Christianity and Science Fiction Conference Schedule

October 7, 2021 By James F. McGrath

The website for the conference on Christianity and Science Fiction is back up and running, thankfully! Here are the details for blog readers, for your convenience:

Christianity & Science Fiction: A Virtual Event (11-12 October, 2021)

The Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies, in partnership with the Department of Middle East Studies (University of Michigan), is pleased to announce a four-day virtual conference that explores the symbiotic relationship between Christianity and science fiction. The meeting is chaired by James McGrath, Gabriele Boccaccini, Jason von Ehrenkrook, Deborah Forger, and Joshua Scott.

“Christianity and Science Fiction” is the first conference in a new series sponsored by the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies. Part of MCECS’s mission is to foster understanding of the legacy of the Christian tradition in its impact on contemporary culture. The keynote speaker and academic presenters at the conference will each offer a glimpse of how the relationship between Christianity and science fiction appears from one particular vantage point, or at one particular example of intersection. Christianity is not a single entity with a unified perspective, and neither is science fiction. Studying the interplay between the two provides insights into both and into the roles they play in contemporary society.

Registration

Registration is free. Please consider supporting the work of the MCECS with a donation.

Schedule

**Schedule is based on EDT/New York Time**

MONDAY, October 11th

12:00-12:30 EST: Conference Welcome

12:30-2:30pm: Themed Session 1: Technology and Nature
20min: “I See a Suite of Armor around the World”: Tony’s Stark’s Techno-Idolatry
Jason Eberl (St. Louis University)

20min: Ritual at the Edge of Reality: Language and World-Creation in Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka
Maria Doerfler (Yale University)

20min: Diving Deeper into DEVS
Juli Gittinger (Georgia College and State University)

20min: Canon and Apocrypha in Neon Genesis Evangelion
Gavin McDowell (KU Leuven)

45 minutes discussion

2:45-3:00pm: BREAK

3:00-4:30pm: Keynote and Q&A
My Spiritual Journey as a SF Writer
Maurice Broaddus

TUESDAY October 12th

12:00-1:00pm EST: Welcome & Recap

1:15-3:00pm: Themed Session 2: Space
20mins: Far Beyond Those Distant Stars: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and an Afrofuturistic Approach to Religion
Roger Sneed (Furman University)

20mins: Shore Leave: The Theological Significance of Rest in the Star Trek Universe
Amanda MacInnis Hackney (University of Toronto)

20mins: Jesuits in Science Fiction about Space Travel
Paul Levinson (Fordham University)

45 minutes discussion

3:00-3:15pm: BREAK

3:15-4:30pm: Themed Session 3: Apocalypses, Dystopias, and Utopias
20min: Utopia and the Kingdom of Heaven in the Legion of Super-Heroes and Miracleman
Gabriel McKee (New York University)

20min: The Virgin is a Cyborg: Cherrie Moraga’s ‘Heroes and Saints’ as Chicana Mariophany
Rudy Busto (University of California, Santa Barbara)

30 minutes discussion

4:30-4:45pm: Conclusion of Conference
Announcements about next year’s conference on “Christianity and Music”

Keynote Speaker

Keynote: Maurice Broaddus
My Spiritual Journey as a SF Writer

Bio: Maurice Broaddus is an accidental teacher (at the Oaks Academy Middle School), an accidental librarian (the School Library Manager which part of the IndyPL Shared System), and a purposeful community organizer (resident Afrofuturist at the Kheprw Institute). His work has appeared in Magazine of F&SF, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs. His novels include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk novel, Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novel series, The Usual Suspects. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine. His gaming work includes writing for the Marvel Super-Heroes, Leverage, and Firefly role-playing games as well as working as a consultant on Watch Dogs 2. Learn more about him at MauriceBroaddus.com.

Speakers & Presentation Titles

Rudy Busto (University of California, Santa Barbara), The Virgin is a Cyborg: Cherrie Moraga’s ‘Heroes and Saints’ as Chicana Mariophany

Maria Doerfler (Yale University), Ritual at the Edge of Reality: Language and World-Creation in Karin Tidbeck’s Amatka

Jason Eberl (St. Louis University), “I See a Suite of Armor around the World”: Tony’s Stark’s Techno-Idolatry

Juli Gittinger (Georgia College and State University), Diving Deeper into DEVS

Amanda MacInnis Hackney (University of Toronto), Shore Leave: The Theological Significance of Rest in the Star Trek Universe

Paul Levinson (Fordham University), Jesuits in Science Fiction about Space Travel

Gavin McDowell, Canon and Apocrypha in Neon Genesis Evangelion

Gabriel McKee (New York University), Utopia and the Kingdom of Heaven in the Legion of Super-Heroes and Miracleman

Kelly J. Murphy (Central Michigan University), Nostrum Remedium: Apocalypse and Science Fiction

Roger Sneed (Furman University), Far Beyond Those Distant Stars: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and an Afrofuturistic Approach to Religion

Presenter Bios

Maria E. Doerfler, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor of Late Antiquity at Yale University’s Department of Religious Studies. She is fascinated with stories, both professionally and personally. Her most recent book, forthcoming with the University of California Press, deals with the intersection of writing law and creating sacred histories. She’s an avid reader of science fiction and speculative fiction more broadly, and is still amazed that people let her teach courses on this.

