The 19th Biennial Conference for the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture
The Place of Truth
Uppsala University and Stockholm School of Theology
28-30 September, 2018
The nature of truth is as debated as it is difficult to define. Yet it is a matter of fundamental importance. If we are not quite sure what we mean by truth, we remain deeply threatened when it begins to vanish from our lives. The Greek term ‘aletheia’ refers to a reality that lies at the basis of an appearance or a revelation. But in more everyday use truth can mean loyalty, integrity, accuracy, genuiness, conformity with fact, or, in art, simply agreement with the thing represented, or even the awareness of reality as unrepresentable. Can truth be recovered in our society, and what would that mean? In a time when truth has become an especially precarious issue, on many levels, the interdisciplinary study of religion, literature and culture have the opportunity to re-address truth and its many layers. We welcome presentations that, in different ways and from different perspectives, delve into the endless yet crucial question of truth.
The call for papers is now open. Abstracts of no more than 300 words each should be sent directly to the convenors of the relevant panel no later than 1 March 2018. Notice of acceptance will be given by 1 April 2018.
Speakers at the conference are limited to a single presentation; submission to multiple panels is permitted, but we ask that you be clear about this so that convenors may work together to place your paper in the appropriate panel.
Click on the links below to go directly to each panel call.
Continental Philosophy and Religion
Panel Convenors: Andrew Hass and Daniel Whistler
Call for Papers:
The Continental Philosophy and Religion Panel invites abstracts for 20-minute papers that consider the practices of truth in philosophies, religions and literatures. Philosophical traditions have long attempted to both justify and interrogate, in equal measure, the traditional correspondence model for defining truth, in which what is true is what most reasonably agrees with its object. These interrogations have led to all sorts of alternative models for truth: post-rational truths; existential truths; virtual truths or simulacra of truth. The panel particularly encourages engagements with these trends that do one of the following:
(a) Scrutinise the various projects in modern European philosophy to seek after a truth through means other than, or in addition to, the standard rational modes of the philosophical quest—for example, through imagination, art, religion, mysticism, psychoanalysis, aphorism, hermeneutics, or non-philosophy.
(b) Consider the kinds of practices, comportments and ethical attitudes that act as conditions of possibility for these alternative models of truth, especially those that make use of narrative and other imaginative means. In other words, what individual or social practices, disciplines and modes of responsibility are required to be truthful?
(c) Reflect on the contemporary situation of the so-called ‘post-truth society’, and the ways in which philosophical, literary and religious models might contest or, conversely, have implicitly justified and bolstered such developments.
Proposals of no more than 350 words should be sent to Andrew Hass (University of Stirling) at andrew.hass@stir.ac.uk and/or Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway) at Daniel.Whistler@rhul.ac.uk by 1 March 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or early April).Ultimately, speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference so if you are submitting to another panel as well as literature, please let us know so that we can liaise with the other strand chairs.
Ecotheologies: Culture, Nature and Religion
Panel Covenor: Anna Fisk
Call for Papers:
This panel seeks contributions which explore the relationship between spiritual and ecological imaginaries in literature and culture. The basis of this panel is the conviction that, in the face of environmental crisis, it is vitally important to create new visions of the human relationship with the natural world. Religion is a crucial source for this project, whether through reimagining ancient traditions or engaging in new nature-based spiritualities.
Following the overall conference theme, proposals to the Ecotheologies panel should be focused on the keywords truth and place. Suggested questions for discussion may include:
· Creative and theological responses to the contested truth of human-induced climate change.
· Ecological and spiritual activism in a ‘post-truth’ society.
· Myth, arts and literature as forms of truth to be deployed alongside scientific ways of knowing.
· Religious and artistic reflections on the truth of dwelling in place, both as attention to particular places and concepts of earth as home.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations, whether formal papers or creative performances. We are also open to proposals for 90-minute panels which use an alternative format, provided there are multiple contributors. All proposals should be emailed, along with a brief author bio, to anna.fisk@glasgow.ac.uk (abstracts, 300 words maximum, bio, 75 words maximum). The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Convenor: Marianne Schleicher
Call for Papers:
In Judaism, אמת (emet) mostly translates to truth, though it has also signified trustworthiness, sincerity, factuality, Torah, insight, and source of life. The word thus connotes both something absolute and a moral ideal in human interactions. However, with global political instability, poststructuralism’s dissolution of the subject as the seat of cognition and free will, as well as posthumanism’s destabilisation of the boundaries between nature-culture and human-nonhuman,אמת has become a free-floating signifier. Fake news, scare campaigns, and conspiracy theories disturb, but how to argue against them on these premises.
In looking for ways to rethink truth and other connotations of אמת in order to prevent vulnerable states of meaninglessness and chaos, the Judaism panel asks what Jewish religion, literature, and culture have associated with truth and other connotations of אמת from the Hebrew Bible until today. Has Judaism’s transformations from archaic over axial to late modern religious culture implied that אמת has travelled from this world, through the world-to-come or the transcendent sphere, to the inner life of each individual or to the plurivocity of literature, poetry, and art? Or has אמת accumulated its presence in all of these domains and to what consequences? Has the exilic experiences of Jews through almost two millennia resulted in certain perspectives on truth and other connotations of אמת that may offer solutions to the current global crisis of epistemological instability? Answers to one, some, or all of these questions are most welcome.
