Yup, and I lived! Our 6th annual Research in Religious Studies Conference is not history, and I think it was a rousing success. This was actually a hellish year, with depressing and exhausting university politics, odd oddities oddly occurring throughout the year, a teaching schedule that always the the wrong thing happening at the wrong time, and my first year as Dept. Chair. In the end, though, the meeting came together rather well.

Matthew and Bev did a lot of work, and without them I would be a blubbering blob of beer soaked protoplasm. Well, a bigger one.

There were no real emergencies that came up during the meeting, and I think the quality of the papers was at least as high as previous year. With the inevitable cancellations, there were 44 papers or so delivered.

Rather sadly, there were very few biblical studies papers. Since I’m a biblical kind of guy, I suppose it is my fault, but I was not teaching any biblical courses this year. As far as Hebrew Bible specifically, we only got one paper, but it was an interesting one: on Obadiah and Edom from Tobias Blake who is at Notre Dame.

I also particularly enjoyed the papers on theodicy and post-Shoah thought.

Anyway, I’m proud as punch of all of my students who presented, and rather  impressed that this conference has grown so well!

The Religious Studies Department of the University of Lethbridge presents
The 6th Annual
RESEARCH IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES CONFERENCE
Saturday, May 3 – Sunday, May 4, 2008
6th Floor – D Section – University Hall

Saturday, May 3
8:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast & Registration Room D 635

_______________________________________________________________________________
8:45 – 9:00 Opening Remarks: Prof. James Linville (Chair, Religious Studies) Room D 634
_______________________________________________________________________________

SESSION 1 THE BODY RITUAL AND THE BODY POLITICAL Room D 634
Matthew Salmon, University of Lethbridge, presiding

9:00 – 9:30 Constructing Gender Subjectivity: Rites of Initiation and the Performance of Gender
John Siddons, University of Calgary

9:30 – 10:00 This IS My Body: The Transgressive Bodies of the Eucharist
Jenna Belding, University of Saskatchewan

10:00 – 10:30 Masculinity & Non-Material Grievances: Linkages to the Rise of Religiously Motivated Violence in Islam
Erika Jahn, University of Lethbridge
_______________________________________________________________________________
10:30 – 10:45 Refreshments Room D 635
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 2A Early Christianity Room D 630
Tobias Blake, University of Notre Dame, presiding

10:45 – 11:15 4 Maccabees and Origen: An Examination of Second Century Cosmologies
Michael S. Domeracki, University of Notre Dame

11:15 – 11:45 True Witness and Martyrs as Truth-Bearers
Greg Thiessen, Regent College

11:45 – 12:15 The Virgin Mary’s Assumption: The Latin Narrative of Pseudo-Melito
Ross Benson, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 2B Christian Theology Room D 631
Matthew Salmon, University of Lethbridge, presiding

10:45 – 11:15 A Way between Totality and Ambiguity: Søren Kierkegaard and Richard Kearney on How to Speak about God
Nathan Bonney, Prairie Bible College

11:15 – 11:45 The Power of the Pulpit: God’s Grace or Man’s Might?
Tyler Remington Harkness, Prairie Bible College

11:45 – 12:15 Heideggerian Influence in Rudolf Bultmann’s Theory of Understanding
Darryl Ferguson, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 2C Methodology I Room D 632
Erika Jahn, University of Lethbridge, presiding

10:45 – 11:15 The Role of Music in Sufi Practice and Theology in the West
Rhea McCarroll, University of Calgary

11:15 – 11:45 The Sage, The General, and The Modern Leader
Milagros Richardson, University of Calgary

11:45 – 12:15 Social Network Analysis and the Study of Religion
Ryan Williams, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
12:15 – 1:00 Lunch (registrants only) Room D 635
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SESSION 3A HINDUISM I Room D 630.
Leya Russell, University of Calgary, presiding

1:00 – 1:30 Divided Flames: The Difficulties of Discussing Sati in Western Academia
Kendra Marks, University of Calgary

1:30 – 2:00 The Role and Functioning of Love within the Hindu Tradition
Campbell Peat, University of Lethbridge

2:00 – 2:30 The allure of colour: Sita’s trial by fire
Ashleigh Delaye, Concordia University
______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 3B CHRISTIANITY, SOCIETY AND SCIENCE Room D 631
Julie Chamberlain, Duke University, presiding

1:00 – 1:30 The Extent of the Protestant and Counter Reformation’s Impact on Health and Social Welfare in Early Modern Europe
Kenny Wee, University of Calgary

1:30 – 2:00 Reason’s Second Son: Intersections between Religion and Science during the scientific revolution
Jonathan Reimer, Regent College