Jason T. Eberl, PhD, is Professor of Health Care Ethics and Philosophy and Director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University. His research interests include the philosophy of human nature and its application to issues at the margins of life; ethical issues related to end-of-life care, genetics, and healthcare allocation; and the philosophical thought of Thomas Aquinas. He is the author of Thomistic Principles and Bioethics, The Routledge Guidebook to Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, and The Nature of Human Persons: Metaphysics and Bioethics, as well as the editor of Contemporary Controversies in Catholic Bioethics. Additionally, he has edited volumes on philosophical themes in Star Wars, Star Trek, Sons of Anarchy, Battlestar Galactica, and the films of Christopher Nolan. He has also written essays for similar volumes on Terminator, Avatar, Harry Potter, The Big Lebowski, The Hunger Games, Stanley Kubrick, J.J. Abrams, Metallica, Hamilton, and Westworld.

Juli Gittinger, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of South Asian religions at Georgia College. She received her PhD from McGill University in Montreal with emphasis on contemporary issues in Hinduism (nationalism, gender, digital media). She has Master’s degrees from University of Colorado in Boulder and from SOAS in London. Her areas of personal research interest are Hindu nationalism and religion in media/popular culture. Recent publications include her second book Personhood in Science Fiction: religious and philosophical considerations (Palgrave 2019) and a co-edited volume on Westworld and Theology (Lexington Press 2020).

Dr. Amanda MacInnis Hackney’s (University of Toronto – Wycliffe College) main area of research focuses on how theologians use and interpret Scripture in their systematic theologies. Besides teaching college and seminary classes in theology, method, and ethics, Dr. Hackney is the co-editor of the forthcoming Theology and Star Trek volume, and the curator of the Women and Theology Research Database (launches Fall 2021). Originally from Canada, Dr. Hackney has recently moved to Upstate South Carolina.

Gavin McDowell, PhD, is currently a postdoctoral researcher participating in the project “TEXTEVOLVE: A New Approach to the Evolution of Texts Based on the Manuscripts of the Targums” hosted at KU Leuven. Prior to this, he was a membre régulier spécial at the Institut d’études anciennes et médiévales of Université Laval (Québec City, Canada), where he studied the use of the “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” as Christian hagiography. His doctoral thesis, “The Sacred History in Late Antiquity,” examined the relationship between the rabbinic work Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer and two similar writings, the Second Temple Book of Jubilees and the Syriac Cave of Treasures. His primary research interest is the reception of biblical, deuterocanonical, and apocryphal literature within Christianity and Judaism.

Paul Levinson, PhD, is Professor of Communication & Media Studies at Fordham University in NYC. His nonfiction books, including The Soft Edge, Digital McLuhan, Realspace, Cellphone, New New Media, McLuhan in an Age of Social Media, and Fake News in Real Context have been translated into 15 languages. His science fiction novels include The Silk Code (winner of the Locus Award for Best First Science Fiction Novel of 1999), Borrowed Tides, The Consciousness Plague, The Pixel Eye, The Plot To Save Socrates, Unburning Alexandria, and Chronica. His award-nominated novelette, “The Chronology Protection Case,” was made into a short film and is on Amazon Prime Video. He appears on CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, the History Channel, and NPR. His 1972 album, Twice Upon A Rhyme, was re-issued in 2010, and his new album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, was released in 2020.

Gabriel Mckee is a librarian at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. His research explores the intersection of religion, science fiction, bibliography, and countercultures. He is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Theology and the DC Universe, and is currently at work on a monograph on Fortean author and publisher Gray Barker and his flying saucer press, Saucerian Books.

Roger Sneed, PhD, is the Dorothy and B.H. Peace, Jr. Profession and Chair of the Religion Department at Furman University, where he has taught since 2007. He teaches African American Religious History and Thought, Christian Ethics, Sexuality and Christian Theologies, Introduction to Religion, and a host of other courses that address religion, culture, and society. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion, where he has served as co-chair of the Gay Men and Religion Program Unit, a member of the Status of LGBTIQ Persons in the Profession committee, and is currently a member of the AAR’s Program Committee. Dr. Sneed’s first book, Representations of Homosexuality: Black Liberation Theology and Cultural Criticism was a critique of the representations (and erasures) of homosexuality within Black liberation and womanist theologies as well as in some forms of Black cultural criticism. His forthcoming book, “The Dreamer and the Dream: Afrofuturism and Black Religious Thought” will be published by the Ohio State University Press as part of the New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative series.

