Abstracts

Robert Albanese
PhD Candidate, American Studies
University of Iowa



The Non-Self Heads Not-Home: the impossibility of regression in Stephen Wright’s Going Native

In Stephen Wright’s 1994 novel Going Native, the idea of home and homecoming emerges from a hyperrealist milieu of media junkies and vagabonds as both a spatial and anthropological concept, but in forms wholly mutated by Hollywood and consumerism. In a disjointed, postmodernist rebuke of the white-male midlife-crisis-and-flight narrative, Wright employs the elusive figure of Wylie Jones and a prominent secondary cast to challenge our culture’s faith in an attainable escape from the rules of conduct of late-capitalist America. Keeping form with the genre he critiques, Wright begins Going Native with Wylie’s abandonment of modern home and family, in search of a new, existential home – a primal, pre-domestic self driven toward unmediated libidinal satisfaction. However, Wright abstracts Wylie’s search into stories of a dispersed cohort of prodigal sons and daughters, whose spatial and temporal escapes from and returns to home disastrously intersect with Wylie’s anthropological quest for the “native” self: the foci of Wright’s discreet tales lose their security, innocence, faith, and life to Wylie’s regressive efforts. For all of this, Wylie’s cross-country trip ends as it begins, as a domesticated male living in a mirror distortion of the home he left. Though we do not see how Wylie’s search falls apart – after all, Wright cannot figure a path that he does not believe exists – we recognize in Wylie’s coming full-circle his failure to attain a pre-postmodern form of selfhood, and his inability to re-inhabit a newly-fabricated “civilized” self. Ultimately, neither type of home properly exists in Going Native; they’ve dissolved fully into a pool of products and images, and live on only as simulacra. In this paper I will address the relationship between Wright’s postmodernist aesthetics, cultural critique, and his dual conceptualization of homecoming, with reference to its cultural moment and place alongside literary contemporaries, such as Chuck Pahlaniuk’s Fight Club and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.  



Justin W. Baker (Gilman School, Baltimore, MD)


Evoke the Forms: The Resurrection and Reconciliation of Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, a father and son journey south from the ruins of the father’s ancestral home through a void and barren wasteland toward the coast, a place they hope will be their new home. Like exiled “pilgrims in a fable” the father and son proceed on their exodus toward a sacred place apart from the profane destruction and waste. Both father and son face an existential dilemma of mythic proportions: to find order and direction in a blindingly dark and chaotic world. Indeed, they must not simply stay alive; they must find purpose and reason for staying alive.
Interpreting the philosophical writings of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, this work attempts to analyze The Road and its parabolic use of dream archetypes, profane and sacred symbols, and resurrected mythology. From his dreams of caves and the paradisiac past, the father resurrects archetypal images and symbols from the deep wells of the collective unconscious. Reconciling these archetypes and images with familiar religious symbols, the father reconstructs old stories of courage and justice, myths of hope and survival, to tell his son. Moreover, the father resurrects archetypal images and symbols and molds them into myths, prophetic narratives and homilies of inherent goodness, for his son in a heroic attempt to rebuild past order and sanctity in a world of chaos and despair. He evokes divine archetypal forms and breathes life upon them in order to imbue his son with a sense of transcendent, messianic meaning and purpose beyond their dire and tortured corporal existence. Together, the father and son construct their own ordered cosmos, their own ideal sense of family and home, through myth, and, heroically, they act out those myths.



Michael Baltutis
“Ecological Dissonance and Architectural Therapy: reconstructing an urban home as a response to crisis”

Karen McCarthy Brown coined the term “ecological dissonance” to describe the discordant and anomic relationship between the practice of Haitian Vodou and its practitioners’ new Brooklyn locale.  Prevented by the steel and concrete of New York City from deploying their traditional response to geographic alienation – the transposition of the older homeland of Ginen (Africa) onto their newer space – practitioners were required to differently, creatively, and performatively strategize their American immigration.
This dyad of geographic alienation and strategic domestic response that runs throughout the immigrant experience is used to great effect in film and fiction as well.  This paper will look at three such works: Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York, Aldous Huxley’s novel Antic Hay, and Jeff Malmberg’s documentary Marwencol.  The main character of each employs a more totalizing strategy for reducing the dissonance between themselves – their personality, worldview, and desires – and their current locale through the re-construction of a complex urban space.  
Architecture serves as one of the primary metaphors in each work, as each character meticulously reconstructs an urban space from their past as a response to personal and relational crisis.  Though this form of therapy is intended to accomplish the re-rooting of the self in comforting solid ground, the temporal nature of the constructed urban signifier and the cycle of rootlessness that is continued allows us (and them) to question the comfort that home, and a return to home, can generate.



