Arts, Literature, and Religion Unit
The Arts, Literature and Religion Unit welcomes paper and panel proposals for the following themes. Please indicate to which of these themes you are responding. We also welcome closed-panel proposals.
- Futuristic Representations in Religious Arts and Literature
The AAR Presidential theme for 2026 is “The future,” a contested and generative category across religious, literary, artistic, and theoretical discourses. Questions concerning to whom the future is imagined to belong, and for whom it is believed to function, have been examined across a wide range of scholarly disciplines as well as cinematic and narrative traditions. At the same time, anticipations of possible futures constitute preoccupations within many religious communities and practices. This panel invites paper proposals that investigate artistic or literary engagements with themes of the future from any historical period, geographical region, or religious context.
Contact: George Pati, george.pati@valpo.edu
- An Excursion and Discussion at the Clyfford Stills Museum.
Clyfford Still had a unique artistic vision and was unwilling to compromise it for money or recognition. As he evolved as an artist, Still’s works transitioned from recognizable images or landscapes to more abstract shapes, colors, and lines to express ideas or feelings on huge canvases. Still insisted that all of his work be kept together in one museum, which led to the creation of the Clyfford Still museum in downtown Denver, Colorado. We will be meeting at the museum for a tour together, followed by a conversation to explore how Stills might inspire theologians and biblical scholars to express our ideas in new ways, creating new futures in Theology and Biblical Studies.
Organized by Dr. Angela Hummel
Creating documentary poetry to engage sacred texts in new ways.
Documentary poetry is an artistic practice that seeks to extend, interrogate, and dialogue with a text in new ways. Exemplars in this art making are Claudia Rankine and Layli Long Soldier. This call for papers invites people of all religious and spiritual backgrounds to create documentary poetry with their sacred texts, helping artists and readers live into new futures by holding what helps us and transforming those passages that may have caused harm to us or others in the past.
Contact: Angela Hummel, angela.lynn.hummel@gmail.com
- The Art of Divination, Prophecy, and Apocalypse: The Religious Aesthetics of the Future
The idea of something being an art suggests a specific practice, particularly a certain style of that practice. The art of divination, prophecy, and apocalypse explores how artistic practice and style align with religious figurations of the future. Asking questions about the artistic style of divination, prophecy, and apocalypse pushes us to consider aesthetic aspects beyond ocular-centric discourses (think terms like “visions of, “second sight," “clairvoyance,” and “foresight”) and instead encourages a broader understanding of the various religious “senses” of the future. While some papers might examine visual and sight-based artistic expressions related to divination, prophecy, and apocalypse, others might focus on different senses, such as the embodied practices of Ifa divination. Still, other works could explore auto-writing as both a literary and a spiritual practice, investigate the language of “catching the spirit” in Gospel performances, or turn to Rasa theory to examine potential interrelationships among emotion, experience, and knowledge in South Asian religious thought.
Contact: Anderson Moss-Weaver, amoss@bates.edu
- Cia Sautter- Art, Religion, and Healing
Religions have long used the arts to assist with physical and spiritual healing. This has included the use of dance and performance, music, visual arts, and story. With current neuroscience, somatic, and medical research confirming the importance of these practices, this panel explores the traditions while also looking to their future. Papers on the performing arts are especially appreciated, but all explorations of the arts and healing are welcome.
Contact: Cia Sautter, cialuna13@gmail.com
- AI and the Search for the Sacred: Arts, Texts, and Social Practices (Cosponsorship with the Artificial Intelligence and Religion unit)
Artificial intelligence has changed the way people encounter art and shape religious imagination. This panel explores how AI is reshaping religious imagination, interpretation, and artistic expression. We invite papers examining AI’s role in practices such as divination, textual interpretation, pastoral care, and the creation and reception of religious art. How does AI-generated imagery challenge concepts like the sublime, the imago Dei, human creativity, or ritual? What ethical, legal, or theological questions arise as religious communities adopt or respond to AI-produced art? Papers can draw on historical, theoretical, or contemporary case studies to offer nuanced theoretical insights or experimental explorations that provide new perspectives into how AI is transforming practices once rooted in human understanding, creativity, and relationality in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Contact: Ossama Abdelgawwad, ossama.abdelgawwad@valpo.edu; Randall Reed, reedrw@appstate.edu
- Maps: Fantastical, Acquisitive and Religious (Possible cosponsorship with the Comparative Studies in Religion Unit)
Maps have long been an inventive way for religious thought-leaders, institutions, and artists to represent specific teachings, targets, and aspirations in visual terms. This panel invites papers on the religious meanings embedded in maps and charts. Some maps imagine utopian 'places' or depict fantastic 'other worlds'; some re-order the known cosmos to represent a religious perception of this world or reality (allegorical maps, for instance); while others are used acquisitively to claim territory or populations in the interest of an expanding religion. Other interpretations are also invited. This panel seeks scholars who will enjoy sharing investigations into instructive examples of maps in religious systems for a visually vibrant and intellectually intriguing session.
Contact: Christopher Parr, parrch@webster.edu
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What Can Narratives Do? (Possible co-sponsorship with Buddhist Unit)
This panel invites presentations exploring how, in Buddhist contexts—especially from China to Japan—narratives serve as a space to reconsider, rethink, and sometimes subvert ritual protocols, gender norms, conceptions of the afterlife, and non-human ontology.
Contact: Marta Sanvido — marta.sanvido@yale.edu
This Unit seeks to engage the critical issues at the intersection of religion, literature, and the arts. We are concerned with both the aesthetic dimensions of religion and the religious dimensions of literature and the arts, including the visual, performative, written, and verbal arts. Approaches to these two avenues of concern are interdisciplinary and varied, including both traditional methodologies — theological, hermeneutical, and comparative approaches associated with the history of religions — and emerging methodologies, those that emerge from poststructuralism, studies in material culture, and cultural studies.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Newman | anewman4@illinois.edu | - | View |
| George Pati | george.pati@valpo.edu | - | View |