Upcoming Events

Christianity and Science Fiction Conference

July 29, 2021 By James F. McGrath

The website is now up, and registration is now open, for a conference that I am involved in organizing:

Christianity & Science Fiction: A Virtual Event (11-13 October, 2021)

Registration

Keynote Speaker

Keynote: Maurice Broaddus
My Spiritual Journey as a SF Writer

Speakers & Provisional Presentation Titles

Rudy Busto (University of California, Santa Barbara), TBA

Maria Doerfler (Yale University), Amatka, Ritual and World-Building

Jason Eberl (St. Louis University), “I See a Suite of Armor around the World”: Tony’s Stark’s Techno-Idolatry

Juli Gittinger (Georgia College and State University), Diving Deeper into DEVS

Amanda MacInnis Hackney (University of Toronto), Shore Leave: The Theological Significance of Rest in the Star Trek Universe

Paul Levinson (Fordham University), Jesuits in Science Fiction about Space Travel

Laura Lieber (Duke University), Masks and Mimesis: Gideon the Ninth, The Memory Theater, and the Power of Words

Gavin McDowell (PhD École Pratique des Hautes Études), Paris Sciences & Lettres Canon and Apocrypha in Neon Genesis Evangelion

Gabriel McKee (New York University), Utopia and the Kingdom of Heaven in the Legion of Super-Heroes and Miracleman

Kelly Jean Murphy (Central Michigan University), Nostrum Remedium: Apocalypse and Science Fiction

Roger Sneed (Furman University), Far Beyond Those Distant Stars: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and an Afrofuturistic Approach to Religion

Take a look at the presenter bios and other information on the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies website!

Of related interest:

I was interviewed by the author of this really fascinating recent article on Mormonism, pageants, cosplay, and science fiction. Although I’m not quoted in it, the conversation influenced it, while I’ve also learned a lot from the article and trust that you will too.

The Star Wars website has a great new piece about religions of the Force in the Star Wars universe. Reading it made me realize how much Ahsoka Tano might be viewed as exemplifying the rejection of organized religion, yet without abandoning everything that constitutes religion per se.

There is an event today featuring four authors talking about Star Trek

Existential Comics brings together academics, philosophy, science fiction, and superheroes

A presentation about the intersection of ancient Egypt and Star Wars:

There’s a new Doctor Who trailer for the upcoming season, revealed at a panel at San Diego Comic Con

Finally, a poster you can share:

Rage and Race, Intersecting with the Bible and Music

May 7, 2021 By James F. McGrath

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black. In it he offers a wonderful discussion of Psalm 137, musical settings of which I have mentioned here before. After helpfully categorizing the demand for mirth from those one has exiled and imprisoned, whose children and relatives one has murdered, as “psychological warfare,” McCaulley presents the presence of Psalm 137 in the canon as authorizing the oppressed to express their rage and hand it to God. It doesn’t authorize taking vengeance into one’s own hands, but it also ought to silence those who, from a place of privilege, try to silence the uncomfortable expressions of frustration and anger from those disadvantaged and oppressed by the status quo. This should be connected with the recent white reactions to the “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman” by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. What she wrote there is far less harsh than wishing that white Americans be enslaved, exiled, lynched, slurred, beaten, and mistreated. White American Christians are given in this prayer a toned-down version of what it might be like to hear Psalm 137 as a Babylonian. rather than to sing it as an Israelite. Most couldn’t handle it, objecting strongly that it was inappropriate to express frustration in that way. The presence of Psalm 137 in the Bible should offer a clear rebuke. The Bible authorizes the expression of rage in prayer. It does not authorize the oppressors or their descendants to use piety as a basis for demanding that their victims not express their rage to God. Psalm 137 is part of the canon. The Babylonian response is not.

New to YouTube: “This is a recording of “Opera and Christianity: Grace, Faith, and Miracles,” the 2021 Spring Theology Lecture at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. The lecture was delivered on April 20, 2021, by Ms. Desirée Mays, a renowned lecturer with the Metropolitan Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, and other opera companies across the country. The operas that were discussed included Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral, Massenet’s Thaïs, Puccini’s Suor Angelica, and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. The lecture was hosted by The Rev. Dr. Patrick Cheng, the Theologian in Residence at Saint Thomas Church.”

John Rutter blogged about the music at the funeral for Prince Philip:

Did they mention the music?

