at the famous broadsheet known as "How the Mice Buried the Cat." Created in multiple versions in the wake of Peter's unpopular secularizing reforms, this lubok, with its jaunty portrayal of a murine coup, seems to represent a kind of collective dream—or myth.

Bettina G. Bergo, Université de Montréal. “A Considered Debt: Levinas and the (Anti-) Philosophical Gesture in Jewish Philosophy.”

I consider traces of Jewish philosophical themes in Levinas, especially Philo's “critical” decision: humans cannot know G-d intellectually nor themselves transparently as mind. The self’s opacity in Philo does not lie in a split subject but in the human soul’s complexity as a lesser aspect of divinity. Neher argues that this dual limitation on knowledge suggests a philosophy with an “outside.” Philosophy is not theology’s handmaiden, however, since theology undergoes the same limitation. Philo’s decision arose from studying the Torah in the Greek of the ‘Septuagint’. Like Levinas, Philo addresses questions of mediation: If ‘man’ and ‘God’ have no relation, how should creation and prophetism be understood? Philo multiplied conceptual mediations from angels to spirit to ‘verbs’. A similar difficulty confronts Levinas, who questions the passage from the divided self of being-for-the-other to the ‘me’ called to judge. Perhaps Levinas’s ‘trace’ is the answer to the difficulties of mediation besetting philosophies that refuse totalization. It remains a contemporary confrontation with an ancient problem: How did Judaism inscribe itself into its ‘other’, Greek philosophy, beginning with the ‘translation’ of the Torah into Greek?

Swasti Bhattacharyya, Buena Vista University. “From the Least of These May We be Enlightened.”

Hindu and Jain narratives, such as those found within the Mahabharata and the Kalpasutra of Bhadrabahu, contain stories that recount the inutero experiences of fetuses. These accounts are particularly fascinating not only for their entertainment value, but also for the insights they provide into the beliefs and practices of the traditions that preserve them. Through an examination of the “fetal” narratives of Abhimanyu (the son of Arjuna, the great warrior hero of the Bhagavad-Gita) and Mahavira (24th Jain Tirtankara), this paper explores a number of central teachings within Hinduism and Jainism. With an in-depth analysis of the fetal narratives, the principles and priorities of both religious traditions emerge.

Amy Birkan, McGill University. “The Brazen Serpent, A Perplexing Remedy: An Analysis of Num 21:4-9 in Light of Archaeology, Near Eastern Serpent Emblems, and Inner Biblical Exegesis.”

The narrative of Num 21:4-9 reports that the Israelites, after being punished by God with a plague of venomous serpents, are healed by gazing at a bronze serpent fashioned by Moses at God’s command. Given the Torah’s prohibition against the use of any images (Exod 20:4, Deut 5:7-9), and the centrality of the ban of the mediums as a core revolutionary distinction from the practices of Ancient Near Eastern religions, the use of a brazen serpent to restore the life of the wounded Israelites is quite striking. Furthermore the narrative is mentioned towards the end of the last of the forty years spent in the desert isolated from civilization; a cultural void very accommodating to a major shift in religious paradigms. The episode seems like an abrupt intrusion into the very strategic polarization period; life is restored to the bitten Israelites upon their looking at a statue of a bronze fiery serpent. This paper will utilize archaeological discoveries, various Ancient Near Eastern serpent emblems, and the narrative’s Inner-Biblical interpretation in an attempt to find a solution to the peculiar method of healing.

Allison Bohac, Val Bukowski, Laurie Gravell, Jude Harter, and Terasa Prentiss, Juniata College. “Judgment House: A Student Documentary on Evangelical Christianity.”

Between September and November 2004, five students worked on location at an evangelical church outside of Philadelphia. The purpose of their work was to document the staging of a Judgment House. A Judgment House is a modern morality play expanded into a comprehensive alternative to Halloween haunted houses. Fearing perceived Satanic connotations in traditional Halloween festivities, some branches of evangelical Christianity create elaborate rival activities which meet multiple needs of the community. At once evangelism tool, youth activity, moral instruction instrument, social and political commentary, and Christian theater, the Judgment House is a comprehensive lens through which to view the increasing power and influence of evangelical Christianity in the United States. Film in the weeks before evangelical Christianity contributed to the re-election of George Bush, the film offers timely insights into a contemporary American subculture.  The makers of the documentary will discuss in a panel format the content of the film, the processes entailed in its filming, and the pedagogical consequences of studying religious cultures through the construction of a visual analysis. A premiere of the film in its “rough cut form” will follow the discussion.

Donald L. Boisvert, Concordia University. “Storytelling, Sensual Language and the Politics of Desire: A Personal Tale.”

In October 2004, my book entitled Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints was published by The Pilgrim Press, whose owner is the United Church of Christ (UCC), a liberal American Protestant denomination. The UCC has long been known for its strong advocacy work on behalf of, among other groups, LGBT persons, and The Pilgrim Press has a distinguished record of publication in the field of gay spirituality. Days before going to press, however, parts of my book raised concerns with the UCC Ministry Interpreters, more specifically my use of "sensual language". This paper will examine some of the so-called problematic passages of the manuscript, several of which explore the erotic or sexual dimensions of religious devotion. In so doing, I propose to ask some fundamental questions with respect to the politics of religious storytelling and same-sex desire.

Kevin Bond, McMaster University. “The Edo Period Miracle Tales of Fudo Myoo.”

This paper attempts a re-evaluation of the limited and often stereotypical understanding of one of Japan’s most enduring and important objects of worship, the deity Fudo Myoo, through an examination of miracle tales (reigenki) compiled during the Edo and early Meiji periods (17th – mid19th cent.). My focus turns away from the classical, iconographical and ritual materials of the Heian and Kamakura periods (8th – 14th cent.) that have dominated our understanding of Fudo, to the early modern miracle story, largely ignored by Japanese and Western scholars, as the primary source of investigation.
This paper illustrates how Buddhist temples of the Edo and early Meiji periods manipulated the figure of Fudo through miracle tales in order to establish and strengthen local sacred space and history to best meet their economic and religious needs—thus showing us a very different treatment of Fudo than current scholarship commonly describes.

Michael Bourgeois, Emmanuel College. “Myth and History Revisited.”

Despite considerable discussion since the start of modernity, the relation between myth and history in Christian theology remains ambiguous. Myth may convey truth that is not reducible to history, but to what extent should myth and history correlate in Christian understandings of, e.g., the human condition, the life of Jesus, and the ultimate destiny of creation? This paper will briefly sketch the state of the question by citing diverse examples from recent scholarly and popular theology (e.g., Daniel Migliore, Kathryn Tanner, and Tom Harpur). Next it will examine Terrence Tilley’s four-point typology for relating theology and history and his suggestion that the problem be “dissolved” rather “resolved” (History, Theology and Faith, Orbis 2004). Finally, with specific reference to understandings of redemption and knowledge of God, it will consider criteria by which the adequacy of approaches to the relation between myth and history in Christian theology might be judged.

Alexandra Boutros, McGill University. “Visible Vodou: Narrative Visuality in a Diasporic Religion.”

Haitian Vodou has been maligned and often persecuted both in Haiti and in North America, where Vodou is a growing religion. Such persecution has encouraged a religious tradition cloaked in secrecy and invisibility. However, this invisibility is contingent on a complex system of visible-visual codes and signifiers. These often-transient moments of visible Vodou not only transmit coded knowledge to practitioners, but also function as nodes for communication between human and divine in ritualized exchanges. Visuality in Vodou embeds multiple layers of narratives, from the history of Haiti, to the rituals and myths of Vodou, to the mercurial cosmological changes Vodou undergoes as this syncretic religion moves across North America. “Visible Vodou” explores visuality in Vodou today, examining the matrix of symbols and signifiers that allow Vodou to circulate in popular culture. What emerges is a visual strategy that allows Vodou to be at once visible and invisible as it traverses the routes of popular representation and commodification.

Carlos R. Bovell, Institute for Christian Studies. “Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles as an Analogous Proof of Construction.”

It is evident to me that both Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles and his Summa Theologica (un?)consciously try to mimic the structure of Euclid’s Elements, a work that paradigmatically fleshed out Aristotle’s scientific format in Posterior Analytics. Euclidean argumentation employs a very limited number of postulates and advances only by way of proofs of demonstration (QED) and proofs of construction (QEF). I shall spend most of my time on Book 2 Chapter 45 of the SCG and work backwards only five chapters to Book 2 Chapter 40 in order to make sufficient observations to offer a plausible answer to these and related questions, ‘Why has Aquinas followed a genre that presents proofs of demonstration and construction when Aquinas is not in the strict business of doing either? Just what is Aquinas up to in his SCG?’

Lara Braitstein, McGill University. “From ‘Sons and Daughters of a Noble Family’ to ‘Sons and Daughters of a Noble Savage Family’: Tibet Through the Lens of Popular Western Cinema.”

The roof of the world has long borne the burden of the projections of idealists, spiritualists and colonialists alike. Since 1922 when the first British film (Climbing Mount Everest) was shot in Tibet, those projections have been captured on celluloid and projected back into the world of Tibetans and non-Tibetans alike. The result has been the formation of a Tibetan identity which has in large part been constructed by and for Western enthusiasts of the Tibetan cause and culture. A further result has been the consumption and appropriation of that identity by Tibetans living in exile. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how, with precisely the same tools of film language that were employed to create the image of the noble savage with respect to First Nations Peoples of North America, Tibetans have been constructed as the noble savages of our era. How that image has in turn been appropriated and used by Tibetans in exile as articulations of Tibetan culture will also be explored.

Brian Butcher, Saint Paul University. “Narrative Identity in Ritual Mode: A Ricoeurian Approach to the Interpretation of Byzantine Liturgy.”

Paul Ricoeur summarizes the hermeneutical trajectory of his recent Oneself as Another in the following phrase: “From a prefigured world to a transfigured world through the mediation of a configured world.” These “worlds” correspond to three interpretative moments, which Ricoeur terms mimesis1, mimesis2 and mimesis3. I propose that the hermeneutics of action/passion expressed in this three-fold nomenclature is highly germane to liturgical studies, and that liturgy may be understood as analogously tripartite. The richly poetic cast and symbolic configuration of the Byzantine/Eastern-Orthodox Rite make it an ideal locus for such an analysis. While Ricoeur’s primary concern is to understand how “narrative identity” obtains via literary experience, i.e. how the self passes through the phenomenon of the text and is transformed, this paper will extend Ricoeur’s theory beyond his own textual purview and explore its relevance to liturgy as embodied or ritualized narrative, as story-in-action.

Michael Chaness, Syracuse University. “‘Playing Indian’ and ‘Playing Indian’—New Age appropriations of Hindu and Native American traditions.”

My paper investigates the phenomenon of 'Playing Indian' amongst one particular New Age religious leader, Mark Amaru Pinkham. Pinkham's scripture, The Return Of The Serpents of Wisdom, and his spiritual tourism business represent an inclination to ‘Play Indian’ (Indian) as well as ‘Play Indian’ (Native American). I specifically detail what Pinkham and his followers are ‘getting out of’ Hinduism and Native American religions as well as offer my own critique as to why I believe that ‘borrowing’ from one tradition (Indian) is not the same as ‘borrowing’ from another (American Indian). ‘Global middle class Hindu movements’ structure my paper in that I assign the New Age in America as a ‘global middle class movement’ which incorporates elements of Hinduism into its religious system.

Pamela Chrabieh, Université de Montréal. « Arts et spiritualités, ou l'écriture artistique au carrefour du dialogue interspirituel. »

L’objectif de la communication est de présenter un essai d’écriture artistique puisant à mon cheminement, pavé de rencontres entre cultures, spiritualités et pratiques iconographiques proche-orientales (entre autres, chrétiennes orientales et islamiques). La structure d’ensemble forme un espace de dialogue dont la rédaction est constituée de symboles, de formes et de couleurs qui s’interpellent et s’interpénètrent. L’esprit de cette communication se situe d’une part dans la lignée d’une remémoration de souvenirs personnels de la guerre au Liban - dont les événements ont été évoqués jusqu’à récemment dans un rapport à l’oubli ou au déni -, et d’autre part dans la lignée d’une dénonciation des amalgames réducteurs qui figent des individus et des sociétés en des blocs monolithiques qui s’affrontent. L’écriture artistique spirituelle devient ainsi un ‘lieu’ de création d’un dialogue interspirituel, un appel à l’ouverture et à l’acceptation de l’altérité, un appel à transcender les frontières imaginaires et les identités meurtries.

Dianne Marie Cole, Université Laval. “Nag Hammadi Texts as Stories for the Education of Women.”

Throughout the texts of the Coptic Nag Hammadi Library, accounts of female gender entities abound: Creator; mother, and seductress are but a few themes this paper will attempt to explore. What values do the texts uphold regarding the social and mythic understanding of women? Biological speculation, sex, and violence are offered up to the audience, making these stories action-packed thrillers with a high mnemonic value.  The corpus offers a significant window through which we are able to better comprehend the representation of ‘woman’. The concept vacillates along the Platonic-Hermetic-Neo-Platonic-Christian continuum of the compilers of these texts.

Shelly Carmen Colette, University of Ottawa. “Ecofeminism and the Bible: A Doorway Into the Green World.”

As a literary device, Green World imagery is more than mere setting. It integrates illustrations of ‘wilderness’ with the subordination of the status quo. The Green World exists outside of civilization, and in this space, social norms and mores are overturned. Characters who enter the Green World are transformed, and upon returning to the ‘civilized’ world, they are able to effect social change. In this paper, I train an ecofeminist lens on Green World symbolism in the biblical narrative. I explore ways in which biblical stories of the Green World can be used to redress foundational biblical discourses that support an ethics of domination, an ethics which in its turn has global repercussions extending beyond the Christian component of western culture. Through critical ecofeminist analysis, I demonstrate how Green World imagery in these stories articulates an ethics not of domination, but rather of ecojustice.

Mathieu E. Courville, University of Ottawa. “‘Ivory Towers’ or Towers of Babel? A Critical Reading of Martin Kramer’s Unlikely Story.”

Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand, published in the latter part of 2001, initially appears to be a straightforward undertaking. His book is about what he perceives to be the failure of Middle Eastern area studies in the United States. Kramer believes that American Middle Eastern area studies are a failure because the ‘9/11’ tragedy occurred; he places a large amount of blame for this occurrence on scholars’ shoulders. This paper will show how problem-ridden the vision of scholarship which underlies Kramer’s diagnosis is. In order to do this, this essay will not only involve examining the assumptions and implications of Kramer’s main arguments; I will also examine some of the subordinate arguments he deploys, such as his critiques of Edward Said and of John L. Esposito. My analysis will show that Kramer’s arguments are deployed in order to tell a particular (and peculiar) version of the tragic ‘9/11’ story.

Melissa Curley, McGill University. “Read Man: The Circulation of Sacred Texts in Two Films by Jim Jarmusch.”

American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch is famous, if he is famous at all, as the discoverer of hidden landscapes, open countries of epic dreaming that lie underneath and on top of the settled cities of the United States. While much attention has been paid to Jarmusch’s painterly visual style, little notice has been taken of Jarmusch’s writerliness and his use of books and their writers as objects in his films. This paper examines three deployments of the book -- as prop, as image, and as event -- in the films Dead Man and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, and suggests that both films revolve around a transformation of an ordinary book into gospel.

Isabelle Dalcourt, Université Laval. « La littérature tournéenne : le devenir-mythologique de la pensée.»