Amy Lynne Barr

An Implicated Distance: the bridge, the closet, the shelf, the couch, to build something else…the
revolving door, home is a choreographic work inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space; a phenomenological exploration of the notion of home and intimacy with relation to bodies, community and objects.  It was and still is a study of the lived experience of how people view the embodiment of home in their everyday lives and the intimacy that could be found within themselves with the things/people/places they interact with; doors and phones were used as metaphors for openings, closings, pathways, connectivity and the constructability of the symbolic home.  The personal histories of the cast were explored with relation to the idea of the transient being, the person who is still digging into what the experience of home is for them.  While blending gesture, text, and dancing with manipulation of the doors and phones through space, the dancers built and tore down structures throughout the 20 minute work.  At the conclusion of the piece they constructed a rising pathway out of objects and bodies towards a suspended doorway that was slowly opened.  This doorway symbolized an arrival of self to a metaphorical embodiment of home; a coming home of sorts because as Bachelard puts it, “Our soul is an abode.” (Bachelard, pg. xxxvii)  
The paper I hope to present will address the creation of this work and my process as a choreographer, its philosophical findings, and the paradoxical challenge to overcome attachment to memories that embody our ideas of what home really is.   Reverie is not always beautiful about the past, a happy reverie.  There’s a lot of messiness.  There is an underside.  It gets harder through accumulation, through maturity and ongoing living and change to let go of our hurts.  Again this deepens the attachment to things, the need we have to hold on.  It is not about a sad beginning and a happy ending.  When we reconcile the past, there is still a future filled with more that can be hard, dirty, heartbreaking, and defeating.  Reconciliation is bittersweet in that it feels good to reach finality and shed the exhaustive weight from what came before, but we need to draw on the darkness of our past difficulties as a base of learning to keep us moving forward and up.  



Dan Boscaljon 
University of Iowa

Dwelling Beyond Poetry: The Uncanny Houses of Hawthorne and Poe


    Heidegger’s late writings focus on the centrality of language in human existing and dwelling. He argues that true dwelling rests primarily in language, especially as he works through Holderlin’s poetry. His sense of how poetry relates to dwelling has two different aspects. First, poetry as language provides an initial “projective sketch” that reveals and defines a cultural world for a group of people, initially allowing humans to relate to the earth in a certain way. The second sense of poetic dwelling looks to the human responsibility to incorporate measurements that cannot be quantified, forcing humans to live openly.
While he argues that the “poetically” in “poetically man dwells…” is not exclusive to the form of verse, it nonetheless is telling that literary theorists have not been able to develop a narrative theory based on Heidegger’s sense of world. I argue that there are two reasons why. First, the late Heidegger’s emphasis on localized spaces of gathering (orchestrated by things) promotes a closed linguistic world instead of an open one. Second, temporality within this closed world has the feel of an omnipresent or eternal “present,” a ceaseless now of a displaced revelation that accords with only a part of human experience. Noting and then bracketing this possible limitation, the bulk of the paper will be spent exploring the capacity of narrative to mimic the enclosed gathering of poetry.
    Therefore, I begin with a brief overview of Heidegger’s definition of dwelling poetically, focusing on the activities attributed to dwelling and also the relationship that these activities have to poeisis. I then  argue how accounting for narrative supplements Heidegger’s position by looking to how narrative uses of language allow for gathering and dwelling in terms of time. Put otherwise, I account for the distinct type of home that narratives provide. As a way of testing the viability of a narrative home, I conclude the paper by offering two examples of closed literary homes whose potency elicits a conflict with the “world” of the reader. Although Hawthorne and Poe use different methods for achieving the effects, the result is an uncanny rival world, whose closed and gathered existence cannot be integrated with the larger cultural world. 



Kimberly Carfore
California Institute of Integral Studies

The Paradox of Homecoming in Deconstruction and Phenomenology
ABSTRACT: This paper presents some implications of Jacques Derrida’s messianic understanding of homecoming for religious studies.  I divide this paper into three parts, including 1) an articulation of the place of homecoming in Derrida’s philosophy, particularly in light of his concept of the messianic, 2) an outline of parallels between Derrida’s sense of homecoming and the concept of “homeworld” expressed in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, 3) a discussion of some ways in which those deconstructive and phenomenological understandings of homecoming promote justice and counter any religious practices that use figures of home to justify oppressive hierarchies (e.g., sexism, racism, nationalism).  
The work of deconstruction, for Derrida, affirms a messianic call for the arrival of an event of justice, yet his messianic affirmation is “without messiah.”  The arrival of the event is always to come, infinitely exceeding the limits of presence.  Accordingly, the messianic call for justice is a call for something or someone to come that displaces place, exceeding the limits of every home.  Calling for a justice to come is calling for a paradoxical homecoming without a home, which is to say, a homecoming that opens up the boundaries of the home, hospitably welcoming the stranger, the arriving other—the arrivant (“newcomer”).  Derrida’s sense of homecoming draws on religious traditions (particularly messianic Judaism), but the arrivant overflows the distinction between religious and non-religious.  To welcome home the arrivant is to practice a postsecular “religion without religion,” opening up to the alterity that overflows the proper boundaries of traditions, sects, and denominations.  Homecoming thus disturbs any stable boundary that would demarcate the religious from the non-religious once and for all.  For instance, homecoming can be described in terms of the experiential evidence expressed in phenomenological analyses, as in Husserl’s phenomenology of the mutually constitutive relationality of homeworld (Heimwelt) and alienworld (Fremdwelt), wherein home is generated only by welcoming the alien.  Derrida’s messianic deconstruction and Husserl’s phenomenology converge in providing a concept of homecoming that calls for religious and non-religious individuals and communities to make their homes, borders, and traditions more just, more open and amenable to strangers, newcomers, and other others. 