Here’s a Psalm setting I only just discovered recently, by Uroš Krek:

Also on the Bible and music:

The Gathered Redeemed

Never on a Sunday : Psalm 2, clash of God and kings

Bob MacDonald on Makarisms (Beatitudes) in Psalms, Psalms 1-3 (plus a separate post on “you are my son” in Psalm 2), Psalm 11, Psalm 12, Psalm 82, Psalm 83, Psalm 98, Psalm 99, and Psalms 2 and 149 (as well as Jonah and climate with a hint of music, and Lamentations 5)

Commentary on Psalm 46 and commentary on Psalm 47

Etti Ankri sings the Psalms

Helen Leneman has a new book about musical explorations of the story of Judith

New book on music in ANE religions

Signal Musicians in Roman Legions

Kenneth Leighton’s Fantasy on an American Hymn Tune

Theodicy in visual art and music, in particular Handel

Longtime Indianapolis pianist helps preserve church hymns for future generations to enjoy

Black Like Jazz: Imagining a World Without Police

Do We Deprive Music of Its Mystery by Writing About It?

Joshua Albrecht, Kent State University – Music and the Language of Emotion

Bob Dylan: Still Slipping In and Out of Time

ProDeum – Crestinul clasic contemporan, primul episod

Hebrews set to music by Psallos:

Biblical Theology Set to Music: ‘Hebrews’ by Psallos

RES Call for Papers: Sacred Spaces in Motion #CFP

January 17, 2021 By James F. McGrath

Our contemporary world witnesses contrasting approaches to sacred spaces. While in some regions (especially in Western Europe) there is a decrease in the interest for religious buildings as places for worship due to the decline of the number of practicing believers, and they are sometimes reused as public institutions, hotels or restaurants, in other regions one can testify for a revival of an intense attention to religious architecture. This is manifested either through the large-scale construction of national churches (e.g., Church of Saint Sava, Belgrade; People’s Salvation Cathedral, Bucharest), the reconversion of former museums into places of worship (e.g., Chora or Hagia Sophia Museums), or shifts in their religious status (e.g., recent transformation of churches into mosques, as with the former Lutheran Church of Capernaum in Hamburg, Germany or the former church of Santa Maria Valverde in Venice). These contradictory tendencies and dynamics in understanding the role of sacred buildings highlights the exploitation of sacred spaces as areas for the affirmation of religious identity and negotiation of power resorts. Buildings concentrate different values, expectations, and social projections of a religious community, and most times the physical place itself where the building is consecrated bears an importance of its own (e.g., Al-Aqsa Mosque, Dome of the Rock and proposed third Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, Great Mosque of Mecca). The highly controversial call for a third Temple of Solomon exemplifies just how important the exact geography for worshiping God may be. But when different denominations request the same place (e.g., Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary of Jerusalem), or the same building (e.g., the Hagia Sophia) neither immediate nor long-lasting solutions are easily found.

This unique and topical issue of RES aims to bring together papers that deal with (but will be not be limited to) questions such as: How do sacred buildings reflect the interferences of the political with the religious? What are the legal and theological bases for the (re)conversion of churches into mosques and of mosques into churches? To what extent and what foreseeable consequences building, decommissioning, repurposing, or converting religious spaces represent a form of domination and exclusion? Can one envision sacred spaces as communion places for different confessions or religions? Can historical sacred buildings become ecumenical edifices, in which different confessions and religions could worship under the same roof? We are also looking for contributions that discuss the complex significance that religious edifices bear in the architectural language of sacred spaces, from architects, archaeologists, art historians, historians of religions, theologians, philosophers or political scientists. Contributions are welcome on the confessional, ethical, political and aesthetical importance of historical sacred spaces in Abrahamic religions, such as the Hagia Sophia and historic Asia Minor, those in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the Tigris-Euphrates Basin region and the wider Middle East, as well as from the Balkans.

The papers must be submitted to: res@ecum.ro

About RES: The Review of Ecumenical Studies About RES publishes articles, essays and reviews which come from the theological field, but also have an interdisciplinary dimension, especially from the fields of philosophy, history, ethics and social sciences, and go through a process of peer review. Decisions are made within four months. The contributions will be published in English or German and must comply with RES’s editorial guidelines: http://www.res.ecum.ro/guidelines/

Link CFP: http://www.res.ecum.ro/sacred-spaces-in-motion/

Deadline: May 1st, 2021.

#CFP Robophilosophy Conference: Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics

December 17, 2019 By James F. McGrath

International Research Conference Robophilosophy Conference: Culturally Sustainable Social Robotics

August 18-21, 2020
Aarhus University, Denmark

www.robophilosophy-conference.org

Focus
Once we place so-called ‘social robots’ into the social practices of our everyday lives and lifeworlds, we create complex, and possibly irreversible, interventions in the physical and semantic spaces of human culture and sociality. The long-term socio-cultural consequences of these interventions is currently impossible to gauge. While the use of ‘social’ robots in service functions, i.e. within the care-, education-, and entertainment sector, promises great economic gain, it also potentially infringes upon ethical, epistemic, existential, and other socio-cultural core values.

After a decade of interdisciplinary research into social robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) we still lack a clear understanding and regulative directives for how to ensure that social robotics will contribute to a community’s resources for human well-being—to the practices in which members of a community experience justice, dignity, autonomy, privacy, security, authenticity, knowledge, freedom, beauty, friendship, sensitivity, empathy, compassion, creativity, and other socio-cultural core values, as these may be shared, or vary, across cultures.

