Conferences and Announcements

Check here to find news and announcements relating to CCL and CCL members. Also listed here will be information about conferences, calls for papers, and other happenings that may be of interest to anyone exploring various themes in Christianity and literature.

Request for Nominations

The Nominating Committee of CCL is seeking candidates to run for the following positions within the organization:

All candidates must be members of CCL. Those who win election to these offices are encouraged to attend the January meeting of the CCL board.

Nominations should be sent by April 17, 2012 to the Chair of the Nominating Committee:
Daniel Ritchie, Bethel University (MN) Dept. of English: d-ritchie@bethel.edu

Full descriptions of the positions are available here.

CCL Election Results

The newly elected officers who will serve on CCL's Board of Directors in 2012 are as follows (unlisted positions will continue to be filled by the current officer):

President: Roger Lundin, Professor of English, Wheaton College, roger.lundin@wheaton.edu
Treasurer: Scott LaMascus, Oklahoma Christian University, scott.lamascus@oc.edu
Midwest Regional Representative: Avis G. Hewitt, Grand Valley State University, hewitta@gvsu.edu
Southwest Regional Representative: Evan Jay Getz, Houston Baptist University, egetz@hbu.edu

Southeast 2012 Regional Conference
God's Grace in Literature and Flannery O'Connor

Anderson University, Anderson, South Carolina
April 12-14, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Ralph Wood, Baylor University

The 2012 Southeast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature invites the submission of papers that explore interpretations and manifestations of God's grace in literature, with particular interest in the works of Flannery O'Connor.

Proposals from undergraduates and proposals for projects exploring other intersections between faith and literature are also welcome. Presenters should be members in good standing with the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

Please send 400-500 word abstracts (preferably via email) to Dr. Margaret Wooten. The deadline to submit an abstract is Friday, January 20, 2012.

For more information, contact Dr. Wooten at (864) 231-2162 or mwooten@andersonuniversity.edu.

Western 2012 Regional Conference
Belief and Unbelief in Postmodern Literature

Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington
May 24-25, 2012
Keynote Speakers: Amy Hungerford, Yale University, author of Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, 2010); Kathryn Lofton, Yale University, author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (University of California, 2011)

In recent years, the so-called “New Atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—have taken up the cudgels against religious belief. At the same time, the “New Atheist Novel” (to borrow the title of Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate’s new book) has made its debut as a genre, thanks to the efforts of sympathetic writers like Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Philip Pullman.

And yet religious belief is far from dead. Among the many contemporary manifestations of popular religion, there is the phenomenon of Oprah Winfrey and her congregation of faithful viewers—the subject of a new book by Kathryn Lofton. And Amy Hungerford has examined the nature of “postmodern belief” in the work of Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Toni Morrison, among other post-1960 writers.

While we specifically invite papers on literature of the post-1960 era, we welcome papers on belief and unbelief in older literary works as well. We also welcome proposals for entire sessions from prospective session organizers.

Email one-paragraph abstracts and session proposals by March 1, 2012 to:

Dr. Mark Walhout
Department of English
Seattle Pacific University
Seattle, WA 98119
phone: (206) 281-2981
email: mwalhout@spu.edu
web site: spu.edu/depts/english/ccl

Located in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, Seattle Pacific University is just minutes away from downtown Seattle, Lake Union, Discovery Park, the University of Washington, and, of course, innumerable coffee shops.

South-Central 2012 Regional Conference
The Bible in Literature

New Orleans, Louisiana
May 26-27, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Patricia A. Ward, Professor Emerita of French and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University, presenting "Women Readers of The Song of Songs"

Paper presentations and creative writing on any aspect of the theme—allusions to the Bible, biblical themes and narratives, biblical figures and types, etc.—are welcome. Length should be about 8 pages (15-20 minutes). Please send proposals (one-page abstract) to Dr. Claudia Champagne at cchampagne@olhcc.edu by February 29, 2012. Presentations at SCCCL 2012 will be limited in number in order that all sessions may be plenary, so selection of proposals will be competitive.

The conference will take place at Hampton Inn & Suites New Orleans-Convention Center Hotel, 1201 Convention Center Blvd., New Orleans, LA 70130. Registration ($75) and hotel reservations ($129 per night) must be completed by April 25, 2012 (no extensions). All participants must be members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature by April 25, 2012 ($35 regular membership/$30 graduate students). Travel grants are available from CCL for graduate students.

