This session examines three features of comparing religions: religious maps, religious futurity, and prophetic speech. The first paper develops religious ideology displayed in geographic lists as the first “maps,” which shaped cosmological depictions of the divine in the development of maps.
The second paper addresses apocalypticism as a grammar across cultural and chronological boundaries as a strategy for conceptualizing sacred time, enabling religious communities to recalibrate deferred endings within the span of their history.
The third paper illuminates the textual legacies beyond political crises by demonstrating that wisdom literature and prophetic speech are cross-cultural tools for communities seeking to construct just, alternative futures in the face of corrupt temporal power.
Before the advent of cartography, maps in the form of topographic lists were utilized by the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations to convey a religiously based understanding of the world. Texts, such as Akkadian and Egyptian campaign texts, elucidate land taken by a king on behalf of their deity, and thereby understood as created and owned by said deity. Other texts, such as those in the Hebrew Bible and Greek genealogical texts, display mythic elements interwoven into an understanding of the land as divinely given, and, in some cases, then requiring it to be reclaimed from other deities. This paper will summarize the religious ideology displayed in geographic lists before the advent of cartography as the first “maps,” and then analyze how their theology was maintained and shaped in the development of their maps as cosmological depictions of the divine realm.
This paper argues that apocalypticism is best understood not as a historically confined literary genre but as a recurring cross-traditional strategy for organizing religious futurity. Through a comparative analysis of Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity, and contemporary East Asian redemptive movements, it identifies what I term “apocalyptic grammar”: a patterned set of operations that compress time, intensify moral polarity, consolidate remnant identity, and recalibrate expectation under conditions of delay. Rather than assuming genealogical transmission, the study focuses on structural correspondences that emerge when communities confront crisis and deferred hope. Close textual attention demonstrates how anticipated endings are reinterpreted without abandoning expectation. By foregrounding conceptual tools and methodological transparency, the paper contributes to Comparative Studies in Religion by showing how disciplined structural comparison can illuminate recurring strategies for inhabiting uncertainty. Apocalyptic grammar thus emerges as a durable architecture of religious futures rather than a relic of ancient sectarianism.
This paper blurs the lines demarcating the categories of Hebrew prophet and Chinese sage. By analyzing the political situations of Confucius and Jeremiah during the Axial Age, this paper will demonstrate that both were forced to confront corruption among rulers in political climates where they were often personally in danger. Both used wisdom traditions unique to their own traditions but similar in sapiential tactics to hold kings accountable to a higher divine order and construct a vision of a renewed society. It will note seven points of intersection, among them: a sense of internal compulsion from Heaven/God, a reliance on an idealized kingship from the past to judge the present, and the transmission of this subversive, future-oriented hope through a band of disciples. Confucius uses China’s golden age as a model to repristinate the present to create an ideal future. Jeremiah’s vision points forward to a new eschatological day.