Justin Cosner
University of Iowa (PhD Student)

Nothing Sacred: Satire and Sanctity in A Handful of Dust 
This essay pursues a critical inquiry into the ubiquity of satire that takes place in Evelyn Waugh’s most famous comedic novel, A Handful of Dust, and asserts the possibility of affirmation that lingers in the text despite the overwhelming cynicism. The essay first examines the manner and method of Waugh’s satire, described by contemporary modernist theorists as the juxtaposition of the bumbling physicality of character’s bodies with the absence of their interiority or motives. The essay follows the implications of these interiorless characters and meaningless actions as they produce a social critique of the changing “home”, structural and metaphoric, personal and social. Resisting the popular modernist trend of viewing the house as “a machine for living,” Waugh locates in the symbolic home a possibility for a connection to a meaningful historic past and a consequential substantiation of values too often seen as empty or lacking in modernist Britain. It is my argument that the chance for authenticity hinted at in the novel is inextricable from the novel’s illustration of religion as an alternative to the interiorlessness endemic to Waugh’s satiric characters. This growing distinction between the (ful)filled and the empty also extends to the several homes in the novel. Employing Daniel Hervieu-Leger’s recent theoretical work Religion as a Chain of Memory, the essay examines the differentiation of Waugh’s protagonist’s ancestral home against the London flats of his circle. Ultimately, the essay argues that Waugh endows the ancestral home, and in turn tradition itself, with the ability to provide a repository of historicity and gravitas necessary to the substantiation of ethical and spiritual values: an endowment that is reflected in the possibility of individuals themselves to transcend the human satire and attain fulfillment and fullness.



Erik Davis
PhD candidate, Religious Studies
Rice University

Mirroring the Pearl in The Hymn of the Pearl

            The Hymn of the Pearl is the name given by some translators to a numinous fable embedded in the Acts of Thomas, a third century apocryphal Christian text, most likely of Syriac origin. The hymn, sung by Thomas in prison, is clearly an interpolation, and is of more enigmatic origins—though it arguably shows the influence of the New Testament, it has at times been thought to be an older Mesopotamian bit of folklore, or possibly a remnant of pre-Christian Gnostic tradition whose very existence, like most things Gnostic, remains controversial.
            The Hymn is a fable of spiritual home-coming whose arresting doublings, transformations, and paradoxes are embedded in a story with the imaginal economy of a fairy tale. It tells of a prince who leaves his homeland in the East to travel to Egypt to retrieve a pearl held by a great serpent. Along the way, he disguises himself in the clothes of the Egyptians, eats their food, and thereby falls asleep and, literally, forgets himself. His parents send him a letter, which awakens him and enables him to read the words that are also written on his heart. He fulfills his task and, guided by the same letter, which he finds on the road, returns home. 
            As Bentley Latyon recognizes, the hymn is an allegory of the soul’s descent and return from the body, one that Willis Barnstone declares is “a poetic culmination of Gnostic principles, conveyed with a minimum of cosmogony and deific mischief.” After introducing the tale and providing some theological backdrop, I will discuss the story in structural and thematic terms. I will stress its doublings and inversions, and will pay particular attention paid to the dynamics of the Gnostic “wake-up call” embedded in the letter, as well as the paradoxically unheimlich nature of home, at once alien and core to the prince’s existential being. I will close with the suggestion that, just as the letter mirrors the prince’s soul, the hymn asks us to mirror ourselves in it—an iterative refraction I will briefly pursue through the SF writer Philip K. Dick, who loved and wrote about the Hymn, and whose own “gnostic” fictions and theoretical texts both mirror its dynamics and shape, in a recursive fashion, my own re-reading of the tale.




Kerry A. Delaney
Department of English
University of Iowa
308 English-Philosophy Building
Iowa City, IA 52242


Green World Agnosticism:  Fletcher’s Jacobean Catholic Pastoral

The conflicted relationship of English Christians with the Roman Catholic Church continued well after Protestant sects had come to dominate the national religious belief. The Catholicism, banished and derided in the nation, continued in small pockets of recusants. In the Protestant community at large, a fantasy of English Catholicism developed, incorporating both a demonization of recusants as an insidious native threat, and a nostalgic yearning for what had been lost in the national conversion. John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (1608) participates in this reflective fantasizing by staging a sort of Catholic pastorilization. Rather than presenting an imagined proto-Protestant paganism, Fletcher focuses on a community surrounding the character of a “Holy Virgin,” the marian central figure of his work tasked with healing the wayward figures around her. In doing so, he presents an English religious community that escapes the worldly taint of the Roman Church and Protestant sects by locating it in a green world, outside of nostalgic remembrance and the possibility of present achievement. If we consider that Fletcher likely did not endorse a national reconversion, yet still incorporates inarguably papist elements into his work, might his work’s impossible-nature allow for a Protestant audience to contend with a desire for the forbidden? Do the limits of the green world, populated by shepherds, shepherdesses, and pagan mythological figures, emphasize historical English belief as desirable, though ultimately unrecoverable? Is the integrated community present following the title character’s redemption and sanctification of her neighbors only possible in religious fantasy?


Kyle Dieleman
Master’s of Divinity Student
Calvin Theological Seminary


Paper Title: “John Calvin on the Home of the Old Testament Patriarchs”

