Arts and Poetics of Sacred Scriptures

Using the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, this paper will consider why an author might engage with sacred scriptures by examining the revelatory capacity of sacred and fictional texts. By employing the concept of the world of the text established by Paul Ricoeur, a common referential function emerges between sacred and fictional texts. A dialectic of revelation and imagination is used to solidify this function, and a dialectic of explanation and understanding is used to suggest that an author may engage with sacred scripture to extend its referential trajectory. This extension constitutes a unique instantiation of referential activity as a means of imaginative understanding. This reading, limited to texts associated with the Christian tradition, is beneficial to the extent that it can be adapted to account for fictional texts with differing intentions, whether that be in accordance or discordance with the scriptures to which they refer.

This paper examines an early poem of Marguerite of Navarre as a genre-blending response to Scripture that both performs its own self-authorization and invites a community of writers to further reading and literary production. Written in the early years of the reform movement (1520-1527), Marguerite’s Pater Noster was likely an early project toward her lifelong project of vernacularizing the Bible in France, as Luther had done in Germany. This paper, however, endeavors to bracket better studied questions of Marguerite’s historical context in favor of examining this text in terms framed by its genre(s): i.e., as a work that actively configures a loquacious relationship with Scripture, drawing on gendered generic codes and on the voices of biblical and visionary women. In closing, this paper suggests that Marguerite’s Pater Noster may be fruitfully read as a hospitable scene of composition, one that invites further Scriptural reflection and creative response

Just as the frightened Pip of Melville’s Moby-Dick jumps overboard in pursuit of the whale, one also feels scared shipless when interpreting this whale of a novel. Recent scholarship on religion and Moby-Dick has addressed the book’s obsession with theodicy, while others have focused on the story’s irreducible religious meanings. Romantic irony, I contend, is a more appropriate frame of interpretation for Moby-Dick because Melville, like other Romantics, is not bemoaning just the lack of justice or stability in the world, but also a lack or absence of the divine. Romantic irony, and the resulting disorientation, vertigo, and seasickness constitute the greatest moments of divine intensity in the novel, whereby Melville fuses moments in which high themes meet the low and the divine meets chaos. In doing so, Melville anticipates modernist James Joyce, who re-wrote one cornerstone of Western literature, The Odyssey, as Melville too re-writes another, the Holy Bible.

This presentation explores exceptional dimensions of Islamic calligraphy as practiced by selected masters from Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and China and reassesses their roles as religious cultural ambassadors.  Distinguished in their respective countries, these calligraphers have also developed reputations abroad: their works figure in major collections; each has made seminal contributions to their field; and each is a scholar as well as instructor of their art. Of particular interest, they have attained recognition in the genealogical system of Islamic instruction by obtaining ijazas (authorizations) from recognized masters, and they have also earned doctorates or similar degrees from state institutions of education. They are therefore doubly authoritative wherever they practice, and they effectively perform roles of international outreach. They augment this in publishing original studies in which they reproduce Islamic genres of text and scripture, some in multi-lingual formats. Closer to home, their work may present them with unanticipated cultural-political challenges.