Nous postulons que l’œuvre de l’écrivain français Michel Tournier démystifie le phénomène de la perversion. En particulier le roman Vendredi et les limbes du Pacifiques, qui posant en préalable à son élaboration la question : «que devient l’humain sur une île déserte, lorsque autrui fait défaut?», déploie les conditions de sens qui rendent l’expérience perverse possible, voire nécessaire. Tournier trace les avatars psychiques et subjectifs de l’humain non pas en partant des «comportements déviants», comme nous y habitue un discours médico-légal répandu sur la perversion mais à partir des limites et possibilités intrinsèques à la subjectivité. En présentant ainsi la perversion, la littérature tournéenne fournit à l’étude de l’expérience religieuse, qui elle aussi est trop souvent rencontrée de l’extérieur, des repères herméneutiques nouveaux. Notre analyse révèle un devenir-mythologique de la pensée tournéenne, processus mort-né dans la plupart des productions culturelles contemporaines, comme l’a affirmé le philosophe Gilles Deleuze.

Michael T. Dempsey, St. John’s University. “Karl Barth and the Art of Theological Rhetoric.”

Paul Tillich once accused Karl Barth of a “demonic absolutism [in which he] throws the truth like stones at the heads of people, not caring whether they accept it or not.” Reinhold Niebuhr similarly charged Barth with a “determinism and irresponsibility when the divine grace is regarded as a way of escape from, rather than a source of engagement with, the anxieties, perplexities, sins, and pretensions of human existence.” As one scholar recently summarized, Barth has routinely been dismissed as “other-worldly, antihistorical, overly dogmatic, irresponsible, and irrelevant” to the problems that plague Church and society today. This paper argues that Barth has been widely misunderstood by most of his detractors and that Barth’s theological rhetoric, which has often led many of offer such critiques of his work, actually sets out to meet many of the same goals he has been accused of abandoning. By analyzing the rhetorical force with which Barth expresses his understanding of theology and the relationship between divine and human agency, I will argue that Barth is not an opinionated polemicist and vitriolic despiser of religious experience and natural theology, but a master of the spiritual life for the modern era, whose artful use of biblical and ecclesial language seeks to undermine the Cartesian presuppositions of modern theological inquiry. Such rhetoric forces his readers to the point of decision about the Word of God as the source of all theological knowing, a point at which the Word of God itself must enter theological reflection to establish its own meaning and relevance for the Church in the world today.

Michel Desjardins, Shahram Nahidi, and Mina Yazdani, Wilfrid Laurier University. “The Crucifixion of Jesus in Christian, Muslim and Baha’i Traditions.”

“But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” So says Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:23, flagging the fact that from the earliest days of Christianity the concept of a Messiah, a world saviour, whose death somehow saved humanity, was not always well received. Christians themselves struggled with the idea well into the second century, and beyond, as they debated the nature of Jesus’ humanity and divinity. All of this is well known. What often gets forgotten is that Jesus takes on an important role for both Muslims and Bahá’ís, who in turn interpret the crucifixion in different ways. This presentation will explore the similarities and differences between Christian, Muslim and Baha’i interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion.

Jacqueline S. du Toit and Luna Beard, University of the Free State. “‘Room of Requirement’: The Interplay of Visual and Conceptual Space in Biblical Literature for Children.”

This paper presents preliminary thoughts on the concept of “a bounded region in space”, as described by Lakoff and Johnson. Some biblical stories transform easier than others to the often perceived more “simplistic” children’s version thereof. This study endeavours to consider the interpretative exchange of meaning between the visually contained image, the simplified textual variant and the canonized (supposedly rigidly contained) original text. The interconnectedness of the visual and written text(s) lends children’s literature particularly well to an investigation of a conceptualist approach to meaning, considering contradictions in Langacker and Lakoff’s positions on the container metaphor. Images of containers on or in water (Noah’s Ark; Moses on the Nile; Jonah; etc.) will be utilised for the purpose of analysis.

Heather Empey, McGill University. “An Aesthetic Approach to Religious Ritual: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and the Persian Passion Play.”

The proposed paper undertakes the study of Iranian tragic drama, or ta’ziyeh, commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn b. ‘Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. In this form of ritual drama, unique in the Islamic world, actor and audience participate in recreating those events, both mythic and historic, which are central to the worldview of Twelver Shi’ism. While a variety of approaches can be used to understand the plays, the one here advocated relies on the concepts of the “Dionysian” and the “Apollinian” as outlined by Friedrich Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche employed these terms to describe the sublime taming of the tragic through art, a phenomenon which is readily discernable in Persian tragic drama. This paper suggests that given that all interpretations of art and ritual are inevitably tropological, using strong tropes, such as Nietzsche’s, helps one to appreciate the wider cosmological contest in which ritual is engaged.

Phil Enns, Toronto School of Theology. “Doing What One Means: Wittgenstein on Ritual.”

If meaning requires both reference to things and their use, how do rituals have meaning? The claim might be made that prayer requires a belief in the existence of God for it to be meaningful. What is the role of such a belief in the activity of praying? Perhaps it is not a belief about something that makes a ritual meaningful but its effect. How does one recognize the appropriate effect which prayer must have in order to be meaningful? Both claims assume that ritual activity itself lacks meaning and therefore requires meaning to be imported. I will argue that both approaches take a particular function of ritual and mistakenly identify the meaning of ritual with this function. I will provide an alternative understanding of ritual which will identify the meaning of ritual in a more holistic manner. For these arguments, I will be drawing on Wittgenstein.

Alyda Faber, Atlantic School of Theology. “Virginia Woolf’s Writing as Mystical Practice of Loving Attention.”

Virginia Woolf’s writing has been interpreted as mysticism by a number of literary critics, including Martin Corner, Marianne Moore, Jane Marcus, and James Naremore. Many of these critics find that Woolf’s atheist mysticism renounces certainty, consolation, and salvation (and for some of these authors, this mysticism is a subversive feminist politics). For Corner, Woolf’s renunciation of certainties about self and world sustains a precarious practice of responsiveness to the being-of-things-as-they-are, here and now. Training attention in the body and brain in this way “reveal[s] the world as ordinary and yet miraculous, as nonhuman in its otherness and yet beyond everything worth our attention.” Corner’s reading of Woolf’s mysticism without consolation resonates to the views of mysticism developed by two philosophers of religion, Amy Hollywood and Tyler Roberts. My paper builds upon Corner’s insights, with reference to Hollywood and Roberts, to interpret Woolf’s writing as a practice of mysticism, a training of loving attention. I focus on her autobiographical writings, and particularly on her perception that disruptive “shocks” of horror and joy are the ambiguous sensations that drive her art. As Woolf writes, “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer.”

Juliana K. Finucane, Syracuse University. “Sri Sri Radha Govinda ISKCON Temple and Communications – a Movement Becomes Middle Class?”

This paper examines the “mainstreaming” of the Hare Krishna movement over the past ten years, both in terms of larger communications efforts and how these efforts have played out at a local ISKCON temple in Brooklyn, NY. I argue that ISKCON has sought public legitimacy by utilizing a communications strategy that reflects increasingly fluid boundaries between insiders and outsiders, as well as between public and private. These fluid boundaries are also reflected at Sri Sri Radha Govinda, as the temple increasingly centers on a class of “peripheral insiders” who are neither fully insiders nor fully outsiders. The Brooklyn Temple mediates a number of apparent oppositions – public vs. private, East vs. West, tradition vs. innovation, insider vs. outsider – and the paper argues that it is this very ambiguity that characterizes ISKCON as a middle class movement. For ISKCON, “mainstreaming” has meant embracing this ambiguity rather than resisting it.

Benjamin Fleming, McMaster University. “Reconsidering Linga Worship in Sanskrit Sources.”

The worship of Siva is associated most typically with linga worship. However, some of the earliest references to Íiva devotion in Sanskrit sources are arguably devoid of this association. I will maintain that the cult of Jyotirlingas,
formed in medieval India around the 10th century c.e., contains residual traces of altar and fire worship to Siva that were not initially aligned with the early linga cult. Episodes from the Forest Book and the Book of the Night Massacre, both from the Mahabharata describing different kinds of altar and mandala worship will be examined in relationship to forms of worship outlined in the Jyotirlinga stories of the Siva Purana.

Kirsten Fudeman, Ithaca College. “Theological Influences on Gautier de Coinci’s Portrayals of Christian & Jewish Literacy.”

The ability to read Scripture and other edifying works was greatly prized by Gautier de Coinci (b. 1177 or 1178, d. 1236) of northern France, author of the Miracles of Nostre Dame, and other Christian scholars. Yet during the Middle Ages, Jewish men were much more likely to be literate than Christian men. How did Gautier reconcile his high regard for the written word with widespread Christian illiteracy? How did he deal with literate Jews who persisted in what he believed were erroneous beliefs despite being well-versed in Scripture? I demonstrate that Gautier had two main strategies: the exaltation of pious Christian illiterates and near-illiterates and criticism of the very nature of Jewish literacy – claiming that Jews read Scripture mechanically without understanding it. I explore the roots of both strategies in theological writings, focusing on those of Gilbert Crispin, Peter Damian, Guibert of Nogent, and Peter the Venerable.

Renata Furst, Université de Montréal. « Is There a World in This Text? The Construction of a Narrative World in Hosea 1-3.”

Is there a world in this text? Viewing Hosea 1-3 not as a “conglomeration” or “anthology,” but as a possible world, sheds light on the ways in which the voice of God is articulated in this prophetic text. This presentation examines the way the literary world of Hosea is structured to convey meaning to the reader. A textual world is a system of coherence, situated in time and space that contains the representation of time, space, objects, characters, speech, perception and action. Moreover, it is also shaped by the relationship between the text and the ‘real world,’ and the role of the reader in the hermeneutical. Hosea uses these elements found in narrative texts in such a way that they constitute a different genre—a prophetic text. In doing so, Hosea allows the reader to enter into the “subjectivity” of God articulated in the text.

Laurie Kathleen Gashinski, Queen’s University. “The Cult of Santa Claus: Maintaining the Myth of St. Nick for Canada’s Children.”

The worship of Santa Claus is a cultural phenomenon. He is the all-powerful, all-knowing and ever-present god of children. Santa is the most powerful religious figure for Christian children, more powerful and better known than Jesus. Society fosters children’s faith in Santa, and worship of him, through our public institutions, our customs, traditions, and myth (oral, literary, song, film). We have created a very real god who even has his own final Judgment Day- December 25th.  Santa has been given a bad rap by some; sex may sell- but Santa sells more. Despite this, Santa is a tie that binds our society together as we collectively conspire to perpetuate the myth of His Holy Christmas-ness. Through the sociological frameworks of theorists such as Weber and Durkheim, this paper examines Santa’s importance to us, and why our dependence upon him has grown to the point where we cannot let him go.

Nathan Gibbard, McGill University. “‘I am Joseph your brother’: Vatican II’s Development of the Jewish-Catholic Encounter.”

When Pope John XXIII opened his arms and greeted a delegation of American Jews with the words: “I am Joseph your brother,” he provided a powerful metaphor and accompanying myth into the conception of the relationship between Jews and Catholics. The Jews were not a repudiated people, but were family - they were brothers. It then became the task, in light of the newly called Council, to translate that idea and spirit into the texts of Vatican II. This eventually resulted in the “Declaration of the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” whereby the “fraternal’, brotherly relation between the two religions was clearly set forth. However, many other symbols and ways of constructing the relationship were tried before finally settling on the ‘brotherly’ imagery, primarily as a result of John XXIII’s words, and the importance of the idea and story of Abraham as a joining term between the two traditions.

Joanne Ginter, Queen’s University. “Spiritual Journeys in the Visual Arts: Developing Healing Resiliency or Complacent Hero Worship.”

Contemporary society has become enmeshed with images of the hero, from such epics as The Lord of the Rings to our weekly television shows. Portrayed in these stories is the spiritual development of the main character reaching towards self-fulfillment. Co-existent with these stories are theories of hero development, rites of passage and life fulfilling prophecies. This paper discusses the spiritual journey of the character Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings through the development of hero theory and subsequently resiliency theory. Hero theory involves a cultural exploration of the spiritual development of the individual and the role of the hero within the supporting community. Resiliency theory explores resiliency as a meaning making process whereby individuals use life stories to create new meanings to unfortunate life events. This discussion attempts to answer some of the reasons for our deep committed interest in these stories. Are we using these spiritual journeys to develop our own resilient meaning making or complaciently waiting for a hero?

Jennifer A. Glancy, Le Moyne College. “Torture: Flesh, Truth, and the Fourth Gospel.”

What story or stories does Jesus' body tell? In the Roman world, torture was used in judicial interrogation of low-status persons. The flogging of Jesus in John 19:1-3, a flogging that occurs in the midst of the trial before Pilate, is best read as an instance of judicial torture. Since Jesus' flesh is flush with truth (1:14), the flogging is an act of witnessing to the truth. Indeed, in the Johannine passion narrative Jesus' body tells a story of torture, torture as defined in Roman law: "By torture we mean the infliction of anguish and agony on the body to elicit the truth" (Dig. 48.10.15.41). Confronted by the horror of a U.S. policy of distilling truth from foreign bodies, I ask urgently: Is it possible to embrace flesh as a locus of truth and still to condemn the practice of torture?

Tim Goltz, McGill University. “The Gates of the Temple Scroll: A Built Environment Analysis.”

As the largest of its kind, the Temple Scroll is one of the most important scrolls found in Qumran. Among other things, it commands the construction of an enormous Temple complex, which is to include three large concentric, gated walls. Four gates were to be in the innermost wall and twelve each were to be in the outer two walls. The gates were to be constructed with the finest materials including cedar and gold. Beginning with Yadin, a number of scholars have tried to architecturally reconstruct this complex, with varying degrees of success. I argue that an alternative way to understand the architectural descriptions within the scroll is by using a heuristic method called a "built environment analysis." Based on the comparative anthropological-architectural studies of Amos Rapoport, this method privileges the social meaning of the textual description of the Temple complex within its original community(ies) over any one thing or things the text architecturally signifies.

David K. Goodin, McGill University. “The Noble Leviathan and the Twisted Serpent: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective on Good and Evil Symbolism in Genesis, Job, and Isaiah.”

The Hebrew Bible alternately portrays the Leviathan as God’s ocean-going playmate with whom He covenants (Job 41), and as the epitome of evil slain by God (Isaiah 27). As Eastern Orthodoxy upholds the axiom of Peter of Damaskos (c.1096-1157 CE), that there are no contradictions in scripture, this represents a curious exegetical challenge. To this end, this paper presents an allegorical harmonization of these verses together with their scriptural complement of the “whispering serpent” from Genesis 3. This exegesis builds on the scholarship of Jan Boersema (2001) and Catherine Keller (2003), and utilizes the historical doctrines of Peter of Damaskos to argue that the Leviathan is a poetic device symbolizing the “passions” of humankind. As such, the disparate representations of the Leviathan accord with Orthodoxy’s doctrine of Theosis, and the powerful allegory of the Leviathan has serious implications for ecotheology through the Isaiahic themes of broken covenant and environmental destruction.

Colleen Gray, McGill University. “Telling the Tale of a Colonial Saint: The Marie Barbier Biographies.”

Marie Barbier (1663-1739) was a Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Montreal nun, superior and mystic. The story of her life remains in the form of two biographies. The first biography was written by Charles de Glandelet, her confessor and spiritual advisor, some time before his death in 1725. The second biography was an edited version of the Glandelet manuscript by Étienne de Montgolfier, a Sulpician priest, written almost forty years after Marie Barbier’s death. This presentation intends to examine the many challenges faced in the attempt to retell Barbier’s story based upon these biographies. It will explore not only the physical difficulties involved in interpreting these hand-written manuscripts, the obstacles presented by the hagiographical and eighteenth-century scholarly tradition within which they were written, but also the barriers posed by text to the accession of “truth” and “voice.” Ultimately it will ask: can, or how can her story be retold?

Janet Gunn, University of Ottawa. “Intersections of Story, Myth, Ritual and Art in Household Puja: Narratives of Relationship.”