Abstract (Religious Studies Category)
In the Christian tradition the issue of ‘home’ is of paramount importance.  This paper analyzes John Calvin’s understanding of what ‘home’ meant for the Old Testament Patriarchs (i.e. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob).  The thesis of the paper is that Calvin understands the ultimate home of the Patriarchs to be a heavenly home, which they continually hoped for.  Furthermore, resulting from his understanding of the Patriarch’s final home as heaven, Calvin sees heaven as the final home for all Christians.  
The Patriarchs, Calvin asserts, did not understand God’s promise of a home for them as an earthly home but as a heavenly one.  Thus, the Patriarchs, even when they were settled in the Promised Land of Canaan, were never fully at home.  Calvin contends it was God’s promise of an eternal, heavenly home which the Patriarch’s incessantly looked forward to.
Similarly, Calvin argues, the reward for the Christian’s pilgrimage on earth is final rest in the heavenly home.  For Calvin, this ultimate reward of a heavenly home is actually a return to the way things were originally created by God.  The created order, originally good, has been corrupted by humanity’s fall into sin and no longer functions as home for humanity.  Calvin argues that only upon reaching heaven, where all things are as God intended, will anyone ever truly be home.  Thus, ironically, the arrival to a final home, for the Patriarchs and Christians, is actually a return home. 
To support the thesis, the paper will interact with Calvin’s biblical commentaries relevant to the Patriarchs as well as Calvin’s discussion of the home of the Patriarchs in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.  Particularly relevant in the Institutes is Book II, Chapter 10.  The commentaries most applicable to the topic are Calvin’s commentaries on the biblical books of Genesis and Hebrews.



Nathan Eric Dickman
Young Harris College



Faith or Friendship: On Integrating Possibilities for Self-realization in Kierkegaard and Aristotle

Abstract:
Aristotle argues that in complete friendship individuals are "at home" with one another, saying that friends live together by sharing in conversation and thought, unlike cattle grazing in the same pasture. Kierkegaard, alternatively, insists on the radically subjective character of faith, that the "knight of faith" cannot disclose himself in the universal except through irony. This suggests a person of faith cannot realize the kind of living together available in friendship that Aristotle claims is constitutive for selfhood. And, yet, for Kierkegaard, faithfulness is the full realization of selfhood. My question is whether this tension forces a hard choice on us between human connection and authentic individuality, or whether these two dimensions of our lives can be properly organized and integrated into a greater whole of self-understanding? As authentic individuals shaped by unique "intuitions of the universe," what is it to be at home with our friends? Does irony enhance or undermine the "conversation that we are"? Perhaps with today's emphasis on individualism (at least in contemporary Westernized socieities), a responsibility of contemporary thinkers is to retrieve and practice surpressed life-affirming ways of being with others? Suspending the Hegelian possibility of a synthesis, I respond to these questions without answering them. I instead turn to what Ricoeur refers to as the self's "effort to be," and argue that the struggle and effort to realize a tenuous balance between faith and friendship both defines the boundaries of "living together" and fuels drives for fuller self-realization.




Janet Donohoe, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Department of English and Philosophy
University of West Georgia


Coming Home and the Act of Mourning
This paper addresses the role of homecoming as an act of mourning.  Frequently people want to be buried in their native country or their hometown.  Cemetery plots are purchased well in advance for all members of a family to be buried in the same plot.  Cemeteries become places we return to in memory of those who have gone before us, to whom we are indebted for our traditions.  In addition to the homecoming in burial, journeys home are made often to bear witness to the dying and as pilgrimages in the aftermath of a death.  These homecomings are not the typical picture that is presented of a romantic association with home.  They are often fraught with pain, uneasiness, and loss.  This paper investigates the role of homecoming in the preservation and construction of family narratives through cemetery visits, deathbed visits, and pilgrimages in the name of remembering the dead.  By questioning how the memories of home are embedded in the landscape, the built environment, and the cemetery, this phenomenological analysis draws out the relationship between memory and the home focusing on the way such homecomings bring us into relation with our own mortality as well as with our life traditions.  The paper draws upon previous work on the place of home and on the role of monuments in the work of memory.  It also draws upon the phenomenological and hermeneutical perspectives of Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Karsten Harries to provide theoretical support for the claims of the role of home in mourning.



Andy Dorsey
California State University, Stanislaus


“‘I prayed not for the love of God, but for the love of the place I lived in’: Hypocrisy, Home, and the Transformation of ‘Praying Indian’ Identity in Seventeenth-Century New England”

A significant body of early American scholarship has focused on questions surrounding the spiritual authenticity of the conversion narratives delivered by the Natick Indians before Puritan church members and translated into English by John Eliot, the seventeenth-century missionary.  Indeed, a number of historians have investigated the possibility that Eliot’s “Praying Indians” related counterfeit narratives of saving faith in exchange for access to favorable trading relationships with the European colonists, for higher social and economic status within their respective Indian communities, or for land protected from further encroachment either by the increasingly populous colonies or by other hostile native groups.  Similarly, literature scholars have analyzed the ways in which the Natick Indian confessions enact performances of a variety of subversive hybrid cultural identities.  Thus far, however, the connections between the Puritan missionary’s translations of Indian conversion narratives, spiritual hypocrisy, and native adaptations of metaphors of domestic identity have not received adequate attention.  Utilizing Arnold Krupat’s models of native autobiography and “synecdochic” selfhood, this essay traces the transformation of native identity in Eliot’s Indian confessions as manifest in the aspiring Natick church members’ appropriations of Anglo-American conceptions of “house” and home.  It does so in the context of the transatlantic discourse on hypocrisy revived during the seventeenth century by disagreements between England and its Puritan colony in America over appropriate church admission standards. 


