Call for Papers
Call for Papers is now closed.
Individual abstracts of approximately 300 words, including submissions to be considered for one of the Open Call Sessions (described below), and proposals for Prearranged Sessions can be submitted between 1 November and 15 December 2009. Please note that individual abstracts earmarked for but not accepted to an Open Call Session will automatically be entered into the general pool. Prearranged Sessions should be thematically consistent and will typically include three or four papers; an abstract for each paper should accompany the proposal submitted by the session’s organizer, except in cases of book panels, translation workshops, and the like.Notification of acceptance of all paper and session proposals will be made in January.
Abstracts should: 1) present a clear thesis; 2) indicate knowledge of the sources; 3) show awareness of relevant methodological, historiographical, or philosophical issues; and 4) treat subject matter that falls within the parameters of Late Ancient and Patristic studies.
Only NAPS members in good standing may read papers.
Questions or suggestions for improving the call process, which contains new components and deadlines, are welcome.
Dennis Trout Vice-President, NAPS, and Program Chair
Open Call Sessions
1. Gender and Nag Hammadi
Chairs: Katherine Veach and Nathan Bennett
This session welcomes discussion of the role of gender in the language, authorship, context, audience, narratives, interpretation and reception of the texts of the Nag Hammadi library. The desired outcome of such a discussion is a fuller appreciation of gender in the school of thought represented by Nag Hammadi, as well as an awareness of the role of gender in interpretations (both ancient and modern) of these texts.
2. The Reception and Interpretation of Sacred Texts in Early Christianity:The Transfiguration
Chairs: Jeffrey Bingham and Bogdan G. Bucur
A growing number of students and scholars work at the intersection of the Bible (broadly defined) and Patristics. The intention here is to harness this interest to explore the exegetical underpinning of the doctrinal, liturgical, ascetic, visionary, and artistic expressions of the various early Christian movements. For the purposes of this session “sacred texts” encompasses the variety of texts belonging to the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, the New Testament, and the so-called OT Pseudepigrapha, which were deemed sacred and authoritative during Christian antiquity. Similarly, “early Christianity” embraces a broad spectrum of religious movements, irrespective of the various ancient or modern categories under which they are usually grouped. For this session, we invite submissions that explore the reception and interpretation of the synoptic Transfiguration account.
3. Religion and Society in Syrian Antioch
Chair: Wendy Mayer
The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the city of Antioch on the Orontes in the late antique period as witnessed by the Antioch exhibition organised by Christine Kondoleon in 2000; the conference held in Lyon in 2001; the publication since 2006 of books by Isabella Sandwell, Jacqui Maxwell, and Rafaella Cribiore; and the forthcoming volume on the city’s churches by Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen. The day seminar on the city sponsored by the Center for the Study of Early Christianity at CUA in March 2009 and the meeting in Paris in January 2010 to launch the Lexicon Topographicum Antiochenum project are further evidence of this increasing momentum. In 2010, too, the results of the new archaeological survey by a joint Halle-Wittenburg-Mustafa Kemal University team will be published and fresh excavations in the city are scheduled to commence. The aims of this session are to promote further scholarly interest in the city and stimulate discussion and the exchange of ideas. Presenters are encouraged to submit abstracts for papers on all aspects of the connection between religion (not just Christianity) and society in the city for the period from 100-800 CE.
4. The Rhetoric of Heaven
Chairs: Candida R. Moss and Taylor Petrey
This session invites papers on the construction of heaven and heavenly bodies in ancient Christian literature. Papers may focus either on the architecture and topography of the heavens or on portrayal of heavenly occupants with a view to the way that these depictions function rhetorically in Christian discourse. Suggested topics include the role of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and disability in the construction of heavenly bodies; the reproduction and creation of heavenly hierarchies; the interpretation of scriptural traditions in the portrayal of heaven; the rhetorical function of appeals to heavenly authority; the relationship between the heavenly and the terrestrial; and the way that constructions of heaven function in martyrological, heresiological, and ecclesiastical discourse.
5. Ambrosiaster (or "De-mystifying the ’Mysterious Ambrosiaster’")
Chair: David G. Hunter
The anonymous biblical commentator usually called "the Ambrosiaster" has been one of the more enigmatic figures in Latin Patristic literature. Recent studies by Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe, Marie-Pierre Bussières, and Emanuele Di Santo have shed new light on important aspects of his thought, but there is still much to be learned from his extensive opera. This call for papers seeks contributions on all aspects of Ambrosiaster’s work, including his identity and provenance, the different recensions of his oeuvre, his relation to earlier and subsequent biblical commentators, and all aspects of his theology.
6. Syriac Homiletic Biblical Exegesis
Chairs: Robert A. Kitchen and Kristian S. Heal
Among the most creative and imaginative aspects of Syriac patristics is the Biblical exegesis found in the homiletic writings of a wide diversity of Syriac authors.Much research on Syriac Biblical exegesis, however, focuses upon a single author or work, seldom analysing broader patterns and hermeneutical approaches among a range of authors and traditions.This session aims to draw together studies of Biblical exegesis from different genres of sermons:extended exegeses of Biblical episodes and personalities in longer homiletic discourses; poetic homilies on Biblical themes; expository commentaries on particular Biblical books; and the numerous anonymous dramatic dialogue poems. Likely candidates for consideration include Aphrahat, Ephrem, the Book of Steps, Isaac of Antioch, Narsai, Jacob of Serug, Daniel of Salah, and Isaac of Nineveh.While the range of possibilities is broad, two primary themes are suggested: (1) typology of Biblical personalities or events and (2) exegesis/interpretation of a Biblical passage in which the author relates at least one significant detail at variance from the canonical version for homiletic purposes.