Please send proposals and abstracts (around 300 words) and a short bio to Marianne Schleicher, ms@cas.au.dk. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Convenors: Jeff Keuss and Mark Knight
Call for Papers:
We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers on literature and the conference theme of truth. Papers should address literature from any period, written in or translated into English, and may think about texts formally, theoretically, historically, and/or thematically. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
– The role of poetry in truth telling
– Unreliable narrators
– What is the place of truth in fiction?
– Propaganda and literature
– Reader response and the construction of truth
– The literary afterlife of Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?”
– Parables in literature
– “The instruments of darkness tell us truths” (Macbeth)
– Rhetoric and literary representation
– Literature as Lying: the role of fiction as truth-telling
– Confession
– Fantasy and/or speculative fiction
– “…On a huge hill, / Cragged and steep, Truth stands…” (John Donne)
– Post-Truth and the political/ethical dimensions of literature
Please send abstracts (300 words maximum) and a short biography (75 words maximum) to both strand co-chairs: Jeff Keuss (keussj@spu.edu) and Mark Knight (m.knight@lancaster.ac.uk). The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March). Ultimately, speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference so if you are submitting to another panel as well as literature, please let us know so that we can liaise with the other strand chairs.
Panel Convenor: S. Brent Plate
Call for Papers:
Objects and media, bodies and senses, books and symbols, spaces and times, all operate together to shape religious worlds. Materiality stands at the heart of religious life. We are interested in papers or panels that explore these dimensions.
In keeping with the conference theme, we are especially interested in topics around “visual ethics,” and examinations of visual media that play with the “truth” of things depicted. How do visual media trick the eye? And to what effect? What impact does this have on religious practice and devotion, and ultimately on belief? Welcome too are examinations of any experiences in which the sense organs are manipulated, and in which material mythologies toy with perception.
Please send proposals and abstracts (around 300 words), as well as queries, to Brent Plate, splate@hamilton.edu. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Convenor: Nils Holger Petersen, University of Copenhagen
Call for Papers:
Historically, music has been associated with truth in numerous ways, including Pythagorean, quadrivial thinking in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, medieval theological ideas of Angelic song, notions of “true church music” in the Cecilian movement of the nineteenth century, and not least Romantic ideas of artistic truth and of music as the highest, divine art. Notions of aesthetic truth, artistic sincerity and authenticity in musical composition and/or performances thrive at least in western cultures of the last centuries, and in the twentieth century, the philosopher Theodor W. Adornos understood the music of Arnold Schoenberg to bring about knowledge.
The music panel seeks to explore interrelations between the notions of music and truth, historically or in a contemporary context. How does the idea of musical truth relate to the equally prevalent idea of entertainment and to music’s various societal roles, in concerts, theatres, churches, as well as private listening or performative practices?
Abstracts of no more than 250 words can be sent to Nils Holger Petersen nhp@teol.ku.dk. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Convenors: Fiona Darroch and Alicia Broggi
The postcolonial panel invites abstracts investigating specific cultural presuppositions informing conceptions of ‘truth’. Papers are encouraged to consider how we can gain insight into processes of value and valuation by approaching questions of truth from diverse cultural perspectives. By which interpretive processes are certain stories determined to be truer than others? How might considerations of historical particularities also confront readers with the politically freighted significance of their own interpretive judgments, as a force of resistance to any easy variety of mere relativism?
In approaching these themes, we particularly welcome papers that attend to questions of intertextuality, with an eye toward the ways in which diverse socio-historical contexts also furnish the ‘intertexts’ for religious belief and literary work. Indeed, how do specific writers ‘re-tell’ forgotten or alternative truths, in fiction, or even in stories that depict political and activist works which risk or sacrifice a great deal to ‘expose the truth’? In what ways are postcolonial writers and activists involved in destabilising and contesting dominant narratives or accounts of ‘the truth’? What demands are placed upon conceptions of ‘truth’ in areas of political unrest and humanitarian crisis where ‘God’ is part of the conflict? Moreover, what are observable politicized implications of claiming to be the one who knows, and tells, the truth?
Within postcolonial criticism, there can be reluctance to ‘name’ (something-we-might-call-) ‘religion’ because of, amongst other things, the issues around truth and narrative outlined above. This panel therefore also welcomes papers that deal with religion and critical theory—raising questions about what actually constitutes religion, in postcolonial contexts, and about the ways in which this might pose a challenge to accepted and dominant discourses surrounding, for example, ‘religion’, ‘theology’, and/or ‘spirituality’?