Verna Marina Ehret
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Mercyhurst College


“Home Is Where the Mediation Is: Trans-contextual Narratives of Integration”
In Tillich’s Courage to Be he identifies two types of courage, the courage to be as a part and the courage to be as oneself. Life in community is a blending of these two types of courage. In being oneself and being a part of a group, this courage is made manifest through the narratives we tell. Our identity and belonging is narrative dependent. I know who I am and feel at home because of the narrative I have created that emplaces me in time, space, and community (Clingerman). Through this emplacement, I build my understanding of the world. Religious narrative as sacred history is not simply the narrative of whole communities but rather the collected narratives of the members of those communities. Through those narratives communities grow and change as people find belonging in them.  This sense of belonging means home is where the like-minded are. But because sacred history is the collection of voices with multiple narratives that continue to grow and change, the “home” of sacred history can become “not my home anymore.” People can be driven away by the ever-changing quality of sacred histories. The purpose of this paper, then, is to propose a path of integration, ways that people can be gathered in (Farley) through the recognition and acceptance of the multiple voices of sacred history. The paper seeks to build the notion of the trans-contextual narrative as a narrative of mediation within religious communities, thereby enabling the creation of integration within difference.



Sage Elwell
Texas Christian University
“There’s No Place Like Home” 
From Oz to Antichrist: Searching for God and Finding the Devil
In 1939 MGM Studios released The Wizard of Oz.  In this familiar adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s book, Dorthy is swept away in a tornado to the land of Oz where she befriends a scarecrow, a tin man, and a lion.  Together they travel through Oz in search of a wizard that Dorthy believes can return her back home to Kansas.
Seventy years later, Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.  Part slasher-horror part pornography, the film centers on a married couple simply listed in the credits as He and She (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), who retire to a cabin in the woods called Eden in order emotionally heal after the death of their young son.  What unfolds in Eden however is a theater of cruelty as She spirals into an evil, almost Satanic, insanity as He both spurs and suffers the atrocities of her affliction.  
These two films represent polar opposites  Antichrist is an art-house film about chaos and evil that features graphic sex and grotesque violence and narrowly escaped an NC-17 rating by the British Film Board.  The Wizard of Oz is a cinematic children’s story about finding fulfillment in home that became a pop culture icon and is broadcast annually into hundreds of million homes. Because both films tell a story of a quest for home – Dorthy for Kansas and He/She for serenity in the wake of tragedy – it is precisely these remarkable differences that invite consideration,
In this paper I present The Wizard of Oz and Antichrist as contrasting examples of the quest for home realized and the quest for home failed.  Writing on Salman Rushdie’s short analysis of The Wizard of Oz, A. Waller Hastings writes, “Oz gives us, finally, a world purged of evil by Dorthy’s adventure over the rainbow.”  Conversely, Antichrist gives us a world created by Satan where every element is infused with evil.  In Dorthy’s quest to find the wizard, the wisdom, love, and power that is sought and embodied by her companions symbolically attests to the truth of home she seeks.  Antichrist is likewise modeled around three archetypal figures called the three beggars, whose appearance mark the three core “chapters” of the film in much the same way that the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion plot the storyline in The Wizard of Oz.  However, the three beggars of Antichrist invert the metaphysic of beneficence represented by the trio from Oz.  The three beggars are a deer (grief), a fox (pain), and a crow (despair).  Collectively they attest to a metaphysic of maleficence that is the truth of the film: “Chaos reigns.”  
Viewed theologically and in tandem, these films unlock the dichotomous but entwined archetype of home as at once heimlich and unheimlich.  As Freud wrote, “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.”  Beginning with Oz and a home that lands on and kills the Wicked witch of the West and moving to Antichrist where a cabin-home shelters evil incarnate, we see this devolution as “There’s no place like home” migrates from the light of heimlich to the shadow of unheimlich and the dark possibility that there is indeed, no place at all that is like home.



Robert Fernandez
University of Iowa, PhD candidate, English

“The One Was the Other and Both of Them No One:” Jack Spicer and the Politics of Estrangement

Examining works from the entirely of Jack Spicer’s oeuvre, this essay attempts isolate elements of the poet’s highly particular tones, textures, and images. It unpacks Spicer’s notions of translation and correspondence. It examines his indebtedness to Jean Cocteau's Orphée via a formal analysis of the film elements, which criticism has thus far overlooked. Throughout, it address Spicer’s concern with the uncanniness of language. For Spicer, the poetic is that which makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange—this in a more fundamental sense than a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table. Poetry is a kind of haunted singing that makes that which is most familiar to us, language, strange, and in so doing reveals the human being’s essential strangeness—reveals that one is constituted by difference and always-already at home in otherness. In the wake of two world wars, Spicer’s properly ontological and linguistic claims appear (as such claims inevitably will) political, instructing in the possibility of persisting within foreignness without seeking recourse to self-preservation, myth, or nationalism. By proceeding chronologically through Spicer’s work, the essay shows how certain concerns and strategies remain consistent. Along the way, Maurice Blanchot and Barbara Johnson provide support in thinking about the ways in which we are at times turned toward, at times away, from language.



 Dorothy Wolfe Giannakouros
Ph.D. Candidate, The University of Iowa 


‘Teaching the Grass about Green’: The Homecoming of the ‘big-time artist’ in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water
My project will consider the question of homecoming in the context of Native American author Thomas King’s novel Truth & Bright Water. King’s novel spans the United States-Canadian border and is narrated from the perspective of a young adolescent, Tecumseh, whose family is divided between the town of Truth and the Bright Water reservation. Tecumseh relates the homecoming of “big-time artist” Monroe Swimmer from his metropolitan success to the embattled community of his youth. My interest in this novel lies primarily in its technique of child narration and the ways that Tecumseh’s voice—in its naivety and unselfconscious candor—lays bare the unhomeliness of Swimmer’s return. I will also explore the question of the role of aesthetic production in the definition of home-space as raised by King’s novel. In a counterpoint to Swimmer’s radical installations and iconoclasm, Tecumseh’s mother, Helen, posits vernacular, domestic artistic production which constitutes a perspective organically derived from the challenges of her community. Helen’s tactile, image-driven art (for example, a quilt appliquéd with razor blades, chicken feet, needles, and patches of repurposed fabrics) is a rejoinder to the gendered dynamics of mobility, economic opportunity, social intimacy, and familial obligation as they are laid out within the geographic and interpersonal terrain that constitute her home. Ultimately, King’s novel  illustrates the ways in which his characters’ relationships with their home(s) are profoundly influenced by the colonization of the spaces in which they live. 