7. Love, the Mind, and Books: exegetical pedagogy and noetic exegesis
Chairs: Blossom Stefaniw and Michael V. Niculescu
A large section of late antique religious life was cultivated in a complex interaction between individuals in the roles of teachers or students and texts credited with possessing a noetic or divine content.Origen’s complex exegetical pedagogy has been analysed by Karen Jo Torjesen and, most recently, Vlad Niculescu, for example. The spiritual aspect of interaction with such texts in Evagrius Ponticus, understood as contemplative reading, has been investigated by Luke Dysinger, a circle around Didymus the Blind has been studied by Richard Layton, and Blossom Stefaniw has most recently produced a study of noetic exegesis in Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius.These examples of exegetical pedagogy and noetic exegesis have in common the belief in a divine/noetic deposit in the books being studied and in the spiritual/noetic ability of the process of learning to perceive and engage with that deposit. We intend to focus on the transformative relationship between student, teacher and text in Origen, Evagrius and anyof their contemporaries from the earliest third to the latest fourth centuries, on the educative aim of cultivating the moral, mental, and spiritual capacities of the person, and on the textual strategies that make possible this goal’s attainment.
8. The Reception of Paul’s Letter to the Romans: Predestination and Divine Sovereignty
Chairs: George Kalantzis and Patout Burns
The commentators on Romans generally take an approach significantly different from Augustine’s reading of this text, which struggled with and then affirmed both a divine control of human willing and a limited intention to save. Most writers assumed that God granted autonomous self-determination to humans; the divine will to save was therefore taken to be conditional upon human cooperation with the means provided by God. Divine foreknowledge of a negative human response to an offer of the means of salvation was used to justify the denial or withholding of those means. Even those, such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, who affirmed some form of universal salvation protected the autonomy of the human agent.The instances of divine election of one person or group over another that are affirmed in the Hebrew Bible were brought to bear in the Letter to the Romans. Paul reflected not only on the gratuity of the divine preference for Jacob and Esau in chapter 9 but also on the divine plan which used the temporary Jewish rejection of Christ as an instrument for the salvation of both Gentiles and Jews.That session invites papers that explore both the strategies used and conclusions in this regard reached by writers in the patristic period and the use of these interpretations for dealing with theological issues and pastoral practice.
9. The Reception of Gregory the Great in the Middle Ages
Chair: Ann Kuzdale
Next to Augustine and Jerome, Gregory the Great (590-604) was one of the most cited and influential authorities in the Middle Ages. Gregory’s ideas shaped not only a spirituality that emphasized the miraculous power of the living holy man, but also a mentalité that came to be identified as particularly medieval in its synthesis of the physical and spiritual worlds. In works such as his Moralia, Dialogues, andPastoral Care, Gregory wrote on the nature of the moral life, miracles, grace, eschatology, ecclesiology, monasticism, and the afterlife. Many of these works as well as his homilies on the Gospels and Ezekiel circulated during his lifetime and his reputation as an authority for preachers was well-established within one hundred years of his death. By the ninth century, some of his works were translated into Greek.The goal of this panel is to bring together scholars working on various aspects of the influence of Gregory’s thought upon later writers and thinkers, with special attention to the ways in which such figures adapted Gregory’ ideas to create new works meaningful in their own context.
10. Touching Religion in Late Antiquity
Chair: Douglas Boin
It’s become de rigeur to characterize the three great monotheistic religions (Judaisim, Christianity, and Islam) as “religions of the book,” holding, as they do, certain sacred writings in common. Our modern shorthand, however, rarely accounts for the fact that during most of antiquity—at least during those centuries when the first two of these religious groups flourished side-by-side-books, as we would call them, were a very rare thing indeed. Religion, then, at least for most people in the ancient Mediterranean world who were neither rabbis nor theologians, was for a long time intricately bound up with other things. This session is concerned with the physical traces which Greco-Roman, Jewish, Christian religious practices left behind in the ancient and late ancient world (c. 150 B.C.E.-600 C.E.). Seeking papers that address how tangible things (like altars, statues, and dining halls, not to mention sacred sites) helped people of antiquity construct diverse ideas about their religions, this session is particularly keen to explore how the wide array of historical artifacts — from amulets to mosaics, sculptures to architecture — often nuance or directly challenge Jewish or Christian theological assumptions developed, passed down, and codified in later textual sources.
11. The “Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy” Research Project
Chair: Charles A. Bobertz
This session invites papers for a session that is part of a larger international project on Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy (sessions are also held at the SBL and ISBL meetings). Papers may focus on any aspect of the relationship between Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy, demonstrating both similarities and differences in attitudes, approaches to problems, and attempted solutions.
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