Abstracts, and enquiries, can be sent to Fiona Darroch and Alicia Broggi at isrlc.postcolonial@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Religious and Inter-Religious Studies
Panel Convenor: Alana Vincent
Call for Papers:
Analytic philosophy of religions tends to construct religions as sets of truth claims to be analysed for their verifiability and compatibility. This approach has rightly been criticised for producing highly theorised models of “religion” with little resemblance to religious systems as experienced by their participants or practitioners. In keeping with this panel’s stated mission of holding together methodological approaches from the study of religions with the theoretical concerns of theology of religions (broadly construed), we invite papers which consider questions such as:
- “Post-truth” versus multiple truths as theories of religion
- Hospitality and the relinquishment of truth claims
- Theories of religion in the work of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
- Other approaches to issues of belief and reality, particularly in genre fiction
Please send proposals and abstracts (around 300 words) and a short bio to Alana Vincent, alana.vincent@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Convenor: Daniel Boscaljon
Call for Papers:
Theological humanism always already inscribes itself within a dynamic notion of truth, as the word “god” illuminates a place of truth within humanism that prevents it from being a closed system, just as the word “human” conjoined with theology provides finite implications and prevents theological doctrine from becoming an endless play of mirrors. In questioning “What Is the Place of Truth?” the Theological Humanism panels will examine the following topic areas through the lenses of culture, theology, and philosophy:
1: Geographies:
How does the play of truth illuminate specific geographical places, and/or how does “truth” become gathered in the fusion of earth and sky, mortal and divinity? How does culture change the role of place in attesting to truth? Does the truth of a place change, or only social modes of articulating and experiencing the truth of a place? How does culture create geographies?
2: Communities:
What place does truth have in community, especially larger social communities predicated on ideologies? Is the place of truth to recover an initial sense of intimacy that is lost in modern societies? Or do social frameworks allow humans to have access to truth as its coming manifestation?
3: Institutions:
As political and religious institutions come under increasing scrutiny as being dishonest, it has become increasingly important to know what truth is and means at levels of anonymous abstraction. How do institutions re-place truth from a more intimate human experience? Is this way of re-placing truth as good as what one might otherwise experience? If not, what is lost?
4: Bodies:
Given that flesh is our interface with the world, in what way do human bodies collect and reflect truth’s ongoing work of revealing and concealing? Is there a difference between ways that living flesh gathers truth and ways that representations of bodies do the same? What is the interaction between them?
Please send abstracts (300 words maximum) and a short biography (75 words maximum) to Daniel Boscaljon daniel-boscaljon@uiowa.edu. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Ultimately, speakers will only be allowed to give one he conference so if you aremitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Covnenor: Aaron Rosen (Rocky Mountain College / King’s College London)
Call for Papers:
“We all know that Art is not truth,” Pablo Picasso once admitted. “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist,” he explained, “must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” Picasso’s cryptic comments introduce questions that are just as germane now as they were nearly a century ago. Theologians might ask: Does an icon lie? Does the Incarnation reveal truth in materiality? Does the Second Commandment condemn the deceitfulness of ‘graven images,’ or challenge artists to tell the truth? Scholars of visual culture might ask: Has the binary between abstraction and representation outlived its usefulness? Should we trust artists’ accounts of their own inspirations and motivations? And what role do digital images, especially memes, play in the burgeoning marketplace for ‘alternate facts’? Philosophers and literary scholars will have their own questions. For instance, does ekphrasis lie about lies, reveal multiple truths, or neither? Ultimately, we may need to settle for the fact that only a certain degree of truth “is given us to understand.” But this hardly renders the search for truth any less urgent.
This panel welcomes contributors from any discipline with an interest in images, as well as artists, who may wish to show examples of their own work.
Please send abstracts (300 words maximum) and a short biography (75 words maximum) to aaron.rosen@rocky.edu. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Ultimately, speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference so if you are submitting to another panel as well, please give a hint about that.
Panel Covnenors: Alison Jasper (University of Stirling), Dawn Llewellyn (University of Chester) and Hannah Marije Altorf (St Mary’s University, Twickenham)
Call for Papers:
In what senses do practices of feminist analysis and imagination tend to the cultivation of truth/s? We are now familiar with the idea that all epistemic relationships are inflected in terms of power; truth depends not only on your point of view but also on who you are. Feminism has been careful to attend to voices that go unheard or thoughts that fail to be expressed. But how does this help us to turn over the partially-cleared ground a century of feminist analysis and activism has created and to what purpose? Naomi Alderman’s novel, The Power, imagining a world in which women acquire the upper-hand over men, suggests that imagining new worlds has also to be a process of vigilant re-evaluation if we are to have any hope of escaping existing patterns of domination. It also suggests there is some notion of first feminist principles or truths against which to measure up. We invite papers that touch on either the notion and/or progress of feminist first principles within discourses of religion, literature and culture or on the cultivation of new worlds that address/reevaluate the cultivation of truth/s.
Please send proposals and abstracts (around 300 words) and a short bio to d.llewellyn@chester.ac.uk, hm.altorf@stmarys.ac.uk and a.e.jasper@stir.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2018 (response from the panel can be expected towards the end of March or beginning of April). Speakers will only be allowed to give one presentation at the conference. If you are submitting to another panel as well, please let us know so that we can liaise with the other strand chairs.