SOUTHWEST REGIONAL CONFERENCE
Anger in Literature
October 24-25, 2025
Northeastern State University
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
The Department of Languages and Literature and the College of Liberal Arts at Northeastern State University will be hosting the Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature annual regional meeting on October 24-25, 2025, at Northeastern State University’s campus in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
The general theme of this year’s conference is “Anger in Literature.” Negative emotions are everywhere in literature and popular culture, but are not always directly addressed. Anger can be both righteous and shameful, redemptive and crippling. Part of the theme is to explore the uses of anger (and associated emotions) in terms of a Christian worldview.
Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
• The uses of anger in literature generally
• The role of anger and catharsis in Christian literature
• The emotions and literary interpretation
• Constructions of communal worldviews through shared emotional experience
• Narrative community as model for the uses of anger and emotion
• Popular perceptions of ‘righteous’ anger
Words and the Word: Bible as Literature, Literature as Bible
University of Dallas, Dallas, TX
November 15-16, 2024
Keynote Speakers: Shemaiah Gonzalez and Theresa Kenney
ALIENS AND ALLIES
2023 Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature
Baylor University, Waco TX
September 21-23, 2023
To speak of our historical moment as one of great cultural upheaval is trite understatement, to be sure. Ours, however, is not merely an age of change; it is a period of ongoing change. The “unprecedented” has been normalized. Crisis and scandal and outrage all have become de rigueur, the “new normal,” of our disorienting change. In the midst of this tumult and change, human relationships have been transformed. The Conference on Christianity and Literature exists, in part, to explore “the relationships between Christianity and literature” in hopes of discovering how one might, as the psalmist wrote, “sing the songs of the Lord/while in a foreign land.” Or, to borrow from Robert Frost, perhaps literature in a fallen world (would it exist in any other kind of world?) is one of humanity’s efforts to address the question of “what to make of a diminished thing.” The psalmist who longs for a particular homeland, the poet who abides in exile—these paradigmatic voices echo and resound in our age. In light of this reality, the 2023 SWCCL conference theme is Aliens and Allies.
Keynote speakers
Dr Lori Branch (University of Iowa)
Dr Branch is the author of Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Baylor University Press, 2007), winner of the Christianity and Literature Book of the Year Award 2007, and of the forthcoming books Postsecular Reason: A Manifesto, and The Violation of God: Masculinity and Secularism in the Enlightenment. She is editor of the monograph series Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies for Ohio State University Press. Her keynote address will be entitled, “Religion and Secularism: Postsecular Allies?”
Dr Natalie Carnes (Baylor University)
Dr Carnes is the author of Motherhood: A Confession (Stanford University Press, 2020); Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford University Press, 2017); and Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa (Cascade Books, 2014). Currently, she is working on a project that explores intersections of poverty, aesthetics, luxury, and art, pursuing the question: What is the place of art in a world of poverty and suffering? Her keynote address will be entitled, “The Artist as Ascetic: How the Denials and Excesses of Art Witness to Christian Hope”.
WOMEN READING / READING WOMEN
Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature regional meeting
September 29-October 1, 2022
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, Arkansas
This conference theme is inspired by the artist Mary Cassatt’s paintings of girls and mothers with books, in particular “The Reader” on display at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. (Early conference attendees will have the opportunity to tour Crystal Bridges.) Papers on women authors such as Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Flannery O’Connor, Zora NealeHurston, Charlotte Bronte, Dorothy Sayers, and Mary Shelley are warmly welcomed, as are topics that explore women’s representation in painting, film, or literature, particularly where such representations intersect with Christianity or other religions. Papers dealing with the changing nature of reading and the teaching of literature (Kindle versus print materials; the hybrid classroom) are also welcome.
The keynote speaker for this conference is Wheaton College’s Dr. Crystal Downing, Co-Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and author of five books, most recently Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers(2020). Downing’s presentation for SWCCL is entitled, “The Seeing of Sayers: A Scandalous Prophet.”
Christian Community
Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature regional meeting
October 15-16, 2021
Northeastern State University
Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
The keynote speaker for the conference will be Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, associate professor of History at the University of Chicago and author of Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Life and Thought (2018), who will be discussing Christian poetry and its role in community and culture.
In light of the disruptions in our world created by COVID-19, the working theme for this year’s conference will be “Christian Community” as we begin to rebuild and reestablish communal bonds and seek to understand how our sense of community and the communal have changed in response to the world around us.
Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
The construction of Christian community and fellowship in or through literature
Recovering a sense of the communal through literature
The impact of the world on both faith and literary interpretation
Constructions of communal worldviews through shared experience
Faith as a tool for rebuilding after disaster
Ways of engaging with community through narrative
Community and the construction of the text
Narrative community as model
Liturgy and the lived community
Community and spirituality in popular media
The Art of Spiritual Friendship
Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature
October 16-17, 2020
ONLINE, hosted by Dallas Baptist University
Dr. Paul Wadell, Keynote Speaker
Dr. Wadell currently teaches philosophy, Christian ethics, and theology at St. Norbert College. He is the author of The Christian Moral Life—Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society, co-authored with Patricia Lamoureux (2010); The Moral of the Story: Learning from Literature about Human and Divine Love (2003); and Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship (2002), as well as other books.
As Parker Palmer has observed, “The highest form of love is the love that allows for intimacy without the annihilation of difference.” For many, the experience of friendship offers a window into such a love, for though it may occur among lovers and family, as often it is found among those connected by only a shared passion or concern. Friendship, then, is not just a common regard and affection for others, but also a common task and joy. The literature of Christianity offers a rich tradition of reflection upon the many facets of friendship—with God, with our fellow humans, and with the natural world, and the “art of spiritual friendship” may be said to encompass not only the moral and intellectual skill of being friends, but also the cultural works that embody it in print, on stage, and in film.
Additional Previous Conference Themes and Locations
October 2017: “Solemn Geographies & Sacred Places: The Literature of Holy Location"
Abilene Christianity University-Dallas Campus
October 2016: “Stewards of Culture: The Role of the Christian Writer in the 21st Century”
Oral Roberts University
October 2015: “Christ and Culture: The Interaction of Faith and Literature Through the Ages"
University of Mary-Hardin Baylor
November 2014: “Has Literature Lost Its Faith?”
John Brown University