The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity joins an already rich interdisciplinary project at Notre Dame that seeks to reimagine the relationship between Religion and Literature. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this symposium seeks to challenge the common characterization of this period as increasingly secular. This view claims that a combination of archaeological and geological research, Darwinian biology, and German biblical criticism created a crisis of faith. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this crisis transformed European, and especially British, societies into something more middle-class, nationalist, aesthetically realist, and secular. Literary scholars of these periods have embraced and repeated the same narrative. By examining the Bible as narrative and the role it plays in shaping eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, this symposium challenges this common narrative of secularization, while exploring a range of religion and literature methodologies in the scholarship of these two periods.
Download the poster (PDF)
Download the program (PDF)
Thursday, March 26th
7:30 p.m. - Poetry Reading at Hammes Bookstore (Open to the Public)
Dr. Brett Foster, Wheaton College
Friday, March 27th
10:00 a.m. - Coffee Reception
11:00 a.m - Morning Keynote Lecture (Open to the Public)
“‘Hoping for a Protestant Burial’:
Centlivre, Farquhar, and the Politics of Protestant Comedy”
Dr. Misty Anderson, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
1:30 p.m. - Graduate Student Workshop (Registered Participants Only)
“Rocks and Belief ”
Dr. Misty Anderson, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
3:00 p.m. - Faculty Roundtable(Open to the Public)
“Exploring Religion and Literature Methodologies”
Dr. Misty Anderson, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Dr. Richard Gibson, Wheaton College
Dr. Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College
Dr. Romana Huk, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Susannah Monta, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Timothy O’Malley, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame
Saturday, March 28th
9:30 a.m. - Coffee Reception
10:30 a.m. - Morning Keynote Lecture (Open to the Public)
“Victorians and the Bible Beyond Belief ”
Dr. Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College
1:00 p.m. - Graduate Student Workshop (Registered Participants Only)
“Nineteenth-Century Spiritual Autobiography: Carlyle, Newman, Mill”
Dr. Richard Gibson and Dr. Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College
2:30 p.m. - Faculty Roundtable (Open to the Public)
“Teaching the Bible Outside Theology”
Dr. Misty Anderson, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Dr. Richard Gibson, Wheaton College
Dr. Timothy Larsen, Wheaton College
Dr. Gary Anderson, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Margaret Doody, University of Notre Dame
Dr. Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame
Dr. James VanderKam, University of Notre Dame
Sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies with additional support from Religion and Literature (journal), Nineteenth-Century Contexts (journal), and the Department of English.