As governments of the highly developed countries worldwide implement “industry 4.0” and prepare to enter the “automation age” (McKinsey) central questions concerning the larger cultural significance of social robots remain unclear and are more urgent than ever:

* How can we develop social robotics applications that are culturally sustainable? That is: how can we create cultural dynamics with or through social robots that will not impact our value landscape negatively?

* If cultural sustainability is relative to a community, what can we expect in a global robot market?

* Could we design human-robot interactions in ways that will positively cultivate the values we, or people anywhere, care about?

* What are the greatest challenges for responsible or culturally sustainable robotics?

* How can we arrive at sufficiently clear and useful conceptions of these terms?

* Are there sufficiently concrete methods, strategies, or approaches to research, design, and development processes in social robotics, or to policy and legislation, that ensure the cultural sustainability of this technology?

* Are there paradigmatic examples for culturally sustainable applications of social robotics to guide us?

* Can we approach solutions by way of working from paradigm examples of culturally sustainable social robotics?

Robophilosophy 2020 will explore these and related questions, with its usual broad scope, embracing both theoretical and practical angles.

The event is an invitation to philosophers and other Humanities researchers, as well as researchers in social robotics and HRI, to explore in detail, and from interdisciplinarily informed perspectives, how the Humanities can contribute to shaping a future where social robotics is guided by the goals of enhancing socio-cultural values rather than mere utilities. Concrete pro-active proposals will be preferred to wide-scope reflections.

Robophilosophy 2020 is the fourth event in the biennial Robophilosophy Conference Series (www.robo-philosophy.org) which was introduced with the aim of promoting interdisciplinary Humanities research in and on social robotics. Robophilosophy is foremost “philosophy of, for, and by social robotics”, but it is a new area of interdisciplinary and often experimental research. Thus topically relevant research submissions from any disciplineare welcome.

The conference will feature the theatre performance ‘Eliza 2.0’, art installations, and special outreach sessions to communicate to policy makers and the public at large the core message of conference series: only if Humanities researchers join forces with the research community and practitioners in social robotics and HRI can we create futures worth living.

Plenaries (confirmed, alphabetical order)
Alan Winfield (University of the West of England, UK)
Aimee van Wynsberghe (Delft University of Technology, NL)
Catrin Misselhorn (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, DE)
John Danaher (National University of Ireland, Galway, IE)
Robert Sparrow (Monash University, AU)
Selma Sabanovic (Indiana University Bloomington, US)
Shannon Vallor (Santa Clara University, US)

Format
The conference will feature about 80-100 talks in plenaries, special workshops, and parallel sessions of reviewed research papers.

Timeline Research Papers
Submission of research papers: February 1, 2020
Notification of accepted research papers: March 15, 2020
Submission of final papers: April 15, 2020

Workshops
Submission of workshop descriptions: January 15, 2020
Notification of workshop acceptance: February 2, 2020
Submission of final workshop descriptions and abstracts: April 15, 2020

General
Early bird registration: until February 1, 2020 (opens mid-December); register here
Normal registration: until July 15, 2020-afterwards late registration
Late registration: August 15, 2020-afterwards onsite registration
Conference: August 18-21, 2020

Contact:
Johanna Seibt
https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/filseibt@hum.au.dk
filseibt@cas.au.dk

Via WikiCFP

LDS Rockers

November 26, 2019 By James F. McGrath

Rock music has been associated in the minds of most people more with LSD than LDS. (Sorry, but this seemed like it might be the one appropriate opportunity to make that acronymic joke). While reading and thinking about theology and progressive rock, I keep finding things that are outside of that genre but nonetheless very interesting. One is that Jonathan Cain of Journey fame is married to Paula White, the Pentecostal televangelist who has made news lately for her connection with President Trump (among other reasons). My co-author Frank Felice and I had a bit of back and forth on Facebook about the progness or otherwise of Journey. The band emerged out of Santana, which is firmly progressive in the jazz rock tradition. Early Journey was even more experimental in many ways. And although my colleague and friend insists that Journey was no longer prog in the Jonathan Cain era, I feel that some tracks challenge that, whether “Escape” (from the album of the same name) and the ending of the otherwise straightforward rock song “Stone in Love,” or a variety of songs on Frontiers.

But that wasn’t where I was going with this post. I wanted to note in particular how many musicians there are today doing highly creative things who have a present or past connection with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. One that seems particularly worth mentioning is Brendon Urie of Panic at the Disco! fame.

In one article, Urie talks about his ambivalent and complicated relationship with his tradition, which comes through in his music, saying:

There may be a sad underlying message, but for the most part, I’m just really taking back my tradition—I’m doing my job. I’m not really religious at all. I mean, you could argue that I am. I don’t know: It’s something about the way I was raised that I can’t knock all of those traditions that I feel so positive about. On this one, I compare myself to the wicked, but do I consider myself wicked, as well? There’s a dichotomy there, for sure.