The paper aims to interpret the confluence of story, myth, ritual and art in Hindu women’s daily household worship of family and personal deities. Domestic shrines are approached primarily as material expressions of female values. I argue that the home altar effectively consecrates women’s emphasis on reciprocal relationships - those which flow between people and the sacred, among the gods themselves, among various groups of people, and which find multivalent expression through ritual actions at the home shrine. It is hypothesized that participants in puja may, through the maintenance of reciprocal relationships with deities on the home shrine, be engaging in a two-fold process: the negotiation of human relationships and the construction of personal identity. This process offers the potential of upholding traditional patterns of meaning while at the same time providing the devotee a ritual space within which idealized relational identities can be transcended.

Airen Hall, Syracuse University. “ECKANKAR’s Balance: Combining East and West in the Legitimation of a Middle-Class New Religious Movement.”

This paper examines the way in which the new religious movement Eckankar has sought legitimacy and made itself an attractive option for middle-class spiritual seekers. By exploring the history of the group and the various beliefs and practices which the group espouses, one can see how Eckankar has followed a two-pronged course in order to gain legitimacy: the foundational use of Eastern religion to maintain the image of spiritual tradition and authority and the emerging use of a more Western style of worship. In this way, Eckankar is balancing along the very fine line that so many new religious movements which appeal to the middle class are walking—it is both Eastern and Western, both mysteriously exotic and utterly pragmatic, both deliciously exotic and reassuringly comfortable.

Stephen Healey, University of Bridgeport. “In My Father’s House Are Many Stories – If It Were Not So…”

The paper uses the term ‘story’ as an equivocal referent to explore conflicted dimensions of religious experience and to argue that theology expresses hope about finally telling a truthful story. A story can be a lie, a fiction that conceals reality. Religions often encourage truth-telling, but religious believers and communities often find themselves telling stories (lies). In short, religions are multi-storied discourses that entail the redemptive potency of revelation and the destructive potency of concealment. Within human experience—religious and otherwise—these potencies are inseparably narrated as ‘story.’ But there is longing for ‘the story,’ revealed and proclaimed, and distinguished from stories that conceal reality. This longing is supremely present in the doing of theology, which tries to unite the principle of ultimacy (theos) with the medium of stories (logos). Put another way, theology is a God-story, an expression of human hope that our stories finally can be truthful and revelatory.

David Hermanson, Drew University. “Story Against Story: “Georges Bataille’s ‘The Dead Man.’”

20th Century author and philosopher of transgression Georges Bataille is often seen as a difficult or even chaotic writer. The paper will show how Bataille uses both fragmentary philosophical narrative and erotic stories as kinds of counter- or anti-stories. Bataille in his “The Dead Man” subverts the notion of the story in attempting to expose the constructed nature of the moral narratives underlying common experience. Reading Bataille from the view point of Heideggerian, it is possible to understand this movement as an effort at recognising the limits of moral constitution of “world” in a renewed openness to the “earth” and is suggestive of a tactic of seduction in philosophical and religious discourse.

B.K. Hipsher, Episcopal Divinity School. “A Queer Retelling of the Healing of the Leper in Mark 1:40-45.”

The dynamics of silence and proclaiming, and the choices we make regarding whom we include and exclude from rituals are integral parts of this very short story. The seeming simplicity of the narrative collapses under the weight of a modern day parallel. When a queer person comes to a liberal priest and asks for a blessing, what happens when that good priest is moved with pity, compassion or even anger declaring the outcast “clean”, welcoming him/her back into the community in defiance of the bishop? Using the lens of present day queers people in relation to the institutional church I will explore the historic context of the story and compare that context to the “don’t ask don’t tell” policies practiced by many religious institutions on the basis of gender performance and sexual preference.

Sajida Jalalzai, McGill University. “The Myth of the Ideal Woman in Muslim and Hindu Nationalism.”

Religious nationalism often involves conscious efforts to enact or embody mythical ideals. Nowhere is this more obvious than the construction of the ideal woman in nationalist agendas. This paper examines the influence of such agendas on women, specifically in the South Asian context, and poses the question of how Hindu nationalist movements in India and Muslim nationalist movements in Pakistan contribute to the subjugation of women.
Furthermore, an examination of women’s adherence to religious beliefs or involvement in religious practices that may be perceived as “oppressive” complicates the commonly held perception of women as passive receptors of such subjugation inflicted by the state, society, colonialism, or mankind at large. Thus, this paper highlights the complex interplay of myth, interpretation, and societal power structures at play in the nationalist construction of the ideal woman, and the ensuing implications of this interplay for both men and women.

John A Jillions, Saint Paul University. “‘Time for the Lord to Act’: the Eastern Orthodox Experience of Worship.”

Eastern Orthodox worship is well-known as an expressive form of liturgical story-telling that combines ritual, chant, icons, candles, vestments and many other elements in a tradition that largely reached its final form more than a thousand years ago. Yet the experience is designed less as a re-telling of the past than as an encounter between human and divine in the present. Indeed, many liturgical texts speak of past events as “today”. How do interpreters of Eastern Orthodox liturgy explain the “making present” of these stories from the past? This paper surveys Orthodox liturgical commentaries for possible answers to this question, and suggests, through responses from interviews and focus groups, how Orthodox Christians of today understand this liturgical language.

Eglute Johnson, Syracuse University. “A Diabolic Digression: Death Caps, Boletuses, Russulas.”

This paper makes a methodological digression from a direct discussion about religion in order to talk about Indigenous Religion of Lithuania. Though Lithuania today is a Roman Catholic country, the paper argues that the secular practice of mushroom gathering is an uninterrupted continuation of the Ancient Baltic religion. Mushroom gathering, as a locative-exchange orientation of inhabiting the world, constitutes an Indigenous Religion. People regard mushrooms as objects of mystery and associate them with the supernatural.
Through the use of myth, the paper links mushrooms with the chthonic realm of the mischievous god of the dead Velnias. Simultaneously as food, medicine, and poison, mushrooms embody the potent powers of the sacred. The paper concludes with a story about Lithuanian response to the Western scare regarding poisonings from the Yellow-knight fungus.

Meera Kachroo, McGill University. “The Goddess’ Rescue of Desire: Kavya and the Saundarya Lahari.”

In the 11th century Tantric text Saundarya Lahari, one recurrent feature is a retelling of scenes from the Puranic story of the great ascetic Siva’s battle with Kamadeva, desire incarnate. In the Saundarya Lahari, this myth is reinterpreted to accommodate the Goddess’ successful rescue of Kamadeva from the wrath of Siva; this narrative is reworked in the embellished style of courtly Sanskrit poetry, clearly borrowing from the poetry of Kalidasa. This narrative is a kind of ornament to the central movement of the poem, a description of the Goddess’ beautiful physical form. The Goddess’ body is the object of the devotee’s love and adoration; it is the site of aesthetic and devotional desire. The Saundarya Lahari can be understood to give a fresh perspective on the value of desire, through the incorporation of literary tropes and style, and thematically as the reworking of the narrative to end with Kamadeva’s victory. This paper will analyse the nature of the connection between desire and the Goddess: at the confluence of the literary and the theological is her rescue (and further) her embodiment of desire.

Jason Kalman, McGill University. “To Laugh or To Cry? The Rabbis Respond to the Book of Job.”

The biblical book of Job, which tells the story of a righteous man afflicted without apparent cause by God, troubled the earliest generations of Jewish sages (not to mention the early Church fathers and generations of later thinkers of both faiths). How these rabbis read the biblical text has been studied critically since the turn of the 20th century but nothing has been written concerning the rabbis emotional responses to the text. This paper examines two rabbinic texts. The first explicitly reveals that crying was an appropriate response to the challenge to theodicy represented by the book of Job. The second text suggests that the rabbis may have accepted laughter as an appropriate method for dealing with the overwhelming situation described in the story. These rabbinic responses to Job stress the humanness of the sages in addition to their exegetical acuity.

Warren Kappeler, McGill University. “Christian Discourse and Social Change: Using McLuhan’s Cultural Theory to Understand Vatican II.”

This paper argues that Vatican II modernized the way in which the Catholic Church communicates with the world. I will show that the Council bishops took an explicit interest in both language and communications. First, I will discuss the reform of the liturgy, in which the bishops at Vatican II embraced a shift from Latin to the vernacular. This allowed Christian worship and catechesis to be renewed and adapted to the Church’s changing social conditions. Second, I will consider the pastoral decree on mass media issued at Vatican II. In this document, the Council took an interest in the languages of the media and their influence upon the Church. Finally, I will draw from Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between ‘medium and message’ to explain why Vatican II was a linguistic revolution for Roman Catholicism. After Vatican II, religious education tends to adopt McLuhan’s concern for translation.

Gwynn Kessler, University of Florida. “Famous Fetuses in Rabbinic Literature.”

This paper sets forth narrative rabbinic traditions about the construction of Jewishness, focusing specifically on the positive markers of Jewishness already, apparently, existing while in one's mother's womb. I first analyze rabbinic passages that attribute Jewishness to biblical heroes while still in their mother's wombs. Such fetuses express their Jewishness through prayer, praise, song, and study, much like ideal rabbinic Jews. Furthermore, male biblical heroes are repeatedly said to be born circumcised--often understood as a mark/sign of Jewishness in and of itself.  I then delve more deeply into the rabbinic narrative traditions about the pre-natal characters of Jacob, Esau, R. Yohanan and Elisha ben Abuyah, a.k.a Aher. Here I examine positive markers specifically ascribed to Jacob and R. Yohanan, and negative characterizations of Esau and Aher while in utero. I ask, how is Jewishness, even already in the womb, defined against its Other.

Kristin Beise Kiblinger, Thiel College. “Using Mahayana Buddhism to Tell the Story of Jesus: The Work of John P. Keenan.”

Scholars have claimed that the theology of religions has reached an impasse and that the next step is to engage instead in comparative theology. However, using the work of John P. Keenan (an Episcopal priest with extensive training in Buddhist Studies), I will argue that the two are not easy to separate; one's theology of religions makes a significant difference in one's comparative theology, and getting the former right is essential to doing the latter well and to framing what one is doing accurately. Despite Keenan's own differing conception of his project, his use of Mahayana Buddhism as a hermeneutic for reinterpreting Jesus instantiates a particular, problematic type of inclusivism. Examining his work up against an alternative, ideal form of inclusivism helps to make sense of the criticisms of his project made by his reviewers, bringing to light both the virtues and weaknesses of his approach.

William P. Kiblinger, Thiel College. “Protest in the State of Exception: Thoughts on the Biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben.”

Giorgio Agamben describes the nihilism of our time – of all time – as the “state of exception.” Through his analysis, the Heideggerian diagnosis of the meaningless willfulness resident in Western metaphysics extends to the realm of biopolitics in which the body becomes another instance of “abandoned being,” subsumed by the forces of technology and sovereign power. This cultural condition of nihilism stems from the metaphysical opposition of humanity and animality, which involves not only the technological mastery of “the animal other” but an alienated sense of ourselves. For Agamben, this is the logic of sovereignty. In this paper, I want to think about the possibility of protest in the midst of the state of exception. How is protest possible without recapitulating the logic of sovereignty? Drawing on Keith Stanovich’s The Robot’s Rebellion and Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy & Tradition, I argue that protest arises through the emergence of spirit and vice versa.

Peter Killam, McMaster University. “Reconciling Jean Bodin’s Religious and Political Thought: The Inner Consistency of Colloquium Heptaplomeres.”

It is often remarked that Jean Bodin was an unpolished, infelicitous writer, torn between the pre-modern superstitions of medieval Europe and the scientific study of humankind that would emerge in the seventeenth century. This fractured picture, painted by the brush strokes of modern historiography, has dissuaded interpreters from seeing in Bodin’s writings any meaningful inner consistency. Bodin’s various modern and pre-modern ideas, it is argued, are ultimately irreconcilable. In two short overlapping essays written in the 1940's, however, Eric Voegelin suggested that a unified picture of Bodin’s religious and political thought is possible when the uncritical categories of linear historiography are abandoned. Voegelin’s treatment of this issue is brief, and lacks detailed textual support. My paper proposes to examine Voegelin’s contention through a careful exegesis of Bodin’s late dialogue, Colloquium Heptaplomeres.

Rebecca King, Queen’s University. “Memories and Truths: A Discussion of Confessional Narratives in Canadian Literature.”

Confession is a concept which is complicated by the confusion between memory and truth. Religious confessions are often generated by alternative motives or confusion on the part of the speaker or the listener. In literature this confusion is magnified by an emphasis upon the character’s search for self-actualization and the presence of both an omniscient author and the audience.  Canadian literature is marked by its concern for the roles of both the author and the reader, who believe they share a common bond brought about by their shared national identity. Common themes such as isolation and survival are manifested in the narrator’s search for self-actualization in the form of a confessional fiction.  In this paper I explore both the accepted roles which confession has played in literature and the changing notions of confession as it applies to Canadian literature in selected texts.

Chris Klassen, York University. “What Was, What Is, and What Should Be: Exploring Utopian Mythology in Feminist Witchcraft.”

This paper explores the constructions of a utopian past to address a dystopian present in order to work toward a utopian future in the stories told by feminist Witches. I focus on fictional narrative–novels written by feminist Witches–as examples of deliberately developed sacred text. These texts motivate authors and readers to shape a religious and ritual identity which allows them to function in a world which is seemingly antithetical to feminist Witchcraft. My analysis asks questions about the usefulness of utopian constructions in working toward a more empowering and sustainable future. I suggest that while some feminist Witches utilise a simplistic utopia/dystopia opposition which lacks nuance and is limiting in its emancipatory potential, others allow for a more complex strategic deployment of utopian themes which allow feminist Witches to address the shifting and sometimes contradictory relationships they have with mainstream culture and history.

David Koloszyc, McGill University. “Lovers, Dreamers, Storytellers: Psychoanalysis and the Practice of Narrative.”

The past few months have seen two renowned French magazines, Magazine Litteraire and Le Nouvel Observateur, dedicate an entire issue to the subject of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Partly inspired by this move, the aim of my paper will be twofold. On the one hand, I will address the issue of the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis today, not only in the field of psychology, but also in the study of religion, philosophy, and culture. On the other hand, drawing upon the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Shoshana Felman, I will argue that, defining the human subject as a speaking being, psychoanalysis is essentially constituted around the interpretation and practice of narrative. By the same token, the central thesis of my paper will be that, because its fundamental task is the rebirth of the imagination through language and through meaning, psychoanalysis remains a significant challenge to both positivist and relativist tendencies in the human sciences.

Lisa Kuly, Cornell University. “The Competing Narratives of Safe Childbirth of Obitokedera and Nakayamadera.”

In this presentation, I explore the literary, historical, and geographical narratives constructed by two Buddhist temples to illuminate their strategies of marketing ritual. Obitokedera and Nakayamadera are known in the Kansai region of Japan for the efficacy of their amulets and rituals of safe childbirth. Obitokedera, a Shingon temple whose main image of worship is the Bodhisattva Jizo, sells haraobi, girdles pregnant women don in the fifth month of pregnancy. Nakayamadera, the twenty-fourth temple along the Saikoku pilgrimage route, holds Kannon as its main image of worship. Both temples have crafted narratives emphasizing connections to Japan’s royal families, past and present, and have created miraculous birth stories, cementing their reputations as the pre-eminent safe childbirth temples in the region. As the temples are situated in close proximity to each other, I show how they compete in procuring petitioners.

Cory Andrew Labrecque, McGill University. “A Unilateral Contract? Where Do I Sign! Reciprocity, Agency, Partnership, and Moral Responsibility in the Primeval Covenant.”