2:00 – 2:30 The First Generation since Genesis: The Re-Figuring of American Civil Religion in Clerical Responses to the Nuclear Crisis
Christopher Friedman, Vanderbilt Divinity School
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 3C READING BIBLICAL TEXTS Room D 632
Michael S. Domeracki, University of Notre Dame, presiding

1:00 – 1:30 Edom and Judahite memory in the vision of Obadiah
Tobias Blake, University of Notre Dame

1:30 – 2:00 Future Primitive: Anti-Civilizational Trends in the Biblical Narrative
Joel Laforest, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
2:30 – 2:45 Refreshments Room D 635
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 4A COMBINED SESSION: ECOLOGY AND EQUALITY Room D 630
Matthew Salmon, University of Lethbirdge, presiding

2:45 – 3:15 Honouring the Earth: The environmentalist movements influence on contemporary Wicca’s cosmology
Sheena A. Mac Isaac, University of Calgary

3:15 – 3:45 Evangelicalism and the Environmental Crisis
Megan Lacerte, University of Lethbridge

5 MINUTE BREAK

3:50 – 4:20 Quietly Destructive: Old and New Antisemitism in Canada
Amie Piche-Schaufele, University of Lethbridge

4:20 – 4:50 Reformation through Revelation: The relationship between the Latter Day Saints Melchizedek priesthood, the civil right movement, and the 1978 revelation
Lindsey Skakum, University of Lethbridge
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 4B CHRISTIANITY: STRUGGLING FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS OF AMERICA Room D 631
Christopher Friedman, Vanderbilt Divinity School, presiding

2:45 – 3:15 A Worldwide Challenge: Campus Crusade for Christ and Ethnicity
Julie Chamberlain, Duke University

3:15 – 3:45 Statistical Analysis of the Megachurch
Dan Wimmer, University of Calgary
5 MINUTE BREAK

3:50 – 4:20 “I AM YOUR FLAG!”: The American flag as the Living Embodiment of American Patriotism and Totemic Religiosity Within Crystal Cathedral Ministries
Tyson Will, University of Lethbridge

4:20 – 4:50 Born (Again) in the USA
Kyle Penn, University of Lethbridge
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 4C COMBINED SESSION: METHODOLOGY 2 / HINDUISM 2 Room D 632
Rhea McCarroll, University of Calgary, presiding

2:45 – 3:15 Fighting On Holy Ground: Mapping New Territory between International Relations & Religious Studies
Erika Jahn, University of Lethbridge

3:15 – 3:45 Naturalism with a Human Face: a pragmatic contribution to the insider/outsider question in Religious Studies
Graham Baker, University of Calgary

5 MINUTE BREAK

3:50 – 4:20 Iconography and Interpretation: Sectarian Depictions of Kali
Nicole Hembroff, University of Lethbridge

4:20 – 4:50 Krishna’s Immanence and Transcendence
John Siddons, University of Calgary

_______________________________________________________________________________
BANQUET: 6:30 p.m. Lethbridge Lodge Hotel (Cedar Ballroom)
Dr. James Mullens
Department of Religious Studies & Anthropology University of Saskatchewan
“If you see the Buddha Coming, grant him a degree”: Reflections on a Path without limit

Sunday, May 4
8:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast Room D 635
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 5A Theodicy & the Holocaust Room D 630
Darryl Ferguson, University of Calgary, presiding

8:30 – 9:00 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil: Writings on Suffering
Illana Huckell, University of Calgary

9:00 – 9:30 Addressing Evil and Suffering: The Balance of Theodicy and Anti-theodicy
Katherine Hundt, University of Calgary

9:30 – 10:00 Connecting Altizer and Rubenstein within the Death of God Movement
Kyle Nunweiler, University of Calgary

10:00 – 10:30 Fackenheim and Berkovits: Theological Responses to the Shoah
Matthew Van Dyk, University of Lethbridge
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 5B CANADIAN RELIGIOSITY Room D 631
Leya Russell, University of Calgary, presiding

8:30 – 9:00 The Evolution of the Evangelical Free Church of Canada
Stuart Barnard, University of Lethbridge

9:00 – 9:30 Changing Religious Participation in Canada
Kristen Desjarlais, University of Lethbridge

9:30 – 10:00 Studiousness and Godliness: A Foray into the Religious Lives of Students
Natasha Fairweather, University of Lethbridge

10:00 – 10:30 The “New” Metaphysical Secularization
Bonnie Shedden, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
SESSION 5B BUDDHISM Room D 632
Nicole Hembroff, University of Lethbridge, presiding

9:00 – 9:30 Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in Southern Alberta
Thera Body, University of Lethbridge

9:30 – 10:00 What has Zen to do with meditatio?
Johann Roduit, Regent College, Vancouver, BC