Paul Gleason
University of Virginia


Can the Black Church Come Home to Gilead?

There are no African-Americans in Gilead. It was once the kind of town that sheltered runaway slaves and protected John Brown after his raids on slaveholding states, but there haven’t been African-Americans in Gilead since the families that made up the black church all left for Chicago, shortly after someone set “a little fire” behind their church. Yet even though the black church seems to be missing from Marilynne Robinson’s recent novels, I submit that race is one of her most important, though often unappreciated, themes. In this paper I will argue that both Gilead and Home are animated by a simple question: can the black church come back? Their plots are her answer.

Both novels are set in 1956, and the black church may be returning. Robinson’s novels dramatize their homecoming in several ways. The first is through Jack Boughton, the prodigal son of a retired Presbyterian minister. He comes home after a twenty-year absence and wonders if the town could accept not only him, but also his black wife and their son. Second, Jack’s wife Della comes to Gilead briefly but decides she can’t stay. She feels safer in Missouri, a former slave state, than she does in Iowa, the formerly “shining star of radicalism.” Third, news of the black church arrives through the medium of television. It beams images of the Montgomery Bus Boycott into family living rooms. Even a town as peaceful as Gilead can no longer ignore what Jack calls “the Americans’ treatment of the negro.” Robinson seems to concur with Della’s verdict: the black church has no place here. 

Yet in the end, even as she chastises her characters for their inhospitality, Robinson offers hope. Home ends with yet another moment of return. But instead of a physical homecoming, it is an intimation of homecoming: a prophecy. Jack’s sister resolves to stay in Gilead, imagining that one day she will welcome Jack’s son home. The zeal of the Midwestern abolitionists may have almost burned out, but Robinson implies that it could flare again.



William Closson James
Queen’s University
Kingston Ontario

“The Long Journey Home in The Wreckage and Three Day Road

The horrors of two World Wars almost destroy two colonized soldiers—one a pre-Confederation Newfoundlander, the other an aboriginal from James Bay. More theologically, given the human propensity to imbue life with religious meaning, Christian providence and First Nations shamanism are tested in the foreign wars of their colonizers. The circuit completed by their respective homecomings raises large questions about scarred individuals and unfinished business. How does the returnee resemble the one who enlisted? Can the battle-scarred veteran recover himself and begin again? And, what is the “home” available for homecoming?
 The paper compares two works of Canadian fiction, The Wreckage by Michael Crummey (2005) and Three Day Road (2005) by Joseph Boyden. Boyden’s Cree sniper leaves Northern Ontario to become a man-hunter in France during World War I; Crummey’s Newfoundlander flees religious bigotry and a thwarted romance to end up as a POW in Japan during World War II. Bearing an almost apocalyptically altered inner landscape, each one takes a long journey to a home apparently inhospitable to the damaged self.
Crummey explores the roles of fate, circumstance, and providence while searching for an elusive pattern to explain contingency.  Amidst the “wreckage,” his characters make bets and take risks though their lives “seemed part of some mad joke designed to be the end of [them].” Yet the narrative discloses an emerging design behind prejudice and human evil, suggestive of something more mysterious than the vanity of human wishes.
The First Nations characters in Boyden’s novel respond differently to their fate and suffering. They experience their lives as inevitably part of the currents and circumstances into which they are thrown.  They draw on bush skills and First Nations wisdom—including shamanic traditions--as they become misshapen in the theatre of the European war. But their ancestral resources direct them and provide the tools of a restoration. 
Crummey’s Aloysius (“Wish”) and Boyden’s Xavier (“X”) bear remarkable similarities, but amidst their networks of relationships, their sufferings, and their long journeys home, they offer contrasting views of human responsibility, of one’s connection to others, and of the process necessary to heal a broken person.



Hanna Janiszewska
PhD candidate in English at Stanford University


Poetic habitats, impossible homecomings

I would like to consider the nature of uncanny homecomings in the context of poetic practice. Poems both originate in habitats and produce them. In telling the story of the first, they arrive at the second. In the case of Romantic lyrics, that story can describe two kinds of travel. The first uses the malaise of the present moment to urge the poet into a vision of some home long lost. It seeks to turn habitat into habit. The second uses that same malaise to arrive at an uncanny vision of the present, which in its strangeness lets the poet forget that his habitat is not his home. It turns habit into habitat. Both are forms of consolation, which organize the desire for home. But since all consolation is potentially false, because potentially inadequate, such poems need to rely on something more than just a habit of thought, on something more than just method. And that is poetic faith.

I propose to examine the dynamics of poetic faith as the dynamics of homecoming, with special attention to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which lies at the intersection of both philosophy and religion. The tension created at that junction, I believe, is central to the question of what makes a home. It is the tension between thought and belief, a conflict between two modes of being and their capacity to teach us how to feel at home in language and in the world. Because poetic faith can only “exist” through (or in) poems, it must be capable of being willingly produced. That is a problem as far as faith is concerned. For what is a belief if it is only intermittent? But further, what kind of a home could such a faith guarantee?   