While Biblical usage of berit varies according to the Priestly narrative context, the legal metaphor of covenant is employed to lend theological structure to the eternal bond between, and mutual commitment of, God and his people. The Primeval Covenant is peculiar. God does not only covenant with Noah (and humankind through him), but with all creation. Further, this “covenant” is unilateral; there is no reciprocity, no return promise of loyalty from humankind or any other creature. All creation is the gracious recipient of God’s pledge to preserve life ad infinitum. God hangs up his ‘bow’ in the sky, a gesture of pacification and disarmament to signify a creator intending to be at peace with his creation. Returning to the legal construct of covenant in the Ancient Near East and describing moral responsibility through this particular agent/patient dynamic, we come to a renewed understanding of the imago Dei in human-nature partnership.

Adriaan Lamprecht, North-West University. “Elijah’s Ascension: The Interplay Between Visual and Conceptual Space.”

An idea was once described by Voltaire as “an image that paints itself in the brain”. In cognitive linguistics the description of an idea should be defined by the term mental simulation, the gist activity present in child language acquisition. To put it in linguistic terms, utterances are understood by mentally simulating their content. But what if there are sentences describing unusual visual imagery, like the description of Elijah’s ascension to heaven on a chariot of fire pulled by horses of fire? In this paper I will discuss the parameters of the linguistic structure of simulation exploiting some of the same neural structures activated in hearing an utterance/reading a narrative, in performance, perception, imagining and in memory. I will then explain the somatotopically organized motor system underlying the traditional literal interpretation of Elijah’s ascension to heaven and finally proposes a newly coined simulation for the utterance within the understanding system of metaphor.

Tamara S. J. Lanaghan, Harvard University. “Finding Kashi in Kolhapur: Mirroring of a North Indian Sacred City in South India in Agatsya’s Story.”

When we think of cross-border journeys, we generally assume that the traveler passes from a familiar world into a world that is completely foreign. What happens, however, when he finds the same world on crossing a boundary? This is what sage Agastya experiences when he travels to the city of Kolhapur in southern Maharashtra. According to a story in the Karavira-Mahatmya, a Sanskrit text, having left behind northern Kashi on the banks of the Ganga, Agastya finds Dakshina (Southern) Kashi on the banks of the Pancaganga. Utilizing the mirror metaphor as developed in A. K. Ramanujan’s study of the intertextuality in Indian literary traditions, this paper considers the narrative strategies employed by the author-redactor of the Karavira-Mahatmya to build the phenomenological and ontological bases to extol Kolhapur. Mirroring of Kashi in Kolhapur leads to a theological understanding that binds together the land of India across its physical and cultural divides.

Susan Landau-Chark, Concordia University. “The Public Role of the Rabbi’s Wife: The Interweaving of Fact and Fiction in Jewish Religious Leadership.”

One popular theme of early Jewish fictional writing concerned the relational issues that exist between a rabbi and his rebbetzin. Rebbetzin is the Yiddish term for the wife of a rabbi.  The rebbetzins of these 19th century stories conjured up images of an East European Jewish shtetl (village), where the rabbi's wife was the family breadwinner, a role model of piety and learning, and an exemplary wife and mother whose sole concern was the well-being of her husband and his standing in the community.  Between 1954 and 1983 six novels were published which portrayed the role as contributing to a woman's loss of individuality and emotional stability.  My own research explores the public presence of the rabbi's wife in terms of her communal and religious role within her husband’s congregation. Using my research to-date (interviews with women married to congregational rabbis) my paper will explore the interface between fiction and fact.

Steven Lapidus, Concordia University. “A Conversation with Bawon Samedi: A Haitian Vodou Ceremony in Montreal.”

Vodou ceremonies present a diversity of interacting yet distinct layers of significance. Perhaps one of the most interesting features of Haitian Vodou’s cosmology is the reenactment of social and historical drama through the interaction between Vodou spirits (lwa) and the human ritual participants. Social reality, including both the experience of colonial slavery, the revolution and the aftermath have and continue to influence historical and contemporary Vodou ceremonies. I propose to describe my participation in a Vodou ritual as both an invited attendee but an obvious White outsider. During this ceremony, I was chosen by Bawon Samedi (Papa Gede), an iconoclastic, trickster spirit, to be mocked. Through this conversation, Papa Gede used my ethnicity and language deficiency to re-enact an historical moment, thereby attempting, at least in ritual, to redefine the colonial power structure. This dialogue which symbolically transcended time and space was a clear example of the way in which parody is utilized as a challenge to social history within Vodou practice.

Lee Wing Hin, Queen’s University. “When Bisexuals Meet an Evangelical Protestant Wife.”

While the study of Christianity and the discipline of Religious Studies has welcomed research projects by Queer Studies scholars in the past decade, the unique potential of queer epistemology in explaining Protestant identity is unexplored. Core to present day evangelical Protestantism are rules-based communities that advocate gender and sexual identities which preserve moral order and conservative family values. The category of “wife” in an evangelical Protestant marriage implies total submission, unquestioned obedience, and inherent complementarity with its male counterpart. Using bisexual epistemological approaches that problematize rigid, mutually exclusive geographical and metaphoric spatial boundaries, my paper uncovers what is said to be the essence of an ideal evangelical Protestant wife. It furthers deconstructs the gender and sexual conceptions that underlie “wife” and more importantly, evangelical Protestant femininity. Appropriating various bisexual epistemologies, the paper also explores the inherent flexibility, ambivalence, and ambiguity in this moral, sexual and gendered identity’s seemingly exclusionary boundaries.

Gabriel Lefebvre, Université du Québec à Montréal. « Enlèvements extraterrestres, expériences de mort imminentes, témoignages d’apparitions: des récits mythiques contemporains. »

Le concept de mythe rend compte d’un certain type de récits issus des civilisations et religions traditionnelles. La notion pose un problème pour le chercheur qui s’intéresse aux manifestations du religieux dans le monde contemporain, en dehors des institutions. Existe-t-il des équivalents du mythe dans la culture occidentale ? Si tel est le cas, de tels mythes permettent-ils de saisir les spécificités du religieux en modernité avancée, et, en retour, ces spécificités permettent-elles de mieux comprendre le rôle du mythe dans l’univers religieux ? Cette communication entend présenter trois types de récits contemporains qui offrent des pistes de réponses: les récits d’enlèvements extraterrestres, les expériences de mort imminentes, et les témoignages d’apparitions. Ces trois “nouveaux mythes” se déploient à la fois sur le plan expérientiel et comme mythologie occidentale profondément inscrite dans la culture. Ils permettent également d’analyser d’une nouvelle façon les rapports entre mythe et rituel.

Marilyn Legge, Victoria University. “Beyond Borders: Imagining Diversity as Moral Dilemma and Resource.”

We live in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity which we often encounter as unprecedented diversity. Myths of community and globalization operate in ways that both exclude and destroy as well as delight and even expand the boundaries of moral community. Does “diversity” enliven or inhibit our capacity to imagine, narrate and mobilize practices of creativity, compassion and justice as collective mutuality? For religious groups seeking resources for a shared future, diversity is a paradox that requires an epistemology beyond borders. Drawing on key notions of moral imagination (Johnson), untangling race and class (Bounds) and alliances engaging complex diversity (Jakobsen), this paper will suggest how, with reference to hospitality to strangers, diversity can be profoundly contextualized through “an alchemy of desire” (Welch) and a politics of storytelling that encourage sustainable networks and diplomacy (Wellman) of greater respect for and openness to others.

Joshua Lesk, McGill University. “The Model of the Universe: History of a Trope from Plato to the Midrash.”

Genesis Rabbah, the 4th Century Midrash, introduces into Rabbinic literature the well-known trope of the Torah existing prior to Creation, functioning as God's model when creating the universe. This trope predates the Midrash by almost a thousand years, resurfacing in different guises in Greek, Jewish and Christian literature. One predecessor is the character of Wisdom in the Biblical book of Proverbs, God's companion at the beginning of Creation. This character is developed in the Wisdom of Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon until it is assimilated to the Rabbinic concept of Torah. The other main precursor to the trope is the idea of the noetic cosmos, introduced in Plato's Timaeus as the conceptual model of the physical universe. Through the filter of Middle Platonist and Stoic thought the doctrine of the noetic cosmos inspires variations in the Wisdom of Solomon, Philo's De Opificio Mundi and Origen's Commentary on John. Eventually the two strands, that of Wisdom, God's primeval companion, and of the noetic cosmos, the model of Creation, merge and develop into clear Rabbinic and Christian versions of the trope. This paper traces this process, focusing especially on the synthesis of the two original strands within Ben Sira, Pseudo-Solomon, Philo and the Gospel of John.

Jason Lewis, Syracuse University. “The Universal Guru.”

This paper will focus on the phenomenon of the universal guru. While the concept and notion of the guru is present primarily in the tradition of Hinduism, this paper will also focus on the application of the term to Jesus of Nazareth, making use of Thangaraj’s work, The Crucified Guru. Furthermore, this work will examine the universalization of the Sai Baba of Shirdi, a prominent Hindu/Muslim guru of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, relying heavily upon both the work of his principal biographer Narasimhaswamiji and his modern devotees proclivity for using the internet to spread the message of their gurudeva (God teacher). Similarities will be drawn between these two men, their lives and their teachings, in an effort to answer the question of how and why people seek to deify their spiritual teachers, making them what I dubbed the universal guru?

Layne Little, U.C.Berkeley. “Cinema Siddhas: Tamilizing Hollywood’s Yogi-Christ in Rajinikanth’s Baba.”

This paper explores the entrance of Tamil Siddha tradition into the world of popular culture by examining the 2002 Tamil film, Baba, written, directed, and starring “superstar” Rajnikanth. The film depicts a “universal” Tamil Siddha world fully integrated with Tamil temple traditions and conservative Hindu culture. My paper argues that Rajnikanth’s unique re-envisioning of the Tamil Siddhas through his repatriation of Babaji, “the Yogi-Christ of India,” attempts to promote a direct lineal relationship between indigenous Tamil yoga traditions and Kriya yoga forms, which have become increasingly popular in the United States since the 1930s. In doing so, Baba encapsulates a dynamic moment in the Tamil nationalizing process that co-opts Siddha tradition through a pop-cultural form of diaspora-Hinduism.

Andrea Lobel, McGill University. “Astronomy, Cosmogony, and Images of National Rebirth in the Exagoge of Ezekiel The Tragedian (or, By the Time I Get to Phoenix).”

Preserved in fragmentary form by Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Eustathius, and attributed to the Pseudepigraphal author, Ezekiel, The Exagoge retells the story of the Exodus within the literary style of Greek drama. Likely composed in Alexandria during the second century B.C.E., the play is quite possibly unique in its presentation of the Bible text in this form. The Exagoge, however, transcends the limits of the biblical narrative and hints at a rich subtext filled with bold images of national rebirth, re-emergence and survival in strange lands -- from Egypt outward, and back to Egypt (albeit Hellenized Egypt) once again. Among the images to be examined are several which may be viewed as allusions to the cosmogonic and mythological roles of the sun and the stars. When observed together, these point to the underlying story of Divine creation, covenant and kingship as manifested through the House of Jacob. Indeed, even the colourful phoenix, which appears in the final fragment, will be shown to be a pivotal symbol in the understanding of our key themes as they manifest themselves in the play. With the above issues in mind, this presentation will note the ways in which The Exagoge might be considered to be both a form of apologetic entertainment and a cyclical creation myth, with its roots planted in Egypt and its 'wings' linked to notions of Israel's destiny.

Grace Cheng-Ying Lin, McGill University. “Religion and Women: Context and Subtext.”

This paper discusses the construction of Chinese religion as a form of knowledge, and the relationship between religion and structures of subjectivity. More specifically, the paper focuses on childbirth and abortion in the religious texts and practices of modern China and Taiwan. In order to discover the position of woman within a religious context, it is first of all essential to acquire knowledge of the classical texts of Chinese Taoism and Buddhism. In addition, contemporary practices such as the worship of gods protecting childbirth and abortion ritual need to be analyzed in order to know how women in modern China and Taiwan react within the religious context. This approach – looking at the interaction between classical texts and contemporary religious practice – should allow for a Foucauldian perspective on the formation of subjectivity within the context of religion; but one that assumes that subjects are not simply passive agents.

Manuel Litalien, Université du Quebec à Montréal. “Thai bhikkuni movement and the story of Maha Pajapati: Transnationalization of a movement?”

Recently, full ordination of former Thammasat University scholar, Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, has opened a new religious alternative for Women in Thai society. The presentation will focus on the social impact of such an event and its relation to the story of Maha Pajapati. The lecture borrows from three fields of studies, namely the status of women in Buddhism, the status of Buddhism in Thailand, and the status of women in Thailand. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh (Dhammananda)’s ordination is not seen as an isolated case. It evolves around an international network of Buddhist scholars who wishes to uplift the status of women in the tradition. So far, the reestablishment of the bhikkhuni order has had an impact beyond Southeast Asia. It is said to be a response from forces residing outside and inside the tradition. For Thailand, it is argued that the bhikkhuni order offers a more politically engaged alternative than the current mae-chi (white nuns) position.

Sorching Anne Low, Syracuse University.“The Concept of Emptiness in John Cage.”

This paper explores the way the Buddhist concept of emptiness is used in the music of John Cage. By focusing on his early works between 1940s and 1950s, I argue that Cage uses this concept for a pedagogical purpose. In my examples, I show how emptiness becomes the modus operandi in Cage's work but at the same time I question and argue for why Buddhism is appropriated instead of a Western tradition such as Meister Ekhart. By looking at this intersection between art and religion, i ask also what becomes of 'religion' and 'art' when the categories are deliberately blurred.

Matthew Forrest Lowe, McMaster University. “Working for Dr. Zeus: Belief, Narrative, and Eschatology in the Novels of Kage Baker.”

Mythology provides a compelling bridge between religion and story. Kage Baker takes advantage of this connection in her novels of the Company, following the exploits of operatives employed by “Dr. Zeus, Incorporated.” These agents have received the gift of immortality, but the gift is a mixed blessing: eternal life on this world makes it difficult to accept promises of an afterlife in the next. Baker’s characters struggle to come to terms with religious faith, especially that of Christianity. Significantly, while much of their origins are couched in Greek mythology, these immortals find in Christian thought the means to express their emotions, ethics and all-too-human angst as they tell their own stories to others. This paper will explore this gradual transition from Greek to Christian cosmology, particularly as it affects the protagonists’ attitudes toward belief, narrative, and finally eschatology, as Baker’s immortals face the prospect of their own day of reckoning.

Mary N. MacDonald, Le Moyne College. “Pigs in Rituals and Stories of Highlands New Guinea.”

Pigs have been part of highland New Guinea ecosystems for some five thousand years and have become important go-betweens in religious systems that emphasize fertility and survival. They have entered into the social and economic transactions of the human community and have also come to play an important role in rituals in which people seek to renew their communities. The killing of pigs and the sharing of pork facilitate the restructuring of relationships among the living and also between the living and the ghosts of the dead. Pigs also appear in the telling of traditional tales where human behavior is projected onto them. It is suggested that pigs' close association with people and their physical qualities make them good bearers of meaning. They evoke life and their killing calls forth new life.

Gregory Mack, McGill University. “An Examination of Recent Discourse on the Shari’ah’s Role in the Public Sphere of Traditional Muslim Societies.”

This paper examines the impact of transposing concepts, such as “ritual,” with meanings rooted in a distinct historical experience, to the analysis of Islamic legal institutions. “Ritual” is commonly used to describe ‘ibadat, the division of fiqh, which addresses devotional matters, in contrast with mu’amalat, applying to civil transactions. By extension, the different jurisdiction of the Shari’ah, has been used to highlight the absence of institutions associated with European societies. A key objective of this paper is to inform the evolving discourse about the role of the Shari’ah in traditional Muslim societies. Attention is given to recent scholarship, which builds on the legacy of Marshall Hodgson, portraying it as the main framework for a vibrant and autonomous “public sphere.” A key conclusion of the paper is that this discourse marks an advance from an over-simplified view of Islamic law being stagnant, but it stays tied to the Western legal tradition; particularly, the nation-state implicitly remains the major unit of analysis.