In another piece, Pop Song Professor shared analysis of the lyrics of Hallelujah including a message from Urie to his fellow sinners. And in an article in the Independent that describes him as a “Mormon Sinatra” Urie is quoted as saying:

I still use a lot of good values from growing up in the Church, and there was a sense of community. But you were also being heavily judged by people that wanted to look down on you for not being as great as they are.

And that’s not the sense I get when I’m touring and just in music in general. So meeting fans and interacting with other bands has become a new religion to me, one that’s overwhelmingly beautiful and enlightening.

Their music videos often add additional material that deserves a look from those who study religion in music.

Lest this post just focus on one LDS artist, Billboard had an article about Dan Reynolds of the band Imagine Dragons, who is also LDS. See also Believer: A Documentary on that topic.

Of related interest:

Evangelicals’ Fears About Satan Led to the “Explicit Content” Warning on Albums

Also of related interest, see the recent discussion of religious language on the latest album from Florence + The Machine, “High as Hope.” See too “What Elvis Tells Us About Rock Gods,” this article about Lou Reed’s lyrics, this article about Nick Cave, a podcast about Bob Dylan and religion, an article in Sojourners about Dylan’s variety of Christianity, the recent article in Commonweal about country music which quickly moves to transgressions of genre and audience divisions and to Dylan, the Commonweal article about Rocketman, several recent pieces on Phish and Judaism including a call for papers, as well as Randal Rauser on secular music in his childhood, and Richard Beck’s series on Johnny Cash related to his new book Trains, Jesus, and Murder. Check out the parts of the blog series he has shared so far. He has even made a playlist to go along with it! Kanye West’s Sunday Service has been making the news as well, as has his visit with Joel Osteen (in many, many different places). See the recent articles in Sojourners, Red Letter Christians (more than once), and elsewhere. And finally, Eboo Patel offered the Grateful Dead as a guide to nonprofit leadership…

Neolithic Robots

September 19, 2019 By James F. McGrath

As someone who is fascinated by new technology, including robots, and who thinks that ancient technologies now taken for granted have a lot to teach us about the present and future when it comes to the current and potential impact of new technologies, this article about the impact of oxen in the ancient world fascinated me. Here’s a lengthy excerpt:

If it sounds silly today to lament that oxen were taking the jobs of people 7,000 years ago, it is easy to see why robot concerns are equally mundane. Human progress did not collapse due to oxen, food instead became cheaper and when that basic necessity was met we got written language and then art and culture.

Agriculture did not create inequality – it’s instead what kept things equal for so long

Oxen displaced human workers, so they brought economic inequality. When all people worked in the field or in hunting, there was no economic weight to any individual. The labor of one person might be more than another, but not enough to change economies. Yet an ox allowed one person to work 10X as much land, which made the land and the ox the asset. If you didn’t have those, you were a have not economically. By the time the Assyrians had a giant army to feed, agriculture was booming and people who didn’t own the oxen managed them, or built stuff for people who owned them. But the steep increase in inequality in Eurasia was much earlier, around 4,000 BC — and that was several millennia after the advent of agriculture.

“The surprise here isn’t so much that inequality takes off later on, it’s that it stayed low for such a long time,” says lead author Amy Bogaard, an archaeologist based at the University of Oxford who is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

“The usual story — that the societies that adopted agriculture became more unequal — is no longer valid because we observed that some societies who adopted agriculture were remarkably egalitarian for thousands of years,” says co-author Mattia Fochesato, an economist at Bocconi University.

Before around 4,000 BC, societies across the Middle East and Europe cultivated a patchwork of small garden plots, which Bogaard likens to present-day “allotments” in the UK. Families would have grown a variety cereal grains, as well as lentils, peas, and other pulse crops that needed to be harvested by hand. Notably, they would have tilled the soil by hand using hoes, in some cases also with the help of unspecialized cattle (such as aging milk cows) to pull plows, and carefully monitored their gardens during the growing season to protect them from wild animals. “It was quite a busy landscape, with lots of people working in and around these garden plots.”

Then something changed. Farmers who were well resourced enough to raise and maintain specialized plow oxen saw new opportunities in farming additional land. A single farmer with an ox team could cultivate ten times or more land than a hoe farmer, and would begin to acquire more and more land to cultivate. Those who owned land and ox teams also began to opt for more stress-tolerant crops, like barley or certain kinds of wheat, that didn’t require much labor.

By the second millennium BC in many farming landscapes fields stretched to the horizon, and societies were deeply divided between wealthy landowners, who passed their holdings on to their children, and land-poor or landless families.