In answering these questions, I hope to not only examine the psychological apparatus of the poems themselves, but also of our experience of reading them.


Dr Deborah Jordan
Research Fellow
School of Communication and Journalism
University of Queensland


‘Finding a Spiritual Home in the Environment: Australian Interwar Writers of the 1920s and 1930s’
Eco-centric ideologies recognise humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and the biophysical systems that support them. This paper will address how constructions and narratives of one’s ‘spiritual home’ in the environment by authors and critics can challenge colonial and postcolonial understandings, of --  in this instance -- Australia. Vance Palmer, Australia’s leading man of letters of the period, claimed their’s was a generation seeking to find harmony with the environment; Nettie Palmer believed that writers’ powers depended on their capacity to find a spiritual home in place.  Without the literary imagination, people and places appeared ‘uncanny and ghostlike’ and she evolved a schema to help others find a postcolonial home in and through language. In a time of rapid environmental change, this paper re-visits these writers, that is Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others, in their important initiatives in challenging dominant and habitual ways of understanding and seeing the natural environment through their writing. Often as a result of their ideas they sought out remote country locations and ‘wilderness areas’ to live. Theirs was also a generation who sought to reject Edwardian religion and yet had a strong sense of their own cosmologies; in their failure to fully endorse Indigenous sovereignty, their work has been criticized in the last two decades, as too some of their work in terms of gender.  This paper will seek to explore their writings in context of recent  discourses on ecological sensibilities, identities of place and transnational cosmopolitanism, home and homecoming in the literary imagination, and rapid change through climate change.



Dr Miles Kennedy [NUI Galway, Ireland]



The way HOME:
A synopsis of Bachelardian concrete metaphysics
or
Recovering from Heidegger’s unheimlich maneouvre.
Abstract: This paper examines the notion of 'the homely' which rests at the foundation of Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics. In order to trace the development of this effaced notion through the history of contemporary Continental philosophy and literature, this study progresses by digging down into the enormous chasm set forth in Martin Heidegger's writing and its reception; becomes lost in Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves; climbs out from this labyrinth into the maternal home; and, finally, comes slowly to rest in a recovery of Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics.



Mari Kim, Ph.D.
Lecturer, Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington



Faithfulness and Fulfillment: Eros in Eden

Eden has long been the time/space/place of remembering our past beginning. Yet is a theological home made profoundly uncomfortable by ancient theological anthropologies that insist humanity committed grave sin and doctrinally lost all privilege of returning to its original home. 

Yet experiences of desire in cultural hybridity offer a different interpretation of the Eden narrative. Ambiguity and ambivalence are the hallmarks of a hybrid existence because existence emerges as characterized by struggles to choose the good in a context of multiple and competing goods. An appreciation of desire as eros (the power of love in the form of desire) allows us to return Eden with an understanding that human responsibility is allowed to mature in the crucible of benevolent creation - a creation shaped by a multiplicity of diverse good, each oriented to a particular expression of faithfulness that in turn introduces the necessity of discernment and courage of choice as primary human virtues. Theologically, the ontological non-dualism of benevolent creation makes it possible to discern how the woman in Eden acts with eros to embrace and fulfill (rather than betray and fail) humanity’s vocation to bear the likeness of the divine. Thereafter she is rightly called by her partner “Eve, the mother of all living.” Returning to Eden with the capacity to see the faith in eros reveals that it is erotic faithfulness - nodding towards a Schleiermachian appreciation of original perfection, rather than Augustinian original sin - that emerges as the truth of humanity in the Eden.


C. Ryan Knight
Randolph Community College
Asheboro, NC 27205



“Notoriously Homeless”: The Place of Lvov in Adam Zagajewski’s Poetry
For renowned Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, born in Lvov in 1945 but dislodged with his family from there just four months later, exile and the notion of home uniquely manifest themselves. As Czesław Miłosz suggests in “Notes on Exile” (1976), exiles normally fuse memories of their native realm with their new territory. Zagajewski, however, was far too young to have memories of Lvov, so a homecoming for him is existentially impossible; nonetheless, Lvov assumes a supernatural character, so powerful it can permit the unremembered first months of Zagajewski’s life to “blaze with the light of an epiphany” (Zagajewski, “Two Cities,” 4).
My thesis is this: Adam Zagajewski’s interactions with Lvov demonstrate the need to discover homeliness in homelessness, for all are at risk of historical catastrophe exiling them, and people must be able to discover home anywhere in order to transcend the trauma of their disaster. To develop this, I briefly introduce Zagajewski, and I investigate Zagajewski’s concept of homelessness and its influence upon his poetry. I conclude by integrating this analysis into current critical discussion about cosmopolitanism and witness literature.
Critics acknowledge Lvov possesses an important role in Zagajewski’s writing, but sustained critical attention has yet to be devoted to the place of Lvov in his work. The case of Zagajewski offers unique insight into the reality and vitality of the concept of home, for most examination of exiles’ relationship to their home does not focus on those with no memory of their place of birth.