Robert A. Martel, Queen’s University. “Understanding Moral Conflict : Story, Narrative, and the Cultivation of Moral Imagination.”

In moral conflicts, opposing groups suffer deadlock because they fail to do two things: first, take into account the moral narrative (history of personal and community moral development) of their opponents, and second, use moral imagination (ability to consider alternative ethical positions), to better understand moral viewpoints and choices different from their own. Narrative is a way of understanding and adjudicating the moral judgments and choices we make in our lives. Narrative reveals that we are at one agent of the events in our lives, and the interpreters of the moral import of these events. When we narrate or give expression to the importance of a personal story, we situate our moral development within more or less a coherent path, revealing that moral education is an ongoing process. Through a community of shared moral vision, that shapes judgment and imagination, narrative or story acknowledges the complexity of human life. Making an effort to understand how the imagination influences our moral judgments provides a way for working through ethical conflict. Without considering alternate ethical and moral choices, we may never come to understand how a religious community can be made up of smaller groups that adopt opposing moral viewpoints.

Craig Martin, Syracuse University. “Freedom, Religion, and the Coherence of Liberalism.”

In Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (2004), Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini claim that the adoption of heteronormative policies by the American government is akin to the establishment of Christian theology as law. They argue for the delimitation of sexual regulation by suggesting that sexual freedom be conceived as analogous to religious freedom. Though they reject the word “tolerance” because of its condescension toward the “tolerated,” their program is nearly identical to the classic liberal program of tolerance. However, this means that the program they recommend is also subject to the incoherencies of classic liberalism. With attention to the critique of liberalism made by Stanley Fish in The Trouble With Principle (1999), I will demonstrate the incoherence of their program, and will suggest how their agenda might be reframed in a way that would carry more force.

Masaki Matsubara, Cornell University. “A New Dialogue of Zen Master Hakuin’s Writing and Paintings: Overlooked Legacy of Political Critique and Social Justice in Hebiichigo.”

Zen Master Hakuin (1685-1768) is a well known and seminal figure in Japanese Rinzai Zen. In particular, he is regarded as the reviver of the contemporary Rinzai tradition, which has, in effect, been monopolized by the Hakuin-lineage today. For the ecclesiastics inside the tradition, this monopolization indicates that every one of the lineages of current Rinzai Zen in Japan derives from him. It is not an exaggeration to speak of contemporary Rinzai Zen as "Hakuin Zen." In recent decades, Hakuin has been also remembered as both a painter as well as calligrapher whose reputation among wide intellectuals goes beyond the sphere of religion as a versatile artist of the Edo period.  In this paper, growing out of the intensions of a more hermeneutical and critical approach in the academic study of religion as well as Religious Studies, I explore Hakuin's category of political critique that has been undoubtedly overlooked in both the Rinzai world and scholarly world. By looking at one of Hakuin's most influential political treatises, Hebiichigo, as well as many other paintings on that topic, I suggest that Hakuin was a fearless fighter for social justice who fought, with words and visual images, the abuses of power of the Tokugawa elites as they exploited farmers. Moreover, I suggest that Hakuin's paintings are most often the visualization of his writings. From this perspective, I argue that he was an extraordinary and ingenious artist, storyteller, and more importantly, effective political protest, producing paintings dependently from his writings. In this paper, what in mind is how this new reading of Hakuin can be used to reexamine some of the moral crises in the Zen tradition with twentieth-century Japanese nationalism and the current situations of the abuses of power and many violations of human bodies and spirits we face around us everyday. What would he say today?  Hakuin is an outstanding writer, painter, and calligrapher. More than anything, however, he is a religious man who is one of the great champions of social justice in the Japanese Zen tradition. Demanding new responses with the passing of time, Hakuin's burning passion is not limited only to his own era. The rich legacy of Hakuin's works now speaks to us powerfully, eloquently, and directly.

Karl McDaniel, McGill University. “Burton and Bultmann: Historical Constructs and the Myth of History.”

The understanding of myth as obsolete for the scientific generation was one of the most significant thrusts of Rudolf Bultmann's demythologizing of the New Testament. Myth and modernity, according to Bultmann cannot coexist, for one is rational, whereas the other is not. This dichotomy, however, has not led to the rejection of myth. The works of Tim Burton, Big Fish being the prime example in film, indicate that pop culture enjoys myth and is attracted by tales of grandeur far removed from scientific explanation. Religious studies can embrace films of this nature in order to show the function of myth in culture and history. Mythic theory, historical criticism and the scientific mind all feature prevalently in Big Fish, presenting the audience with more open approach to history.

Bridget McGregor, McGill University. “The Play of Beings, the Play of Selves: Tamil Rituals of Pey and Deity Possession.”

In the context of Tamil possession, the ‘self’ is not a stable entity, but is permeable to a range of beings which use the body as a site of interaction. Richard Schechner’s work understands ritual as ‘play,’ or the constant interplay of roles, motivations, and responses in ritual. ‘Play’ provides a strategy to investigate the ambiguities, tensions and contradictions within ritual and examine people’s dynamic responses to lived reality. In viewing ritual as play, there is a stress on unpredictability, multiplicity, and fluidity of all components of the practice, so that contradictions within the ritual are not viewed as a ‘degeneration’ of a scripted reality, but rather a manifestation of ritual’s characteristic variability. This paper explores pey and deity possession in the Tamil context through the notion of ritual as ‘play’ to highlight the fluidity of identity between possessor and possessed, and the roles traditionally assigned to these beings.

Mark McGuire, Cornell University. “Strategies of Narrativizing Sacred Space, Religious Experience and Hope in a Japanese Mountain Ascetic Tradition.”

Tateishi Kosho, an independent ascetic in southwestern Japan, has made protection of the natural environment his top priority. By guiding pilgrims to sacred waterfalls that had been the dumping grounds for junked cars and mist-enshrouded ravines once filled with thousands of tatami mats, Tateishi creates new founding myths featuring Osaka gangsters, dumping operations carried out under cover of night, and the heroic triumphs of local people to reclaim and purify the land. Local deities make their appearance in these narratives, too, but their assistance never overshadows the farmer or school lunch lady. Kôshô-san’s eco-pilgrimages combine ascetic trials and environmental education, and provide a space for self-reflection and healing. They also offer participants the opportunity to insert themselves into the narrative by joining the on-going environmental struggle. He helps participants situate their efforts to restore the natural environment against the backdrop of Kumano’s mythic landscape, thereby placing university students, farmers and lunch ladies within a broader narrative frame shared by revered supernatural deities. Over time, participants develop their own versions of Tateishi’s narratives and disseminate them among each class of newcomers. Often the stories involve “rare” sightings of wild animals. For urban guests, breathable air and clear night skies filled with glimmering stars constitutes a religious experience. Tateishi’s efforts can be seen as a creative strategy to narrativize sacred space, religious experience and hope.

Ally Mead, Cornell University. “Devilish Deities: Sex, Violence, and Religion in Indian Cinema.”

The scene is dark with only the sounds of rippling flames and distance cries of anguish until a blood red wedding sari tumbles through the darkness. Screams erupt into a cacophony as the fabric begins to burn in the open flames. This scene opens Lajja, a film focusing on the lives of Indian women in anguished positions, living silently in very dark places. Many previous works have explored the role of women in popular media, and in particular how media tend to propagate the notion of women as responsible for the sexual purity of their bodies, a purity which must be protected at any cost. This paper will explore the role of religion to this connection between sexuality and violence as shown in popular Indian cinema to discern the prevalence of women portrayed as active agents in their sexuality or their role as pawns to be traded and abused by society.

Christopher M. Moreman, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “Apocalypse of the Living Dead: Hollywood Zombies and the Resurrection.”

The concept of a final resurrection is central to all of the Western monotheisms, despite the fact that discussions of death and what lies beyond have been increasingly discouraged in our secular age. Ethics has long gone hand-in-hand with eschatology. The foundational myth of resurrection lurks in the background of society while still being denied by the cultural mainstream. Religion was once the beacon guiding one through a storm of moral dilemmas, and in the realm of post-modernism there is no room for black-and-white ethics. Hollywood reflects this trend in many ways, though zombie movies seem to provide a particularly poignant example. The rotting, reanimated corpses of flesh eating zombies become a symbol for the confusions of post-modernism and a reversal of the normal way of being. I will examine the modern zombie movie as the portrayal of a perverted apocalypse. Western religion posits a resurrection of the dead under the guidance of one God who judges each individual. Hollywood depicts the rising of the dead without any guidance, meting out damnation to all people regardless of their deeds.

Paul Morris, Syracuse University. “Staring into the Sun/Gruesome Night: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy.”

By reading Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy through the lense of his image of staring into the sun, or staring into the darkest depths of night, (and the disorienting effects of either of these opposed gazes) I explore how this text contributed to an ongoing debate about the ills of modernity. Through an analysis of the opposition in Greek tragedy between the "Dionysiac lyric of the chorus" and the "Apolline dream-world of the stage," Nietzsche called into question the assumption that ancient Greece was an ideal harmonious society by which to measure modern society. Instead he argued that Greek art, religion, and philosophy were beautiful illusions that arose from, and obscured, a profound and disturbing pessimism at the heart of Greek culture. I attempt to show how his argument draws on and illustrates his relationship to the Enlightenment, German Romanticism, and Schopenhaurian pessimism.

Camilla Mryglod, McMaster University. “On Kierkegaard, O’Connor and the Paradox of Aboriginality.”

In this paper I will consider some key passages from Søren Kierkegaard’s text Fear and Trembling, and then trace some of the patterns they render visible in Flannery O’Connor’s novel The Violent Bear It Away. O’Connor’s main character Tarwater will be considered not in terms of the double movement of the knight of faith (relinquishment and restoration), but rather in terms of the “one born aboriginally in the paradox” (i.e., existing outside of the universal/the ethical from birth or history). In this respect, Tarwater’s double movement is rendered more clearly as one of refusal and reconciliation than that of relinquishment and restoration. While the paths of the knight of faith and the “one born aboriginally in the paradox” converge once they are working through the paradox, these two paths towards the absolute make visible different aspects of the relation of the singular one to the absolute.

Max A. Myers, St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. “Not Dark Yet: Dylan’s Dialectic.”

Recently, several scholarly books have been published which offer a close reading of the lyrics and music of Bob Dylan, studies such as Christopher Ricks' Dylan's Visions of Sin. I want to use those works to illuminate Dylan's spontaneous strategy of adopting the American folk tradition and the Bible as a way to gain distance from contemporary American culture. My thesis is that Dylan, much like T. S. Eliot, creatively extends that tradition in a dialectic which is critical of the culture in the name of an unrealized and unrealizable totality, the force of which Dylan claims possesses him from time to time but which he does not possess. I follow Dylan in this project by examining several songs from particular cultural moments as they synthesize that American folk tradition and the Bible to offer new ways of commenting on a constantly changing social reality.

Eric Sean Nelson, University of Toledo. “Religion, Ritual and Ethical Responsiveness in Levinas and Mencius.”

Mencius's ethics concerns the cultivation of moral virtue as a comportment of ritual propriety applied with appropriateness in one's practices, which consequently become opportunities for the moral performance of ritual. Bracketing their mythical background and religious import, Mencius justified rituals through the moral disposition disclosed and impetus given to moral cultivation. The sacred, bracketed as mythical or transcendent, proves to be the ethical centered in everyday life. Comparing Mencius's interpretation of ethics, religion and ritual to Levinas's Talmudic writings, I propose that both conceptualize ritual and the religious ethically. Mencius articulated ritual appropriateness as the cultivation of an immanent spontaneity inherently responsive to the other. Arguing likewise for a sensuous and prereflective ethical spontaneity, Levinas interprets Judaic religious rituals as staging the other's transcendence within the simplicity of the everyday. Despite important differences, their strategies suggest a post-mythical approach to the religious by revealing its other-oriented ethical character.

James O’Regan, St. Paul University. “Taxonomy of Liturgy and Theatre: Structural Similitude.”

I propose that theatre and liturgy are identical at the level of event and that their difference is a matter of content.  I propose to detail the taxonomies of both theatre and liturgy from the point of view of event. I propose to group these complex taxonomic details into basic event categories. The result will clearly demonstrate the identity of both events.  I propose to enter as evidence examples of theatrical and liturgical analysis that bear a striking resemblance. I will also introduce as evidence two of my own articles, detailing how each was produced, one based upon the other. I will also
argue for congruency of data and analysis as argument for phenomenological identity.  The outcome of this taxonomic identity will be a clear path for cross disciplinary analysis. Ritual and liturgical studies will benefit from a robust
theatrical analysis of event, easily adapted to ritual/liturgical analysis.

Leslie C. Orr, Concordia University and Katherine K. Young, McGill University. “Praising, Performing, Recounting: The Evolution of Tamil Devotional Literature as Canon and Liturgy.”

The Tamil poems composed in the seventh to ninth century in praise of Siva and Visnu have come to have a central place in South Indian ritual and theology. The later hagiographical literature -- of both the Saivas and the Srivaisnavas -- tells of the miraculous recovery of a “lost” tradition and its organization into a fixed canon, and provides charters for the institutionalization of hymn-singing and the worship of the poet-saints in the temples of the Tamil country. But according to the temple inscriptions, such hymn-singing and worship were already well-established in the period when the “canonizers” were presumably doing their work (the tenth and eleventh centuries). In this paper, we shall examine the ways in which the epigraphical evidence illuminates the on-the-ground processes of canonization and institutionalization and how the hagiographical accounts -- in their variants across sectarian and chronological boundaries -- reveal shifts in the later traditions' relationships to the two bodies of devotional literature (Tevaram/Tirumurai and Nalayira Tivviyap-Pirapantam) and differences and changes in the social and ritual contexts for their transmission and performance.

Michael Ostling, University of Toronto. “Stealing the Sacred: The Eucharist in Polish Witch-Trials.”

Post-Tridentine Catholicism – in Poland as elsewhere – put the Eucharist at the centre of theology and liturgy. Reforming bishops and theologians emphasized the host’s wonder-working power as “the most perfect medicine,” in contrast to Protestants who had no such medicine available. Ordinary Catholics who took the bishops at their word went to great lengths to steal the Eucharist for use in healing and love magic; many of those caught were tried as witches. This paper examines the layered mis-understandings, mis-communications and intersections between official and popular Catholicism, through the close reading of a trial for host-stealing and magic in 17th-century Lublin. What the church saw as diabolical defilement of the most sacred of objects, peasants understood as the concrete application of church doctrine.

Susan J. Palmer, Concordia University, and Paul Greenhouse, Independent Documentary Filmmaker. “The Nuwaubian Controversy: Racialist Religion and Law Enforcement.”

This paper presents an analysis of the escalating conflict between a Black nationalist movement based on esoteric spirituality and secular authorities. The Nuwaubians are a Brooklyn-based NRM, whose founder, Dr. Malachi York established an Egyptian-style theme park in Georgia called Tama Re. In May 2002 Tama Re was raided by the FBI and York was arrested and charged with child molestation and is currently appealing a 135-year sentence. This paper explores the conflicting perspectives/interactions of this Black millenarian spiritual community and the network of interest groups in the surrounding society who united in opposition to the perceived Nuwaubian threat, and analyses the conflict within the framework of deviance amplification theory. The research data includes interviews with Nuwaubians, the local Sheriff, journalists and a career apostate, and participant observation at Tama Re and the Brooklyn mosque.

Aaron Ricker Parks, Independent Scholar. “Johannine Synopticism: ‘The Woman at the Well.’”