10:00 – 10:30 While She was Sleeping: The Conception and Birth of Rahula
Anna Samuelson, University of Calgary
_______________________________________________________________________________
10:35 – 10:50 Refreshments Room D 635
_______________________________________________________________________________

SESSION 6 EAST ASIAN EXPRESSIONS Room D 634
Rhea McCarroll, University of Calgary, presiding

10:50 – 11:20 Symbiotic Manifestation: the coexistence of transcendence and immanence within the Japanese cultural sphere
Kira Petersson-Martin, Brandon University

11:20 – 11:50 Expressing the Inexpressible: Zen Painting as a Means of Depicting Enlightenment
Bob Marthiensen, University of Lethbridge

11:50 – 12:20 The Media of Expression in Zen and Daoism
Colin Hirano, University of Lethbridge

12:20 Closing Remarks – James Linville (Chair, Religious Studies)

The members of the Conference Committee and faculty and students of the Dept. of Religious Studies would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Anne Moore and the generous students of the University of Calgary who attended the 2007 conference and chose to help sponsor this year’s conference.
To Register and reserve a banquet ticket, go to http://www.uleth.ca/fas/relg/
All fees are payable on site.

Research in Religious Studies Conference Committee

Faculty Member: James Linville james.linville@uleth.ca
Student Member: Matthew Salmon matthew.salmon@uleth.ca
Administration Assistant: Bev Garnett bev.garnett@uleth.ca Dept. Phone: (403) 380-1894

The mantic and mythic imagination in the Book of the Twelve

I’ve got my paper accepted to the Society of Biblical Literature’s national meeting in Boston in November! Yippee! Its been ages since I went, and I really enjoyed Boston last time. Here is the abstract for my paper. It will be in one of the two the Book of the Twelve prophets (i.e., “minor prophets”) sections.

The mantic and mythic imagination in the Book of the Twelve.

James Linville (University of Lethbridge)

According to a number of scholars the scribes who produced the prophetic corpus understood themselves as embarking on a quasi-prophetic or mantic quest for divine knowledge. This paper builds on these insights and combines them with a perception of the prophetic corpus as a part of a larger national mythology granting reason and meaning to the past. Moreover, it views the Twelve as a complex symbolic universe in which the historically contingent is revealed as instantiating eternal and paradigmatic truths. This discovery of the timeless within history is what bridges the gap between the eponymous prophet and the scribe, and makes the prophetic text eternally relevant and revelatory for the initiated interpreter.

By looking at Hosea, Zechariah, and Malachi in relative detail, I demonstrate how the Twelve opens and closes on depictions of heavenly and earthly relationship as a relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. This is expressed in the marriage imagery as well as other features. Moreover, the obvious cultic interests of these books suggest a textual, symbolic ritual of transformation and purification embodied in the idea of the “Day of the Lord”, rendering the experience of the writer and even the reader with this symbolic universe not so much as a voyeuristic encounter with the divine, but an active participant in the revelation of it.

Viewing the Book of the Twelve in this way provides a plausible scenario for explaining the desire to produce a tightly interrelated anthology of prophetic documents. Moreover, it can impact how scholars view ancient Judaism’s return to older mythological themes of cosmology, heavenly rebellion and combat, themes that are expressed in a number of apocalyptic texts of the late second temple period.

A Workshop

I posted this on my “other” (militant atheist) blog, but I sort of meant it more for here. So here it is.

I will be away from windy Lethbridge all next week attending the following Academic Extravaganza

Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel & its Contexts

Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich & University of Alberta, Edmonton

April 7-11, 2008 at the University of Alberta

This workshop brings together scholars from the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU) and the University of Alberta, along with colleagues from other European and Canadian universities. This workshop is part of a newly founded cooperation between LMU and the UofA and is conceived as the first of two workshops. The second is planned for Munich (2009).

The workshop is meant to explore, from multiple perspectives, the concept of “Exile” in ancient Israel, mainly but exclusively in prophetic literature, including the social and historical setting against which it evolved and in a way that is informed by comparative ancient materials.

On Exile

Physical destruction and ideological construction, history and memory, nightmares about the past, didactic knowledge and dreams of a utopian future, basic points of reference for self-identity and for self-narratives; all the above directly relate to the topic of the workshop as they are all involved in the concept of Exile.

A Babylonian campaign against Judah in 587 BCE led to a political and social disaster for many in Judah, and for most of Judah. The monarchy collapsed, Jerusalem was destroyed, along with its temple, and many areas suffered from a drastic drop in settlement. Some of local elite were exiled to Babylon and a concept of Exile began to develop.