Do read the whole thing, and perhaps also the related piece from EurekAlert. And then share your thoughts on how this might help to highlight parallels between ancient and modern advocates for social and economic justice. Also worthy of reflection is whether we’d notice more similarities and parallels like this, and learn more from them, if more people studied both the ancient world and science fiction…

Of related interest: “Let Skynet deal with invasive species.” And a call for papers:

https://relcfp.tumblr.com/post/187756332825/cfp-fourth-posthuman-global-symposium-posthuman

Jesus at Grandma’s House: What Jesus Learned in the Big City on a Hill

March 8, 2019 By James F. McGrath

International Women’s Day seems like a good day to return to blogging about the book I am working on, What Jesus Learned From Women. I started this series with Jesus’ mother Mary, since unless one denies that Jesus was a human being, we can safely say that he learned from her. By the same token, we can say uncontroversially that Jesus learned from his grandmother and other female ancestors at least indirectly via the influence they had on Jesus’ parents. But I think we may be able to say more than that, and here I will give just a taste of the kinds of topics I have begun to explore and plan to explore in the chapter in the book about Jesus’ maternal grandmother.

There is good reason to treat the apocryphal Gospels with skepticism. Indeed, even the canonical Gospels deserve to be approached with a healthy dose! But just as we find that there are plausible details in the background of the Gospel of John’s contrived discourses couched in the author’s distinctive style, and just as I found there to be some tidbits of accurate knowledge about India in the background details of the Acts of Thomas, I think there may be reason to draw a similar conclusion about works such as the Infancy Gospel (or Protoevangelium) of James. There is no particular reason for a later author to be aware of Nazareth’s proximity to Sepphoris, much less to locate Mary’s parents there. And so I suspect that the author of that work may have embedded some known details in his work of historical fiction. If so, then between that and some general things that tended to be true about women in that time and place, we may be able to suggest at least a few things that Jesus is likely to have learned from his grandmother, and from visiting his grandmother (whose name, according to this text, was Anna) in the big city.

In writing about this, I’ll also need to take another look at the work Ken Dark has done in Nazareth. His archaeological research has led him to argue that there was a cultural divide between Sepphoris and Nazareth. In a sense, this might simply be confirmation of what we would have considered inherently probable anyway, namely that a Jewish village would be more monolithic and conservative than a Romanized urban center. If that is the case, it must be emphasized that that doesn’t mean there was no interaction between the city and the nearby village. That would be all but impossible, given the time and location. But it would impact the character of that interaction in most instances, and perhaps is Jesus’ case specifically. Dark’s work (as well as that of others) also suggests that Nazareth may have been reestablished not long before the time of Jesus, probably as part of an effort by Judaea to exert its influence on the Galilee. That has implications for the story of Jesus more broadly, although in ways that may or may not fit in this particular book.

Before proceeding, here are links to two recent blog posts that are also about the Infancy Gospel of James:

How Joseph Met Mary In the [Apocryphal] Gospel of James
Weekend Fisher also blogged about the Protoevangelium of James (another name for the same text).

It is important to emphasize that the chapter is not going to be exclusively or even primarily focused on a treatment of this extracanonical source and its details. It is probably also important to emphasize that the discussion of Jesus visiting Sepphoris will likely be of interest, and explore an inherently plausible scenario, even if one thinks that there is nothing of any historical value whatsoever in the Infancy Gospel of James.

I’ll also explore the possibility that Jesus learned some approaches to healing from his grandmother, given that women were often the preservers, repository, and transmitters of what we would have to call ancient medical knowledge. Jesus used methods of healing that are evidenced from other sources – spittle and salves, for instance – methods that blur lines (from a modern perspective at least, but perhaps even in ancient times) between miracle, medicine, and magic.

In ancient times, women often died in childbirth, and when they survived that they still faced challenges to living as long as they can in the modern era. And so how likely is it that Jesus had a chance to know his grandmother at an age when he could learn from her and remember? I’ve seen the odds placed at about even, 50/50. As it happens, I never got to know either of my grandmothers. Both lived to see me, but not long enough for me to remember them. This means, among other things, that I’ll need significant input on this chapter not only to ensure that I do a satisfactory job of narrating this woman’s story in a way that women find authentic, but also to draw on the perspectives of those who have learned from their grandmothers in ways that I never had the chance to. And so I will take the opportunity to give you a chance to influence my book. What did you learn from one or both of your grandmothers? What do you think Jesus might have learned from his?

It is important to explore women’s stories in history, even or perhaps especially when they have in the past been written out of it. This inevitably involves some speculation and reconstruction around what is known with confidence. But it is crucial that we not allow the fact that men silenced women’s voices in various ways in the past as an excuse to maintain that silence in the present and future.