John’s Gospel is rightly differentiated from the cut-and-paste consanguinity of the Synoptics. It is nevertheless a highly “synoptic” work, in its use of allusive symbolic syntheses. This is often recognized in its famous prologue, where the Hebrew God who creates with a word is related to the Greek Logos, and then (possibly via the Hebrew Hokmah) to the primordial Christ, but it is ignored in other passages of equal allusive power, such as the “woman at the well” pericope of chapter four. By extending Robert Alter’s analysis of betrothal/well scenes in biblical literature to include the larger alien/woman/well nexus of the Hebrew Bible, and to include deutero-canonical, non-canonical, and New Testament witnesses, my paper places John 4 within a complex but identifiable symbolic continuum, where I believe it makes the most sense.

Sara Parks, McGill University. “Biblical Interpretation in 1 and 2 Maccabees.”

Recent shifts in paradigms surrounding Second-Temple Judaisms, and a methodological re-working of our approaches to “canon” in the Second Temple Period have created a burgeoning research area. Texts (like the apocrypha/pseudepigrapha) once dismissed as peripheral are being re-examined with greater respect. Themes once oversimplified and harmonized (such as messianism) are being re-examined in an attempt to let evidence speak for itself. This paper, following Martin and Sanders’ recent The Canon Debate, will discuss newly-honed methodologies for dealing with the anachronistic concepts “canonical” and “non-canonical” in Second Temple Literature. It will exemplify these methods on the apocryphal works 1 and 2 Maccabees, arguing that the authors were doing more than using an existing scriptural tradition to prop up their views, but were (in their self-understanding) adding to that scriptural tradition – a possibility not previously allowed them due to scholarly misunderstanding of how “closed” the canon was in their time.

Dorina Miller Parmenter, Syracuse University. “The Bible as Icon: The Myths of Heavenly Scriptures.”

Common to “Religions of the Book,” as well as to other religious traditions from the ancient Near East, is the idea of heavenly books that are made accessible to humans. This paper will explore the impact of the myths of transcendent texts on how the Christian Bible has been and is used. Parallels will be drawn between the image of the Bible and religious icons, which obtain their power because of their reference to a divine prototype. The paper will conclude with what it means that the Bible might function as a religious icon.

Aimee Patterson, McGill University. “Were They Really Tree Huggers? The Status of Nature in Israelite Law Codes.”

The relationship between the people of Israel and nature is clarified through an exploration of Israelite laws concerning the treatment of animals and the environment. An examination of primary texts and secondary Jewish and Christian scholarship reveals that Israel’s law codes indicate attitudes of both deep and shallow ecology. A prime example is Deuteronomy 20:19-20. In the text, the injunction not to destroy fruit bearing trees is defended both on the grounds of the intrinsic value of the trees, and on the grounds of the nourishment their fruit provides to the people. The implications of this tension within ancient Israel’s ecological view are considered. While ancient Israel cannot be regarded as a community concerned primarily with preserving nature for its own sake, the repeated declaration that “the earth is Yahweh’s” may signify an implicit command to respect nature for its value in relation to God.

Ann Pearson, Independent Scholar. “The Ambiguous and Contradictory Use of Fish Symbolism in Medieval Art.”

The conflation of fish with human forms symbolically incorporates the generative and creative powers of water. Merfolk appear as gods or goddesses in various myths and legends, some dating back to ancient times.  By the medieval period in Western Culture, divine allusions have disappeared from the interpretation of depictions of single or double-tailed
mermaids to be replaced with the Christian use of this imagery as the symbol of luxuria. A few mermen suffer the same fate but the negative imagery concentrates on the use of the female form. A more abstracted form of fish symbolism, the vesica piscis, retains more positive affiliations with the divine. This ovoid shape, which surrounds carvings and paintings of
Christ, Mary or various saints, allegedly indicated "heavenly space."   This presentation will demonstrate that aspects of the sacred persist in the iconography of the portrayal of the double-tailed mermaid and that the connotations around the use of the vesica piscis shape ambiguously incorporate referents to the womb of the goddess.

Timothy G. Pearson, McGill University. “The Jesuit, the Mystic and the Martyr: Sacred History and the Life of Catherine de Saint Augustin.”

La vie de la Mère Catherine de Saint Agustin (1671), by Paul Ragueneau, s.j. is the first full hagiography written about a holy figure of New France. I argue in this paper that, as such, it goes far beyond merely describing for edification the holy life of this nursing sister of the Hôtel Dieu de Québec, but rather it seeks to situate Catherine, the Jesuits and the Church of New France into the wider Universal Church, at the same time that it builds a mythology and an identity for the local Church. My paper focuses on two particular episodes in the Life; the first is a tour of the dedication of a church in Quebec in 1666 provided by the martyred Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf; the second depicts Brébeuf and Saint Polycarp as Catherine’s mystical spiritual advisors. The first episode, I argue, situates the Church in New France within the wider history of Catholicism as a Church favoured by God. The second episode builds bridges between the apostolic church of St. Polycarp, the Jesuit missions in New France and the French colony as represented by Catherine. As a result, a new mythology is created in text that contributes to the sacred identity of the local Church and situates it in the evolving history of Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

Kusumita P. Pedersen, St. Francis College. “Myth and Theology in Tolkein’s Legendarium.”

This paper evaluates the claim that J.R.R.Tolkien is a Christian author in the sense that his works primarily convey specifically Christian themes and doctrines. The paper examines Tolkien’s ideas on myth and “subcreation” to assess the assumption that works of imagination may be theology by other means. It discusses Tolkien’s use of “applicability,” suggestion, indirection and what I call “resonance” to indicate religious content in his works of fiction as Tolkien removed most clear references to religion from The Lord of the Rings, but works that provide its narrative context, The Silmarillion and others, deal with religious matters explicitly. The paper summarizes their religious content: ideas of God, the gods or “angels,” the structure of revelation, eschatology and practice. I conclude that while a clear relation to Christianity exists, there is much that is not particularistically Christian. This casts light on Tolkien’s universalism and thus on his wide popular appeal.

David Perley, University of Toronto. “Meaning, Use, and the Process of Articulation in Religious Language: William James's Contribution to Frankenberry's Holistic and Linguistic Turn in the Study of Religion.”

Neo-pragmatic theorists emphasize a holistic-linguistic turn in the study of religion by focussing on literal meaning and the effects of language use. In light of this trend I propose that combining it with a look at the work of the pragmatist William James augments current discussions in two distinct ways: (1) rather than merely being a component of Richard Rorty 's philosophical project, there is a need for and benefit in seeing how James directly engages similar topics within his own context; (2) James goes beyond the current framework and addresses the creative activity involved in the process of articulation, whereas current theorists proceed with a picture of religious language as a finished product waiting to be analyzed and explained. While thinkers like Rorty recognize the ability of language to effect social change, James helps to draw attention to the creative activities of religious writing and expression.

Daniel Peterson, Brigham Young University. “A Prophet Emerging: Fetal Narratives in Islamic Literature.”

The standard biography of the Prophet Muhammad, by the eighth century scholar Ibn Ishaq, and the great Chronicle of al-Tabari (d. early tenth century), preserve several accounts of the remarkable phenomena associated with the Prophet even before his birth. ‘Abd Allah, the father of Muhammad, is said to have had a “blaze” on his forehead (like the blaze of a horse) prior to the conception of the Prophet. (It departed when Muhammad had been conceived.) A divine voice came to Amina, Muhammad’s mother, during her pregnancy, informing her of the exalted status of the baby in her womb and advising her how to treat him when he was born. At one point, she is said to have seen a light emerge from her own body that illuminated the castles of Busra, in far-off Syria.  I will examine these and similar stories to determine their purpose in the growing hagiography of Muhammad, what they say about early Muslim attitudes toward Muhammad’s pre-birth life (and to what degree those attitudes extend to others besides the Prophet), and what might be deduced from them about the status of Amina (and other mothers) in Islamic thinking.

Christine Poirier, McGill University. « Raconter la Shoah: Une rupture narrative à surmonter. »

Les historiens d’aujourd’hui s’accordent sur les points suivants: la représentation d’un événement historique passe par sa mise en récit et l’événement reconstruit diffère de celui qui s’est réellement produit. Le prisme déformant de la narration permet la compréhension de l’événement, qui s’inscrit dans une suite qui paraît logique; la narration le rend intelligible, conforme à un schéma connu du lecteur. Cependant, depuis la Shoah, les possibilités de la narration sont mises en question. De nombreux critiques affirment que la Shoah est indescriptible, indicible ou irreprésentable. Qui plus est, certains, comme Dan Diner, affirment que l’événement a causé une rupture de la narrativité. Je me propose ici d’examiner les raisons pour lesquelles le schéma narratif de Claude Brémond, avec son événement déclencheur, son déroulement et sa fin; et le schéma actantiel de Greimas, avec ses héros, opposants et adjuvants, ne conviennent plus. Par quels procédés narratifs les historiens racontent-ils la Shoah?

Maben W. Poirier, Concordia University. “Voegelin on Revelation qua Revelation.”

In a paper published in The Thomist in April 2004, I argued that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, which is too modern, forced him to view revelation qua revelation as unavoidably immanentist. What I want to do in this paper is, first, further explore the implications of Voegelin’s inability to understand revelation qua revelation for his thought, and, second, suggest that revelation qua revelation is so thoroughly un-modern that the problem that is posed by revelation qua revelation is not only a problem for Voegelin, but is the problem for all of us today. Can we speak about revelation qua revelation at all, and, most importantly, can it mean for us what it meant for the ancients, in our thoroughly immanentised world?

Tanisha Ramachandran, Concordia University. “Featuring Kali: Orientalism and Imperialism in Hollywood.”

The Hindu Goddess, Kali is a source of fascination in the Western world. The Western reinvention of the Goddess is not derived from indigenous materials such as the Puranas or Devi Mahatmya, but rather from secondary writings stemming back from early missionary and Orientalist accounts beginning in the early 19th century. In these accounts, Kali was classified as a dark, dangerous, mysterious and a sexualized goddess often closely associated with the infamous Thuggee Cult who were believed by the colonial authorities to be a gang of robbers and murderers associated with Kali. The 20th century saw the production of Hollywood movies based upon these accounts, thereby representing Kali as a dangerous and sexualized being. The purpose of this paper is demonstrate how Hollywood films in the 20th century (1939-1995) have constructed a conflated and stylized representation of the Goddess Kali according to colonial revisionist narratives, that constitute what Edward Said describes as the “Oriental Tale”.

Michelle Rebidoux, McGill University. “Birth of a Story-Teller: The Encountenance of the Icon in the Phenomenonology of Jean-Luc Marion.”

Turning the entire traditional (Kantian-Husserlian) characterization of phenomena and phenomenality on its head, Jean-Luc Marion develops a conception of what he calls the "saturated phenomenon" whose givenness exceeds the categories of the understanding without yet ceasing to appear. Along with this reconception of phenomenality goes a reconception of the subject given to itself by the phenomenon as witness---witness to the givenness of the self of phenomena for whose self-showing it becomes responsible. Such responsibility, however, pre-eminently revealed in the icon of the face, may or may not (as against Levinas) take on an explicitly ethical dimension. What it does do in all cases, however, is give birth to an eternal story-teller, insofar as the icon opens an infinite hermeneutic which, since it determines the subject as witness, does not allow for the story to come to an end. This paper explores the phenomenological possibilities of such a witness.

Claude Rochon, Université de Montréal. « Construire pour survivre, réécrire pour guérir. »

Cette communication, basée sur une entrevue avec une victime d'inceste, analyse l'interaction entre ce traumatisme et sa représentation de Dieu. Dans un premier temps, nous décrivons l'expérience traumatisante et ses effets psychologiques, et nous retraçons le parcours religieux subséquent de la victime. Contrairement à la grande majorité des témoignages recensés dans la littérature sur le sujet, il semble que l'éducation chrétienne de la victime lui ait été salutaire. Nous tentons de comprendre cette singularité au moyen d'une approche narrative basée en partie sur la théorie des rôles de Sunden, et nous tirons quelques conclusions sur l'utilité d'une telle approche pour mieux comprendre l'interaction entre l'éducation chrétienne, la représentation de Dieu et les abus sexuels subis durant l'enfance.

Catherine Rolfsen, Queen’s University. “Ritualized Resistance: Theoretical and Political Possibilities of the Indian Buffalo Sacrifice.”

The buffalo sacrifice to the Indian village goddess is the perfect testing ground for the salience of a theory of ritual, since its ambiguities consistently foil scholarly interpretation. Many contemporary ritual theories marginalise either the real functions, or the expressive nature of the buffalo sacrifice. In search of a more holistic method with which to examine the multifaceted nature of the sacrifice, I draw upon the recent theoretical work of Catherine Bell. Bell’s proposal to examine ritual from the perspective of human agency in relation to socio-political context allows the author to ask a set of new questions regarding the sacrifice. The answers to these questions lead me to propose that the buffalo sacrifices in Indian villages can be seen, in both ritual form and sociopolitical context, as embodiments of ritualised resistance of the local against the threat of the universal.

Janna Rosales, University of Toronto. “A Myth of Progress: Jacques Ellul and The Technological Society.”

Jacques Ellul was a multidisciplinary French scholar and a harsh critic of what he called the “technological society.” The technological society is one that assumes humanity can control its destiny through the widespread application of technological solutions to problems of human living, guided by such tenets as rationality, standardization, and progress. Ellul argues that the notion of progress is the most firmly engrained myth of the technological society and that the power of this myth resides in its material basis. It promised productivity and efficiency, increased human life span, improved hygiene and safety, and made material wealth and abundance available to a wider segment of society. It seems largely to have delivered on these promises. But at what cost? This paper will examine Ellul’s critique of the myth of technological progress and how this relates to humanity’s search for meaning and purpose, an orientation traditionally considered the domain of religion.

Angela C. Rudert, Syracuse University. “Mata Amritanandamayi, A Goddess for the Global Middle Class.”

Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, Mata, Ammachi or Divine Mother, and dubbed by the North American press as “the hugging saint,” is a fifty one year old South Indian woman. In the last two decades, her popularity has soared. She has become one of the most celebrated gurus in India and in the world as well as the leader of one of India’s largest spiritual enterprises. Indeed, most Indians today would recognize her name, if not for the fact that many regard her as a satguru, then for the vast network of charitable institutions administrated by the Mata Amritanandamayi Math. This paper attempts to introduce Amma, her “other-worldly” and her worldly identities, her message, how that message translates into action, and how all of these factors attract a global middle class following. I draw from scholarly sources, popular media, and preliminary fieldwork as well as materials produced by the Math.

Charles J. Sabatino, Daemen College. “Beyond Dichotomous Thinking.”

This paper discusses how Buddhist thinking, especially with its notion of contingent co-arising that affirms the ultimate inter-relatedness of the world, is able to overcome the dichotomy so often occurring in religious thinking that separates the Divine from the realm of the world. It also discusses how the interpretation of one Buddhist thinker, Masao Abe, which refers to God as essentially self-emptying, may open the door even further and reach beyond the dichotomy of Theism-Atheism.

Mirela Saim, McGill University. “‘Recognizing the connexion with the sermon’: The Rhetorical Use of Storytelling in Homiletics.”

During the Nineteenth century the rhetorical function of storytelling has been redefined through a new understanding of the religious short story. Within this framework, the rhetorical study of the exemplum absorbed the efforts of specialists in various fields: medieval culture, anthropology, rabbinical studies, Biblical scholarship, folklore, preaching, philosophy of myth. In my contribution I will examine the comparative redefinition of the exempla in the context of the religious study of the tale, with a particular consideration for Moses Gaster’s work, an author whose studies of both folklore and religious literature reveal a profound understanding of fiction, orality and religious communication. Recognizing “the connexion of the rabbinical tale with the sermon,” Gaster (1856-1839) included collections of aggadot in his systematic examinations, being able to develop a broader and more comprehensive theory of folk-storytelling that takes into account the complex homiletical function of the narrative discourse.

Naoko Sasaki, Syracuse University. “Thinking Difference in Zen Buddhism: The Presence in the Enlightenment of Maura ‘Soshin’ O’Halloran.”

In this paper I will take up the question of postmodern suspicion towards the affirmation or presence of the Zen Buddhist tradition. In his 1993 book, Nots, Mark C. Taylor suspects that the Japanese philosopher, Keiji Nishitani’s “nothingness” might not be so different from the Western metaphysics of presence by pointing out such seemingly ontotheological notions as “ground,” “things as they are in themselves,” and “original self” in his thought. Taylor’s suspicion and own position of nothingness as a perpetual deferral, however, neglects thinking difference between the two kinds of affirmation characteristic of the process of enlightenment seen in the famous formula: “Mountain is Mountain, Mountain is not Mountain, Mountain is Mountain.” I will contend that the nothingness of Zen Buddhism, which comes back to presence or affirmation, does not commit itself to the metaphysics of presence by discussing the enlightenment experience of the American nun, Maura “Soshin” O’Halloran.

Noel A. Salmond, Carleton University. “Julia Butterfly: Environmentalist as Stylite and Ascetic.”

In recent decades the world religions have produced a plethora of writing on ecology and the environment. In the same period, some environmental movements and individual environmentalists have written about the environment in quasi-religious terms. One such individual is Julia Butterfly Hill, a young woman from Arkansas, who spent two years in the late 1990s 180 feet up in a redwood tree in northern California to protest against the destruction of the forest. Her tree-top vigil brings to mind the fifth-century Syrian ascetic, St. Simeon Stylites who lived on top of a column. This paper analyses the religious ideation in Hill’s writings and situates her environmentalism in the context of the charisma generated by the pillar dwelling ascetics.

Donovan Schaefer, Syracuse University. “Zoocentric Ethics: Theoretical Foundations and Strategies in Narrative Ethics.”

In this essay, I hope to lay the foundation for a zoocentric ethics that takes animals—in the broadest categorial sense as including all feeling, sensate beings—as its subjects of ethical behavior. At the same time, I intend to propose a cluster of tools (by no means a limited set) to be used in advancing the cause of zoocentric ethics. In preparing these discursive foundations, I will begin with a morphological analysis of what I see as the structural functioning of all ethical programs, identifying attention to the subjects of ethical behavior as a deficiency in most ethical discourses. To flesh out the content of zoocentric ethics I will then review concepts from a series of contemporary ethical thinkers—Wyschogrod, Caputo, Rorty, Nussbaum, and Caputo—mining them for resources for theorizing this new paradigm as well as for potential strategies—especially narrative ethics—for propagating it.

Kristin Scheible, Bard College. “Relocating the Light of the Dhamma in the Pali Mahavamsa.”

The opening chapter of the Pali Mahavamsa recounts the Buddha’s three visits to the island of Lanka, incorporating it into the biography of the Buddha. All three visits indicate the island’s perceived transformation from an outlying border region inhabited by unworthy agents (yakkhas and nagas) to a focal and latent repository of the dhamma (moral order). In this paper, I will consider transformation of the island of Lanka in this narrative. Steven Collins suggests that the popular translation of “dhammadipa”, a term used for Lanka in the narrative, as “island of dhamma” reflects nationalistic overtones and not the meaning suggested by the narrative itself: the light (dipa) of the dhamma. I will explore the narrative as a dramatized metaphor expressing the “wish” of the island not to be simply incorporated into the Buddhist world, but to become the very center of it, sanctified by the authoritative visits of the Buddha.

Johanna Selles, University of Toronto. “Narrative and Homelessness: Hannah Arendt’s View of History.”

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) believed that modernity was characterized by homelessness and impermanence. By contrast, the process of remembrance in history could provide humans with a form of salvation from eternal death which she equated with being forgotten. History, she argued, remembers those who through word and deed have proved themselves worthy of remembrance. A life devoid of action and speech is not a human life because it is not lived in community with other humans. Speech and action have a revelatory character which emerges when people are together in community. The storyteller or the historian is the one who interprets the significant and memorable aspects of human action. The proper place for the sharing of history is the polis. This paper will examine the concepts of action and speech in Arendt to determine how these contribute to the creation of permanence in human community.

Carolyn Shaffer, Concordia University. “Images of the Other: Depictions of Jews and Christians in the Stories of Jalal al-Din Rumi’s Masnavi.”

While there have been numerous studies of the Islamic view of other faiths, Sufism, the Islamic mystical tradition, has received much less attention in this regard. A rich source of information on the classical Sufi view of the Other is the Masnavi, Jalal al-Din Rumi’s (1207-1273) major poetic work and the masterpiece of Sufi literature. The Masnavi, a multi-stranded didactic work made up of a series of interweaving stories, portrays numerous interactions between Muslims and people of other faiths, especially Jews and Christians. My analysis of these stories reveals that they function on multiple metaphorical levels, evincing three distinct perspectives on non-Muslims. As such, the stories may speak to initiates at various levels of spiritual acumen concurrently. Along with the Masnavi, material from Rumi’s Discourses and the stories of several other medieval Sufi writers are considered.

Kevin Shelton, Université du Québec à Montréal. “Narratives of Singular Individuals: From Hagiographies to Business Biographies.”

Throughout human history we can find stories of those who have left their mark as singularities of merit, achievement, and worth. The terms used to describe these individuals, as well as the stories that recount their singularity, vary extensively from one religion to another, from one time period to another. The terms invoked cover a wide range: enlightened, saintly, bodhisattva, holy, awakened, evolved, etc. The variety of words is not merely a by-product of translation. Even the structured components of the stories differ, though we see their affinities. The West has not failed to generate its own unique stories of individuals of singular merit, achievement and worth. The stories, whether they are of Martha Stewart, Lee A. Ioccoca or Donald Trump to name only a few recent examples, propose to guide us to such ideal states as security, happiness, and freedom. If we wish to move beyond superficial and often biased understandings of these stories, we must address three key issues: the difference between heroes and artists, the pathology of greatness, and the criteria of validity used to interpret such stories.

Jason Shim, Wilfrid Laurier University. “Playing Dead: Memorials in Second Life.”

SecondLife.Com is an online world that was released by Linden Labs in June 2003. While it resembles most traditional online games, it differs in that goals are not defined for the users. SecondLife.Com is an online representation of reality known as a “metaverse.” Recent technological developments in graphics engines and broadband internet have allowed services such as SecondLife.Com to closely mirror and extend real-life interaction. Using ethnographic interviews and textual analyses of forums, I shall investigate practices on SecondLife.Com to examine memorial rituals that are enacted online and the problems that arise when a death cannot be confirmed by the participants. The paper shall also explore notions of sacred space in the SecondLife.Com environment by examining the development of monuments that were erected as a memorial to September 11th as well as user-constructed churches. This analysis will provide an important baseline for further consideration of memorials in online worlds.

Megan Shore, University of Leeds. “Truth-Telling and the Role of Christian Discourse in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).”

The primary objective of any truth commission is to establish an accurate record of a country’s past as it transitions from an oppressive political regime to a democracy. Consequently, one of the central conceptual matters facing a truth commission is the nature of truth and truth-telling. In the case of South Africa’s TRC, victims of human rights violations were encouraged to recount their experiences in their in own words. Because Christianity played an integral part in South African identity, many victims invoked Christian language and narratives to “tell the truth.” This created a certain tension in the TRC. On the one hand, the TRC, like all truth commissions established on liberal principles of justice, operated with a legal-forensic understanding of truth. On the other hand, Christian symbolic language became an authorized discourse in the human rights violations hearings. This paper examines how Christian discourse fostered individual forgiveness and reconciliation, but failed many victims as they sought political and economic justice.

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, Wellesley College. “Transportation and Transformation in the Hagiography of Narashinha Mehta.”

Spanning a wide variety of spaces – earthly, celestial, and virtual (dreams) – has been a recurrent metaphor in Indic religious narratives since antiquity. The ability to do so is inherently possessed by celestial beings but is acquired by humans usually through intense asceticism that transforms them spiritually. A vernacular narrative about a fifteenth century devotee-poet of Gujarat, Narasinha Mehta, incorporates the metaphor of celestial travel with an interesting shift. The story extols devotion or bhakti rather than asceticism as the transforming spiritual practice. The present paper will examine this story in light of linguist George Lakoff’s observation that metaphors are not simply figures of speech but deeper components of cultures that shape people’s world-view (1989). It will consider how the Narasinha story effectively uses the power of a popular metaphor to uphold a specific religious ideology, providing an example of manipulation of symbols for making contesting claims in Indic religious discourses.

Sherry Angela Smith, McMaster University. “Violence and the Kingdom: A Non-sacrificial Reading of the Gospels in Flannery O’Connor and René Girard.”

This paper examines the Matthean epigraph incorporated as a preface to Flannery O’Connor’s fictional novel The Violent Bear it Away. I begin with an analysis of the Matthew 11:12 in Greek, noting the numerous interpretational problems of this epigraph. Utilizing René Girard’s theories about human violence in mythology, persecution texts and the New Testament Gospels as depicted in The Scapegoat, I then explore how O’Connor understands violence and the kingdom. Concluding that both O’Connor and Girard present a non-sacrificial reading of the Gospels, I briefly illustrate some of the problems with the sacrificial nature of the Roman Catholic sacrament of Eucharist as well as notions about human violence and the kingdom. This paper concludes by highlighting some of the connections to the Gospel of Thomas.
Anais N. Spitzer, Pacifica Graduate Institute. “If There Is Any: Myth and Its Study Within the Network of Religion.”
What is the importance of myth to the study of religion in the current Information Age, in a thoroughly postmodern religious studies discourse? In fact, it seems that giving value to and studying myth, by its most general definition—a narrative—runs the risk of crystallizing and supporting un gran recit and a rigid hegemony of universals that diminishes and devalues difference. However, what this paper proposes is that the study of myth does not betray postmodern concerns, and in fact, that the Information Age’s central metaphor—the network—brings a new understanding to myth within the context of religious studies. Drawing from Derrida’s idea of the unconditionality of the gift—a gift that he always posits hypothetically—this paper poses that myth, if there is any, is the non-structured structure that simultaneously grounds and ungrounds the very network it comprises.

Davesh Soneji, McGill University. “Invoking Archetypes and Re-Presenting Selves: Devadasis and the Uses of Memory in Contemporary South India.”

In 1948, five women – Manikyam, Anusuya, Varahalu, Seshachalam and Maithili – were expelled from the temple of Krsna in the village of Ballipadu in Andhra Pradesh. Today, they live in the town of Duvva, adhering to their traditional patterns of kinship as kalavantulu or devadasi women. Whereas in public culture, devadasis oscillate in and out of sets of historical and moral discourses in which they occupy a highly contested position, in their homes, contemporary devadasis embrace fragments of the past by remembering (and in some cases re-enacting) precisely those aspects of their identity which they can no longer express or display in public. Citing the example of a nineteenth-century javali (Telugu poem) that discusses menstruation, I show that these journeys of memory highlight the disjunctures between past and present, and are the primary modalities through which devadasis are able to re-constitute and represent their identities in contemporary South India.

Jonathan Sozek, McGill University. “The Roman Catholic Mass Today: Historical and Theological Perspectives.”

Liturgical reform topped the list of subjects for discussion at the Second Vatican Council, and the form it took would have a guiding impact on both the Council itself and the subsequent life of the Church. The aim of this paper is three-fold. First, some roots of these reforms are identified,especially in the early-twentieth century Liturgical Movement and Pius XII's 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei. Second, the reforms themselves are examined through consideration of the Council's own document Sacrosanctum Consilium (1962) and Paul VI's promulgation of the Novus Ordo Missae in 1970. Finally, some responses to these reforms and their effects are discussed. Responses have been highly polarized, leading some to break with Rome as others pressure for still more reforms. Is the Church, as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote recently, in ‘ecclesial crisis’ and in need of a ‘new Liturgical Movement’? The paper concludes with a consideration of this question.

Benjamin Stahlberg, Syracuse University. “The Illiberal Religion: Spinoza and Kant on the Heteronomy of the Jews.”

Throughout much of the eighteenth century German scholars devoted considerable energy to trying to understand the Semitic world from which the Hebrew Bible emerged. All too often their attempts were directed toward promoting and securing the image of Judaism as a system of historically specific laws. While veiling their work under a guise of neutral scholarship, these thinkers nonetheless posed a rather flattering narrative of emancipation and enlightenment for themselves. This narrative charted the course of modern thought and culture, which the scholars held to be the beginnings of a mature humanity, showing a slow and painful emergence from a primitive beginning.
This paper examines two figures who, arguably, represent the origin and fruition of this project: Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant. The image of Judaism as a legal anachronism, I argue, plays a larger part in both thinkers’ thought than is generally acknowledged, and we can see that much of their moral and political philosophy takes shape in light of this understanding. This paper illustrates, in the case of Kant in particular, the clear relationship between the school of biblical scholarship inaugurated by Spinoza, its depiction of Judaism, and the notions of autonomy and the moral law.

Eva Steinlauf, McGill University. “‘Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea’ at Dura.”

This paper deals with the analysis of "Exodus and Crossing of the Red Sea", one of the frescoes from the Synagogue at Dura-Europos, an ancient city located on the west bank of the upper Euphrates in Syria (painted ca 244/5 C. E.) Biblical narratives were used by the Jewish community to assert their history. However, for the form they would take quotations from the current artistic practices of their pagan neighbours. Included in the discussion will be scholarly views about the cultural development of Dura as well as the diverse cultures represented in the paintings of the Synagogue, for instance, Greek, Roman, Parthian, Sassanian, Syrian, and Christian, and how these elements are related to Jewish identity. Different cultures are manifested in the frescoes through clothing, dress, architecture and furniture. In particular, this paper will identify ways in which the frescoe "Exodus and the Crossing of the Red Sea" reflects those influences, both foreign and local, while asserting the Jewish community's fundamentally Jewish roots and orientations

Carla Sulzbach, McGill University. “The Sky is the Limit for the Grateful Dead in Daniel.”

This paper will examine Daniel 12:2-3 and try to establish a context for the notion that in the eschatological future, it will be the fate of the “wise” and “righteous” to become part of the luminous heavens and its hosts, the stars. I will look at the correlation between stars as astral beings, as actual angels, how they act as part of the heavenly host both in military and in an idealized sense, and ultimately how all this comes together in the Daniel passage and explore if this may have further implications for the vision chapters of the book. This will be done in light of a) other Second Temple texts, b) post-Second Temple texts, and c) a number of biblical texts.

Carolyn Tate, Texas Tech University. “The Human Seed: Embryos and Fetuses in Olmec Art and Beliefs.”

The Gulf Coast Olmec of ancient Mesoamerica (1400 ­ 400 BC) are well known for their colossal heads of human males wearing helmets. Three such heads, rested on the northern end of the central axis of the ceremonial city called La Venta. Recently scholars have identified three eroded sandstone sculptures, about 2.5 m high, as images of human fetuses also wearing helmets. The heads and fetus sculptures form two termini of a series of sculptural sets along the site¹s central axis. The sets of sculptures functioned as stations along a processional route that reenacted the earliest known Mesoamerican creation story. The helmeted fetuses were considered the beings of an earlier era, presaging the current creation of humans. This paper is an initial attempt to reconstruct the ancient story from its sculptural illustration, an in doing so, to explore the crucial roles of the human fetus and embryo in early Mesoamerican myth.

François Thibeault, Université du Québec à Montréal. « Les enjeux actuels de l’étude du bouddhisme en Occident et la tradition Vipassanâ . »

Les études académiques portant sur l’implantation du bouddhisme en Occident sont orientées selon deux axes généraux : historique et sociologique. Donald S. Lopez et Lionel Obadia ont analysé la diffusion du bouddhisme ainsi que les connaissances produites sur le bouddhisme selon l’une et l’autre de ces perspectives, respectivement. À cet égard, le premier auteur s’engage dans une lecture « post-colonialiste » du bouddhisme alors que le second critique les méthodes sociologiques dites « post-modernistes ». Un survol de ces enjeux actuels de l’étude du bouddhisme en Occident sera suivi d’une interprétation de la diffusion de la tradition de méditation Vipassanâ (lignée de S. N. Goenka) au Québec. Des analyses historique et sociologique mettront en évidence les dynamiques proprement religieuses — déniées dans le discours des acteurs concernés — qui opèrent au sein de cette tradition.