In ancient Israelite literature (both prophetic and historiographic) Exile is construed as a central turning point within the course of the history of Israel. In these texts “the Exile” is a central ideological concept in itself and because of the ways in which it is connected to, and connects other fundamental ideological concepts. It serves to explain the destruction of the monarchic polities and the social and economic disasters associated with them in terms of YHWH’s punishment for Israel’s/Judah’s abandonment of YHWH’s ways. As it develops an image of an unjust Israel, it creates one of a just deity. But YHWH is not only imagined as just, but also as loving and forgiving, for the exile is presented as a transitory state: Exile is deeply intertwined with its discursive counterpart, the certain “Return.” Promises and announcement of the latter are often intertwined with those of Exile. As the latter comes to be understood as a necessary purification or preparation for a renewal of YHWH’s proper relationship with Israel, the seemingly unpleasant Exilic conditions begin, discursively, to shape an image of YHWH as loving Israel and teaching it. Exile is dystopia, but one that carries in itself all the seeds of utopia. As the latter is by definition unrealized (and unrealizable), it is no wonder that the concept of Exile continued to exercise an important influence in the discourses of Israel in the Second Temple period, and was eventually influential in the production of eschatological visions.

Exile becomes also a central turning point in the HB, and a theme in the basic metanarratives of Israel, in its construction of the past, and in the construction of collective memory and remembrance. Because of spatial discontinuity with the land, narratives of exile and return become archetypal for constructions of patriarchal narratives and Egyptian sojourn and slavery that led to the Exodus. As such, the concept of Exile links to concepts such as “Israel outside the land” and “Israel inside the land;” and, in turn, leads to images such as “the empty land” during the Babylonian period.

My paper is entitled “Myth of the Exilic Return: Myth Theory and the Exile as an Eternal Reality in the Prophets” and at present I’m not quite sure what it is about. Something about Chinese archetypal biographies and the failure of Jiang Quing (Mao Zedong’s widow) to successfully rehabilitate the mythic biographies of some ambitious and powerful women from China’s imperial past. Don’t ask how I got onto that, but I found a neat paper on the subject of “Archetypes of the Self” that dealt with it and the lack of a clear distinction in China between the persistent notion of a dichotomy between “mythic” and “historical” consciousnesses in Religious Studies. It is especially present in Biblical studies. So I want to look at the prophets as “mythic” characters, built on the archetype of Moses who then provide archetypes for the 2nd temple era scribes who put the prophetic corpus together. I’m going to argue that in doing so they also employed “cosmic” myths of creation and divine combat in new ways to articulate the historical experience of deportation and repatriation to Jerusalem as mythic events in their own rights. The biblical archetype of explusion (from the Garden of Eden, the ‘exile’ of the northern state of Israel) is one of no return: eternal banishment and the Torah affirms this in its construction of the covenant. The bible is deeply concerned with the southern remnant of the old Israelite United Monarchy, Judah, that persisted for several decade’s after the fall of the North.

In the second temple period, when Judah and Jerusalem were rebuilt, then, the ideologues and mythmakers of the 2nd temple period, then, had to employ this archetype but in a new way that allowed for restoration. In this, I’m going to talk about Wendy Doniger’s ideas on ‘metamyth’–myths about myths– to show the acceptance and yet repudiation of the “exit only” archetype. They do this by portraying the restoration as a fundamentally new creation, thus linking cosmic themes of origin to historical events.

Or something like that. Its not finished…

I have until Wednesday morning to finish it. It is not looking good.

The rest of the schedule is here.

Wish me luck

Well, there is this blog, but what I really mean is this:

Ashgate Publishing in Aldershot, England, has an ad for Dr. Jim’s upcoming tome on the biblical Book of Amos called:

Amos and the Cosmic Imagination
Here is the blurb:

Said to contain the words of the earliest of the biblical prophets (8th century BCE), the book of Amos is reinterpreted by James Linville in light of new and sometimes controversial historical approaches to the Bible. Amos is read as the literary product of the Persian-era community in Judah. Its representations of divine-human communication are investigated in the context of the ancient writers’ own role as transmitters and shapers of religious traditions. Amos’s extraordinary poetry expresses mythical conceptions of divine manifestation and a process of destruction and recreation of the cosmos which reveals that behind the appearances of the natural world is a heavenly, cosmic temple.

About the Author/Editor
Dr James R. Linville is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Lethbridge, Canada. Further Information

ISBN: 0 7546 5481 8
Publication Date: 04/2008
Library of Congress Reference: 2007025875
ISBN-13 978-0-7546-5481-0

Ashgate does a GREAT job making books. GREAT binding. You will want to order many, many copies of this volume in particular.

I finished the page proofs a few weeks ago and the volume is off to the printers. I should have it in hard-copy in a month or so. YIPPEE!