Also related to ancient women or other aspects of the topic of this post, and thus of possible interest:

Writing Women into History

How Now, You Secret, Black And Midnight Hags

How A Woman Should Dress (And Sacrifice)

https://relcfp.tumblr.com/post/182976614391/maternal-sacrifice-in-jewish-culture-rethinking

His Light In Us, Even When He Is Silent

December 24, 2017 By James F. McGrath

“His Light In Us” by Kim André Arnesen is a piece intended for Christmas, although its lyrics do not restrict it to this time of year. Here is an excerpt from the lyrics, from the composer’s website:

God’s distant call
flares in the night,
so long expected, so longed for;
and all my life,
Christ called my name,
and now at last, I’ll answer Him.

Renewed, his hope,
his light in us,
incarnate, fragile,
our Lord appears,
Alleluia, alleluia!
Eternal,
so perfect,
his cry of changeless love.

The piece above (also found again at the bottom of this post in a different format), “Even When He Is Silent,” is a setting of a text found in a Nazi concentration camp after World War II:

I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining. I believe in love, even when I feel it not. I believe in God, even when He is silent.

The two pieces, settings of very different texts by Arnesen, seemed to me to deserve to be juxtaposed and reflected on side by side. Christmas is an excellent time for exploring not only light, but the interplay of light and darkness.

Arnesen seems to have a particular fondness for creating Christmas music, and so I will share several more of his works in this blog post. If you have been listening to the same Christmas music over and over, year after year and day after day, this should be refreshing. Let me offer as the next piece his “Dormi, Jesu”:

Next, here is his Christmas Interlude:

Another piece that needs to be included here is his Julenatt:

Cradle Hymn is also fitting for Christmas:

You can hear more of Arnesen’s music on his SoundCloud page, his publisher (Santa Barbara Music Publishing), and on Spotify. What are some of your favorite Christmas works that don’t get as much attention as they deserve?

Eclipse of the End Times

August 12, 2017 By James F. McGrath

Eclipses were treated as portents throughout much of history (see Anne Graham Lotz’s ambiguous comments on this subject). Eventually, however, people realized that these are entirely predictable events that result from the moon passing between the sun and Earth (in the case of solar eclipses) or the Earth passing between the sun and the moon (in the case of lunar eclipses). As you know, we have one coming up this month, on August 21st 2017, that will be visible in many parts of North America.

XKCD comic decided to do something on the subject, and the connections that many draw between eclipses and the notion of “end times.” Here’s what they came up with:

The Washington Post has an article which highlights the views of fundamentalist pastor Gary Ray and his calculation that the eclipse, and other astronomical phenomena, indicate that the Rapture will happen soon. Here is a quote from the article:

Ray, a writer for the evangelical Christian publication Unsealed, views this eclipse as one of several astronomical signs that the day when Christians will be whisked away from the Earth is fast approaching.

“The Bible says a number of times that there’s going to be signs in the heavens before Jesus Christ returns to Earth. We see this as possibly one of those,” Ray said about the eclipse.

He is even more interested in another astronomical event that will occur 33 days after the eclipse, on Sept. 23, 2017.

The Book of Revelation, which is full of extraordinary imagery, describes a woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head” who gives birth to a boy who will “rule all the nations with an iron scepter” while she is threatened by a red, seven-headed dragon. The woman then grows the wings of an eagle and is swallowed up by the earth.

Ray says that image will be created in the sky on Sept. 23. The constellation Virgo — representing the woman — will be clothed in sunlight, in a position that is over the moon and under nine stars and three planets. The planet Jupiter, which will have been inside Virgo — in her womb, in Ray’s interpretation — will move out of Virgo, as if she is giving birth.

Astronomers don’t see this as a particularly unusual event. But to Ray and others, it could be the sign that the Rapture is ready to happen: “We think it’s God signaling to us that he’s about to make his next move.”

And Ray thinks the two eclipses that are slated to travel across the United States in 2017 and 2024, together marking an X across the nation, could be the starting and ending signs bookmarking a seven-year period of awful tribulations that Revelations says waits in store for nonbelievers who are left behind on Earth when the Rapture occurs.

“That time frame is speculative, 2017 to 2024. But it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of things that really point us to that,” he said.

Therefore, the eclipse preparation that Ray recommends is a bit different from the scientists’ association’s advice.

“My number one encouragement to people would be to just trust God. More importantly, to trust the right God,” he said, warning that those who do not believe when the day of the Rapture comes will be left behind to face the tribulations. “If people want to be ready, the one thing you can do is accept what He has offered, which is the gift of grace and forgiveness. That’s all we have to do to be ready.”

Kurt Willems has a good preemptive response to that in his blog post “Why Rapture Predictors are Always Wrong.” But I would even more strongly recommend Ben Corey’s earlier post, “Why the Rapture and Santa are Both Fairy Tales: a theological explanation.” See also what Episcopal churches are doing for the occasion of the upcoming eclipse.

Also on the topic of the eclipse, but much more lighthearted in character, there is a theme song for the occasion: Solar Eclipse of the Heart!

Finally, at the intersection of lunar eclipses and flat-earthism: