Current Calls for Papers

Midwest/Southwest

Taking Care

College of the Ozarks

Point Lookout, Missouri

September 25-26, 2026

What does “taking care,” or caretaking, mean for literature and literary study? Salman Rushdie’s novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) offers one suggestive model in the figure of Mali, the Floating Gardener, who tends the strands of stories in the Sea of Stories. When Haroun encounters him, Mali explains that stories require attention. They must be tended, repaired, and protected if they are to flourish. Rushdie’s allegory gestures toward a broader set of practices and dispositions that shape our engagement with literature: slow, attentive reading; responsibility toward texts and traditions; pedagogical concern for students; sympathy, compassion, and care for others. Yet this language of care also raises a challenge for literary criticism. Care is frequently invoked as an ethical or pedagogical good, but its relationship to critical judgment is far from self-evident. At what point does an emphasis on care risk softening interpretation or discouraging interpretive conflict? Might critique itself be understood as a form of care? And when does care instead demand critique, even at the risk of disagreement or discomfort?

This regional meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature approaches “Taking Care” as an opportunity to examine the tensions, costs, and responsibilities that emerge when practices of care meet the demands of literary criticism. We invite participants to examine care not as a posture of affirmation, but as a practice of attention, responsibility, and judgment that shapes how we read, teach, argue, and disagree. We welcome proposals that engage taking care in relation to literary texts, interpretive methods, pedagogical practices, and Christian commitments, especially where care comes into productive tension with critique.

Possible lines of inquiry include (but are not limited to):

• What does it mean to take care with words, texts, or traditions?

• When does care sharpen interpretation, and when might it soften critique?

•   How do literary works stage, demand, complicate, or resist practices of care?

• How do literary forms and genres shape what kinds of care are possible or impossible?

• How does care relate to judgment, disagreement, and interpretive risk?

• What distinguishes care from charity, sympathy, or assent in reading practices?

• What kinds of insights can be gained by interpretations that draw on Christian moral vocabularies?

• What does taking care look like in the classroom, especially when texts provoke discomfort or resistance?

• When does care become burdensome, conflicted, or ethically costly?

Submission Guidelines:

Send abstracts (250-400 words) for 15-20 minute papers to jeff.galbraith@wheaton.edu on or before June 30, 2026. See HERE for the full CFP and submission requirements.

Southeast

Transformative Language: Literacies of Mind, Body, and Soul

Samford University

Birmingham, Alabama

October 22-24, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Jason Baxter, Director for the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine University

The year 2026 marks the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s first printed translation of the English New Testament. Tyndale’s New Testament introduced scores of words and phrases into English vernacular and impacted language, text, and literature and religious practice into the modern age.  Sitting at the crux of both the Reformation and the Renaissance, this translation of the New Testament into the common language and its subsequent publication had a monumental impact on both spiritual formation and intellectual knowledge. It helped establish an idiom suited to both public hearing and private reading, shaping the cadence, vocabulary, and narrative voice that would dominate English literature and religious expression for centuries.  Even when we are not using “Tyndale’s words,” we are often using Tyndale’s English.

The movement of printed text across space and time furthermore transformed the way knowledge itself was created, consumed, and deployed in both secular and religious contexts. This singular event in history raises questions about the relationship between language, literacy, and the formation and transformation of the human mind, body, and soul.  

We invite individual papers and panel proposals related to the topics below.  We also welcome individual and panel proposals for readings of original creative work related to the conference theme. Other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals and creative works, are welcome.

·      Language and literacy as spiritual formation and transformation

·      Scriptural, homiletic, and theological language and literacy

·      Reading and writing in the Renaissance and Reformation

·      Languages and literacies of antiquity and modernity

·      Historical and cultural contexts of language and literacy

·      Embodied nature of language and literacy

·      Embodied and disembodied language and literacies

·      Knowledge-making and the use of language

·      Impact of print and digital technologies on literacy and language

·      Formation and transformation of language and literacy over time

·      Lost and recovered languages or literacies

·      Slow and fast literacies

·      Languages and literacies of translation

·      Formative and transformative practices of reading and writing

Submission Guidelines:

·      Abstracts should be 250-300 words

·      Presentations should fit into a 20-minute panel time slot; roundtables of 60 minutes

·      All submissions should be sent by July 1, 2026. Submission Portal Link: Click HERE

See HERE for full CFP and HERE for the conference website. Please contact Sarah Durst (sdurst@samford.edu) and Laura Schrock Crawford (lcrawfo1@samford.edu) with any questions.

Information for Regional Conference Organizers

Regional Conference Guidelines

Regional Conference Planning Checklist