The Conference on Christianity & Literature

Mideast Region

Regional director: Jeanne Murray Walker, University of Delaware, jwalker@english.udel.edu

Mideast 2010 Regional Conference
Pilgrims in Place

March 11-13, 2010
Grove City College, Grove City, Pennsylvania

Deadline for proposals extended to Nov. 16, 2009

 The 2010 Mideast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature will explore intersections between Christianity, literature, and notions of pilgrimage and place—particularly the seeming tension between the necessary discipline of place that Wendell Berry writes about and the equally compelling disposition of Gabriel Marcel’s homo viator or Walker Percy’s castaway (among many others). G.K. Chesterton’s concern with cultivating a proper kind of exile, which he termed “homelessness at home,” may also illuminate our discussions. Stories of return, penitential or existential journeys, liturgical processions, ventures of immigration or emigration, the involuntary exile of the refugee, the ethic of hospitality, “lighting out for the territory”—all of these might prove fruitful as well.

This conference will include traditional panels by faculty and undergraduate student panels with faculty moderators. Proposals for panels, roundtables, or individual twenty-minute presentations are invited. Send 300-word abstracts or panel proposals by October 1, 2009, to H. Collin Messer, English Department, Grove City College, 100 Campus Drive, Grove City, PA 16127 or hcmesser@gcc.edu.

For more details about the conference and the call for papers please visit the conference website: www2.gcc.edu/dept/engl/CCLmideast2010.

 



2006 Regional Conference

About 50 people attended the Regional Conference at Cedarville University in Ohio in October. The theme was "Incarnation in the Classroom: Mentoring The Next Generation of Scholars, Teachers and Writers," and the featured guest speaker was Dr. Jeanne Murray Walker. For more information, ccontact the conference chair, Dr. Don Deardorff,  deardord@cedarville.edu.

Return to the CCL Regional Conferences page

Questions to Tammy Ditmore (tammy.ditmore@pepperdine.edu)

In the Latest Issue of Christianity & Literature:


Night Reading

Franz Wright

Lights coming on
   in windows;
windows lit all
   night long
suddenly dark --

He seems to sleep,
   head nested
in crossed arms
on the desk,
   as he listens

to the first raindrops
striking the window,
the faint roar
   of aircraft just

vanishing with
   moonlit trail
past the horizon,
the underlined phrase.

      Summer 2009