SCCCL 2012 is sponsored by the Department of English, History, and Mathematics of Our Lady of Holy Cross College, New Orleans, Louisiana, A Ministry of the Marianites of Holy Cross.

Midwest 2012 Regional Conference
The Public Life of Literature

Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
April 18-20, 2012
Featured Speaker: Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind

For its 2012 Midwest Regional Meeting, the Conference on Christianity and Literature (CCL) solicits papers and panel proposals that address the conference’s theme: The Public Life of Literature. Such papers might consider, for instance, whether literature can function as public testimony, whether story can preach without becoming preachy, whether confessional poetry embraces or eschews repentance, or the like. Papers and panels focused on pedagogy or texts written in world languages are most welcome, too, as are papers that examine the work of any of the Festival of Faith and Writing’s 2012 participants, including Newbery winner Clare Vanderpool; poets Li-Young Lee and Maurice Manning; graphic novelist Craig Thompson; novelists and essayists Marilynne Robinson, Walt Wangerin, and Jonathan Safran Foer; or memoirists G. Willow Wilson and Mark Richard. For a complete list of the writers taking part in the Festival, see www.calvin.edu/festival.

Scholars writing about any of the Festival of Faith and Writing’s featured authors may also submit their papers for the Festival’s academic track. Such papers should be fitted to the Festival’s constituents, who tend to be serious lay readers rather than specialists. Those who want their papers considered for the Festival’s academic track must submit their manuscripts in full. For those proposals intended for the CCL, an abstract of 200-300 words will suffice. The CCL will also jury papers for an undergraduate track of panels; students interested in this track should send complete 10-page papers, labeled “undergraduate,” to the organizers.

All participants must be members of, or join, the CCL as well as register for the conference. Those delivering papers at the Festival of Faith and Writing must additionally register for the Festival. We heartily invite all members of the CCL, though, to attend both the Conference’s regional meeting and the Festival of Faith and Writing. To that end, all CCL members who register for the Midwest conference will receive discounted registrations to the Festival. Graduate students may also apply for a small travel grant. For a complete run-down of membership and registration fees, see www.calvin.edu/festival after August 15, 2011.

Please submit abstracts and papers to cclconference@calvin.edu no later than November 1, 2011.
See the conference poster here.

Southwest 2012 Regional Conference
Theatrum Mundi: Faith, Representation, and Multiculturalism

Oklahoma Christian University, with Oklahoma Baptist University
October 5-6, 2012
Keynote Speaker: David Henry Hwang, Tony Award-winning playwright, will deliver the 8th annual McBride Lecture for Faith & Literature and will also appear, along with members of the editorial board of the journal Ecumenica, on a panel addressing issues of faith in contemporary drama.

Call for Papers: Shakespeare's famous proclamation that "All the World's a Stage" is just one among numerous Renaissance assertions of the Theatrum Mundi. In his 1612 Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood, for instance, argues that

...  the world a Theater present,
As by the roundnesse it appears most fit,
Built with starre-galleries of hye ascent,
In which Jehove does as spectator sit.

This metaphor gave thinkers in the early modern period and beyond both a means of defending the sacramental value of the stage itself—and of representation more broadly—and a means of conceptualizing God's relationship to his creation as its author, director, and primary spectator. As we consider this metaphor today, we might consider the implications of the Theatrum Mundi concept for the expanded stage of a global society. Is all the world a stage?

For this conference we seek papers that address questions of representation before the divine. While we are, in keeping with our keynote speaker, especially interested in papers on dramatic literature, faith, and multiculturalism, we are also interested in how non-dramatic texts grapple with God as author, director, and/or audience for the theater of human activity. We will also consider papers more broadly interested in the intersection of Christianity and literature, as well as creative writing dealing with issues of faith.

Email one-paragraph abstracts and session proposals by July 6, 2012 to Benjamin Myers at: swccl@okbu.edu.

Travel Grants

CCL offers grants to help cover travel expenses to scholars and writers and who are members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature and need financial support to help cover travel needed to support research and writing. More details and applications are on the Scholar Travel Grant Page.

CCL is also offering graduate-student members travel grants of up to $500 to meet travel expenses and registration fees for regional CCL meetings and the annual meeting of CCL at the MLA convention. More details are on the Graduate Student Grant page.

 Information about all CCL regional organizations