MIDWEST REGIONAL CONFERENCE
Literature and Life Writing
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
October 23-24, 2023
Wheaton College
This conference brings together scholars of Christianity and literature with contemporary writers of spiritual memoir to celebrate religious life writing and consider the forms, features, and thematic possibilities within the range of associated genres. How do literary works and forms shape portrayals of spiritual life? What might literature accomplish in the spiritual life within writer and reader? How might the literary space of religiously inflected life writing offer particular theological content?
This conference will involve traditional panels, creative readings of spiritual autobiographies, and student panels, as well as a scholarly keynote. Attendees will also have the opportunity to attend readings and large public talks by several contemporary spiritual memoir writers, including Esau McCaulley, author of the forthcoming memoir How Far to the Promised Land? and Daniel Nayeri, award-winning author of Everything Sad is Untrue, who will be on campus that week.
The scholarly keynote will be given by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Ph.D., Marquette University), professor of theology at Wheaton College, editor of The Coleridge Bulletin, and a writer on British Romanticism, religion and literature, and the history of Christian thought. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion (2021) and Religion in Romantic England: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2018).
Gathering: Christianity, Race, and Justice
Keynote: Willie James Jennings (Yale University)
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
June 23-24, 2021
Online Conference
Willie James Jennings, author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, has recently released After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, which seeks to reframe higher education by "turning attention to the original trajectory of a God who has ended hostility and has drawn all of creation into a reconciliation . . . one that aims to re-create us, reforming us as those who enact gathering and who gesture communion with our very existence." What parts do literature, writing, and teaching play in such a vision? How do justice, race, and faith intersect in literature? In our creative work? In our teaching? This conference gathers under the conditions of a global pandemic that prevent physical proximity. It no less, however, allows us to reflect in scholarly and creative ways on the concept of gathering, given the realities of injustice that have been prominent on the global, political, social, and religious stage in the past year. This conference will involve traditional panels; roundtables; peer-review panels with pre-circulated papers, shorter presentations and substantive feedback; creative readings; and student panels. Scholars at all stages of their inquiry into matters of Christianity, race, and justice in literature, writing, and teaching are welcome.
Additional Previous Conference Themes and Locations
February 2016: “Illuminating Words, Transforming Beauty”
Spring Arbor University
March 2014: “Ancient Texts and Global Worlds: Translation in Theory, History, and Practice”
Wheaton College