Curtis L. Thompson, Thiel College. “Tending to Life’s Nihil.”

This paper seeks to clarify the distinction between an implicit, unintended nihilism of idolatrous commitment that leads to unconscious despair and an explicit, intended nihilism of humorous recontextualizing that leads to hopeful transformation. Disempowering nihilism, suffering from the fallacy of misplaced absolute affirmation, leads to unconscious despair because the endpoint of its commitment is unworthy of ultimate allegiance. Three of its cultural forms are consumerism, moralism, and ecclesiastism. Empowering nihilism recognizes that total presence in the form of an absolute experience of beauty, truth, justice, or love lies beyond human possibility. Drawing on the fullness of the Idea and its possibilities for life, one becomes aware of the limitations "non-being" places on “being.” In tending to life's nihil one acknowledges with a sense of humor the contradictions of existence and is motivated to make incremental changes for the better and to rest content with these finite contributions to the world.

David Alstad Tiessen, Wycliffe College, University of Toronto. “Textuality, Undecidability, and the Story of Jesus: A Critical Reading of John Caputo’s Deconstructive Hermeneutics via Hans Frei’s Theological Hermeneutics.”

Taking John D. Caputo’s "hermeneutics of undecidability" as applied to the Gospel narratives as its starting point, this paper employs Hans Frei’s confessional/communal reading of the story of Jesus as a means of deconstructing Caputo’s hermeneutic of the biblical text. The paper first suggests that Caputo employs methodological supplements which foreclose on the abyss of undecidability over which the text is taken to be written, and substitutes another story for that assumed by the text. This obviates the possibility of the text speaking qua text, and circumscribes the nature and possibility of an encounter with the o/Other through these texts. The paper then posits that Hans Frei’s adherence to the narratival world of the text and the particular identity of the Jesus of the Gospels narrated therein offers, despite appearances, a more consistently "deconstructive" approach to Caputo’s concerns than Caputo is himself able to maintain.

Ivan Timonin, Saint Paul University. “Black Elk’s Sacred Pipe: Whose Story?”

Students of theology and biblical literature are accustomed to texts with author and redactors unknown. Traditional hermeneutic tools have been used to unravel the development of the text. The task may become even more complicated when the ‘narrator’ is well known, as is the translator, not to mention the assembler and redactor of the eventual text: The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown). Black Elk is known as both Lakota holy man (wichasha wakan) and Catholic catechist; his son Benjamin, the translator, somewhat less known was both traditional practitioner and Catholic layman; Brown is well-known as anthropologist, but less known as disciple of Frithjof Schuon’s ‘traditionalism;’ and Schuon is generally unknown in the English-speaking world as Joseph Brown’s editor and supervisor and translator of the French version. So whose story is it?

Aaron Tugendhaft, University of Chicago. “Between the Calf and the Tent: Towards a Biblical Theology of Art.”

This paper is an analysis of the second half of the book of Exodus, that relates the stories of the Golden Calf and the building of the Tabernacle. Through close textual reading and the application of recent phenomenological theory, I consider these two objects of human building. In so doing, I present a foundation for a biblical theology of art that has as its starting point neither 'representation' (or rejection thereof)---as is generally taken to be the central concern of the prohibition of idolatry---nor 'the beautiful/sublime' of Kantian and later aesthetics. Instead, I show how a biblical theology of art is rooted in the more primary problem of ‘making’; that is, in the relation between human making, on the one hand, and divine creation. By skillfully intertwining the twin stories of human making---the calf and the tabernacle---the Exodus text foregrounds this thematic. Furthermore, by presenting one object in a positive light and the other in a negative one, the text forces us to probe deeper into the capacities and pitfalls of the human arts. Ultimately, this discourse is further embedded (textually, as well as conceptually) in a presentation of the Sabbath---the day commemorating God's divine creation and His rest. By understanding human artistic activity in relation to God's activity, it is ultimately possible to understand the distinction between the two works of human hands.

Sherri Vallee, Saint Paul University. “The Journey After Death and the Toll House Myth.”

In the Nicene creed, Christians profess: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” While belief in eternal life is a basic tenet of the Christian faith, there are different ways of conceptualizing that belief. The Bible is unclear on the details, and various understandings have developed and evolved throughout Christian history. This paper focuses on the toll house myth, a story that provides a framework for the journey of the soul after death. This myth reflects a belief commonly held by Eastern Christians (e.g. Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic), and referenced in some Eastern liturgical prayer texts. After describing this myth, its Biblical and Patristic origins, and the polemics that contributed to its entrenchment, this paper will highlight a number of challenges that the toll house myth presents to Western Catholic Christians today.

Archana Venkatesan, St. Lawrence University. “Embodying the Devotee and Entertaining the Goddess: The Araiyar Cevai as Commentary at the Srivilliputtur Antal Temple.”

The ritual service of recitation (Araiyar Cevai) is performed at the conclusion of all three major festivals celebrated at the Antal temple in Srivilliputtur. The Araiyar Cevai is a performative commentary peculiar to the sect of the Tamil Srivaisnavas. In this paper I analyze the muttukkuri (divination with pearls) of the Srivilliputtur Antal temple. Here the Araiyar (reciter) takes on the role of the gypsy fortune-teller to divine the fate of Antal’s love for Visnu. Combining gesture and recitation he liberally interweaves verses from Antal’s poems with those of the other Alvars to articulate the nature of the bhakti heroine of whom Antal is the exemplar. In this paper I apply the traditional Srivaisnava understanding of commentary as anubhava grantha (text of experience) to the muttukkuri araiyar cevai at Srivilliputtur to explore the local theology of Antal in conceptualizing her as both mortal devotee and immortal goddess.

Robert Virdis, McMaster University. “The Humanist Response to Modern Spiritual Crisis: Voegelin, Arendt and the Problems of Immanentization.”

In the late 1940s, Eric Voegelin’s political philosophy shifted from a focus on the history of political ideas to a consideration of experiences and their symbolization. In particular, he became concerned about experiences that result in immanentist symbolic constructions. His investigations in this vein led to his well-known formulation of the gnostic character of modern ideologies in the New Science of Politics. While Voegelin never abandoned this formulation, he later felt that it failed to account for all of the problems of immantization. His revision of the earlier position allowed him to account for several additional aspects of modern spiritual crisis. My paper argues that, while Voegelin’s new orientation developed a more robust consideration of the problems of immanentization, his account remained too limited to consider the possible sources of resistance to be discovered within the tradition of Western Humanism. I suggest that Hannah Arendt’s work regarding the specific character of action acts as an important corrective to this problem in Voegelin’s theory.

Jonathan Von Kodar, Université de Laval. “Legenda Aurea.”

The Legenda aurea, compiled by Iacopo da Varagine, on the surface appears to be a didactic and edifying collection both for the clergy in his Dominican order and for the devout laity. However, I should like to submit the proposition that da Varagine was compelled by the political climate of his time to compile the lives with commentaries. The effects of one story in the Legenda, in particular, Saint Mary Magdalene, underscores the urgency of the political climate. It proved to be a double-edged sword; clerics of both the Great Church and ‘heretical’ churches made use of this legend to help further their respective agenda. To understand the implication of this particular vita, the marginalized group outside the sexual economy, namely widows and virgins will be addressed in the medieval social context; this is important as both ‘heretical’ and orthodox teachings filtered through this group.

Cordell M. Waldron, Syracuse University. “Man and Nature in the Book of Going Forth By Day.”

This paper examines the verbal and visual ritual contained in the Egyptian Book of the Dead as exemplified by the Papyrus of Ani with particular attention paid to the development of Ani’s relationships with the divine and animal inhabitants of the afterlife and his inhabitation of the landscape. Ani’s imagined position in hierarchical relationships is a central focus, with additional investigation of the portrayal of animals and landscape as positive/negative and beneficial/dangerous. The paper explores both the written text of the Papyrus and the illustrative vignettes.

Richard R. Walker, McGill University. “Science and the Myth of Spirituality.”

Recently, a large number of scientific works have appeared which place the origins of religious belief and experience firmly within human biology. Attempting to understand why religious belief persists in an “age of science” these theories suggest that religious experiences are a manifestation of our brain chemistry - arising from a unique set of gene sequences and representing an adaptive trait of human evolution. Unlike earlier scientific reductionism however, these theories do not attempt to explain religious experiences away as some form of willful ignorance but rather take their existence as an undisputable, if misinterpreted, fact. Individual subjective experiences are thus legitimated and it is the institutionalization of these experiences into organized religion which is then rejected. This paper will focus on how these scientific theories participate in broader cultural narratives which legitimate the reality and importance of individual religious experiences through the myth of spirituality.

Holly Wallace, Syracuse University. “Environmental Themes in Middle Earth.”

Many scholars have argued that Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth depicts important themes of environmentalism. One such author, Patrick Curry, has argued in Defending Middle Earth that The Lord of the Rings is basically an environmental manifesto. Contrary to this popular idea, Verlyn Flieger argues that the environmental themes in Middle Earth are much more complex, and can best be summarized in terms of conflict rather than conservation. This paper provides my assessment of Flieger’s argument, and although I ultimately affirm her main idea, I find some of her supporting arguments critically lacking. Hence, the paper closes with my own interpretation of the environmental themes in Middle Earth and a reworking of Flieger’s argument.

Meredith Warren, McGill University. “Towards a Syncretic Approach to Genre in Joseph and Aseneth.”

Joseph and Aseneth has recently been the focus of much scholarly debate. I wish to discuss the topic of genre, as each author seems to classify the work under a different heading. However, just as religions at the time of its writing (regardless of the favoured date) were syncretic in nature, there is no reason to exclude a genre simply because another is present. Thus, I hope to show that the relationship of the many genres visible in Joseph and Aseneth should be examined more closely, in conjuction with other works which embrace multiple genres within a single text.

Jim Watts, Syracuse University. “The Iconography of Ritual Tablets and Scrolls in Antiquity.”

In the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, texts were frequently used to legitimize ritual performances. They could be displayed and read to demonstrate the antiquity of ritual rules and instructions. As a result, certain texts developed iconic status, and ancient! iconography sometimes reflects their ritual use and display. Myths also developed that described the gods regulating affairs on earth and their own behavior by heavenly ritual texts, which therefore became potent symbols of divine powers. This paper surveys the iconographic portrayals of ritual tablets and scrolls, both divine and human, in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greco-Roman and Jewish art in order to describe the distinctive appearances, and disappearances, of iconic texts in these ancient cultures.

Barbara Weiser, Concordia University. “The Book of Ruth, a Different Dimension.”

The "Ruth" windows at Temple Sinai, and Temple Holy Blossom in Toronto interprete a complex drama which starts as a tragedy and ends in happiness. The events which date back 3000 years are compelling, inspiring all who see them to think, enjoy, remember and respond. The story of Ruth is not part of the liturgy in the synagogue service nor is it mentioned in any ceremony, yet two Canadian stained glass artists recount the story through their chosen medium. Two different modern artistic styles will be explored noting the use of media, space, colour and form. The works offer great insight and spiritual truth through the innovative handling of the media. The panels are a triumph of colour, form, and symbolism, offering viewers a new universal vision through creative insight. The patented Wesselow system of layering glass to achieve multiple colours brings the craft to a new level while Yvonne Williams' delicate pastels capture a gentler side of feminine religious spirituality.

Anne Whitcombe, Wilfrid Laurier University. “Motive, Motion, Emotion: Teaching Environmental Caring.”

Bert Horwood, retired professor of education at Queen’s University, is a leading figure in the Outdoor Experiential Education (OEE) movement in Ontario. Spirituality is a central theme in his work; he argues that the only way to teach students to care for the environment is to engage them emotionally and spiritually. Furthermore, he suggests that OEE as a whole places too much emphasis on intellectual understanding and far too little on this spiritual and emotional connection, which has led to the creation of more educated polluters rather than environmentally conscious conservers; he condemns this as the 'failed curriculum.' Horwood suggests a markedly different approach to teaching OEE, centred on spirituality, ritual, and feeling. This paper explores Horwood's ideas about the role and goals of OEE, the 'failed curriculum,' and the importance of involving spiritual elements in teaching. It also offers some critical reflection on Horwood's alternative model of OEE.

Jeremy Wiebe, McGill University. “Modern Religious Imaginaries: Charles Taylor on Pluralism, Religion, and Liberalism.”

Within the social imaginaries of Western modernity, religion continues to have a shifting and much debated place. Liberalism propounds the language of toleration that makes room for plural viewpoints in religion and morality. Religion, however, has often been seen as monistic, intolerant and in conflict with liberal-humanist values. One response to this has been to relegate religion to the personal, private sphere, while keeping political and moral discourse ‘secular,’ or ‘non-religious.’ Charles Taylor concurs with the notion that modern freedom from religion has done Western modernity much good, an example being global advances in human rights. However, he proposes that there is still a place for religion in liberal-modern social imaginaries, and he rejects a secular liberal monism that would deny religion this place. In this paper I will explore Taylor’s framing of these conflicts, his proposals for a way forward, and challenges that remain in Taylor’s modern religious imaginaries.

David Wright, Drew University. “Religion and Human Nature.”

If it no longer seems possible in our post-modern world to speak of any unified ‘human nature,’ the question still lingers in the background of our discourse, scholarly and popular. This paper asks not whether there really is a human nature, but whether or not we can stand to do without one. Very often, an assumed narrative about what it means to be human remains within disciplines, and, indeed, this assumed narrative allows disciplines to function. If such narratives can no longer claim to grasp the total meaning of the lives of individuals, surely they must be granted some space to make claims, however limited, about what is at work wherever human life is concerned. This paper argues that, since the question of human nature cannot simply be done away with, assumed narratives about the human should be brought forward and analyzed in the space of discourse.

Yohan Yoo, Syracuse University. “Religious Persuasion in Ancient Egypt: Rhetoric of the Book of the Dead.”

The rhetoric of the mortuary cult and its texts successfully persuaded the Egyptians to change their Theogony. This paper will pay special attention to the rhetoric of the Book of the Dead, which adopted various rhetorical strategies and skills in order to persuade the audience within the text, the gods. The text intended to persuade the gods that the dead were pure enough to be blessed in the divine realm. Identification of the dead with the divine was the most important means of persuasion. Historical evidence suggests that the text also persuaded the general Egyptian population, the audience outside the text, to change their religious views. In addition, it is noticeable that the Book of the Dead was the text that was used for rituals. The persuasive function of a ritual and that of a text were combined to engender a more convincing effect.

Travis Zadeh, Harvard University. “Mapping the Apocalypse in Medieval Islam: Sallam al-Tarjuman’s Journey to the Wall of Gog and Magog.”

Focusing on one case study, this paper examines how Qur’anic accounts of the apocalypse informed notions of geographical space in Medieval Islam. My point of departure is the story of Sallam al-Tarjuman (the interpreter / translator), who in the 9th century set out to discover the wall of Gog and Magog. The Biblical account of these
‘barbaric bearers of the apocalypse’ entered into the Qur’an through Syriac sources where the story of Gog and Magog was fused with the Alexander myth cycle. In the Islamic tradition it is Alexander the Great who builds a wall somewhere in the remote stretches of the earth against these tribes to save humanity from destruction. By exploring popular attitudes towards the mythical peoples of Gog and Magog, this paper traces how the narrative of SallAm’s journey to the edge of the known world inscribed itself into Arabic and Persian medieval geographical writings.