Dr. Liberty Kohn
English Department
Winona State University




Signifying Emptiness: Cognitive Stylistics, Embodied Conceptual Metaphor, and Buddhist Dharma Poetry

The disciplines of stylistics and cognitive stylistics have over the last several decades become interested in the relationship between the body, mind, and conceptual metaphors of everyday experience and language. These disciplines focus on a variety of cognitive research to explain how our physical relationship to our environment has produced simple master metaphors, such as GOOD IS UP, that we use in multiple varieties of expression. These disciplines have also used cognitive prototype theory, which is based upon research suggesting that we draw our semantic categories and define our baseline semantic definitions through conceptual language’s relationship with the body, not necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus, a default semantic concept is the image schema that we find most usable and practical in an imagined, projected physical environment. Both of these lines of research combine to enhance a language theory suggesting that we project the physical relationship of the human body when interpreting or expressing metaphorical language. While stylistics and cognitive stylistics often focus on imaginative literature or social discourse, these disciplines have not yet focused to great extent on the poetry of Buddhist literature. 

This presentation will focus on how the Buddhist concept of zen and/or emptiness often times reverses the prototypical physical relationship between the human body and its environment. While scholarship investigating the cultural or spiritual aspects of Buddhist poetry are plentiful, these theories of poetics often explain the need to go beyond linguistic determination to discover the emptiness of the sign (Emptiness and Temporality, Christensen, 2008). However, these cultural and spiritual theories of poetics do not explain how Buddhist poetry, through conventional language schemas, sometimes negativizes natural embodied actions—the physical impossibility of  one hand clapping, for instance—to teach enlightenment. 

Yet such physical impossibilities appear often in Buddhist poetics. The tools of stylistics and cognitive stylistics can be used to explain how Buddhist poetry often achieves the epiphany of emptiness through negativizing the body’s natural relationship with its environment. The repeated negativizing can begin to explain how Buddhist poetics and stylistics use yet invert language schemas to present emptiness and, at least in part, avoid the paradox of using language to move beyond linguistic determination. This presentation will present the work of a variety of poets and ancient Buddhist texts and koans, including 6th c. masters Shih Wang Ming and Master Fu, the Dhammapada and others. To better illustrate the negativization of embodied language schemas, I shall compare the examples of Buddhist poetry to similar Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian usages of embodied language schemas.





Seth Laffey
Department of English
Kent State University

Homecoming in George MacDonald’s Phantastes
George MacDonald’s “Faerie Romance for Men and Women,” Phantastes, is a Victorian work of symbolic imagination in which a young man named Anodos experiences a series of adventures in Fairy Land and, in the process, is elevated from a condition of immaturity and selfishness to a genuine—as opposed to a merely legal-- “manhood.” The attainment of manhood is expressed in spiritual terms as his ability to love selflessly:  “I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being beloved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness” (254). This realization comes only after Anodos has performed an act of self-sacrifice which is the cause of his “death” in Fairy Land and his return to his worldly home—the point from which his adventures had begun on the day after his twenty-first birthday and his coming into his inheritance. There is no evidence from the story that Anodos has ever left his home prior to his adventures in Fairy Land, but the course of the narrative makes it clear that Anodos cannot really come into his estate until after he has left that home, successfully completed certain spiritual trials, and acquired certain personal virtues (explicitly associated in the novel with the figure of the knight-errant and the code of chivalry). Thus, homecoming in Phantastes serves as the “objective correlative” for Anodos’s spiritual triumph. Whereas Anodos’s twenty-first birthday is the token of his coming into possession of a material inheritance, his homecoming after his journey marks his assumption of the moral and spiritual qualities that were ostensibly his dead father’s but that, unlike the material wealth, have had to be earned. 
In this paper I would like to trace the formal and thematic ways in which MacDonald emphasizes Anodos’s return to the mundane world as both a sign of his spiritual elevation, and an affirmation by MacDonald of Victorian values that prioritized active and moral involvement in worldly life. 



James Lambert
University of Iowa

“It paseth all understanding”: The Search for Heavenly Joy in post-Reformation England

To discuss an “emotional environment” (from RLA 2011 conference’s CFP) as a description for home, we probably should identify the primary emotions involved. The questions seem rhetorical: Is home identified with anger, desire, sadness, discord? Well, no, home, at least ideally, houses emotional solace, comfort, joy. This has certainly been the case for the projected “home” of traditional Christianity: a heaven waiting to welcome the disciple “home” with tidings of great joy. The Puritan tradition of “Welcome Joy,” the teleological narrative of the difficult life on earth only to return “home” to heaven, might represent the basic assumptions of the ideal emotional environment of heaven. But heavenly joy, or at least the perception of what joy might be like in heaven, is totally foreign to the inhabitants of earth, at least in the larger Christian tradition. In fact, articulating heavenly joy often becomes a losing enterprise simply because part of the faith of heavenly joy’s existence is its incomprehensibility. The ineffability of heavenly joy became a particular problem for Protestants in England in the wake of the Reformation, who wanted to forego the “mystery” of joy in the traditional Church but nevertheless had difficulty locating the kind of joy that might provide a foretaste of heavenly joy. Aquinas and Augustine both defined religious joy as the soteriological union with Christ, and Protestants in the late 16th century found an analog to that union in certain vocal and literary endeavors:  praying, Psalms singing, writing, and sermonizing. In this presentation, I will argue that heavenly joy for English Protestants of the late 16th-century is most often conceived through the devotional practice of “rejoicing,” a speech act that combines scriptural language with individual expression, creating a particular poetics of religious joy. In so doing, religious writers and poets attempted to create a foretaste of the joy broadly conceived as heavenly union with God, or a heavenly homecoming, both familiar and utterly, emotionally foreign. 



Marwood Larson-Harris
Religion Department, Roanoke College

"The Ambiguity of Homecoming in the Zen Oxherding Pictures"
My work traces an ancient Zen visual parable as it has been adapted and reinterpreted by modern visual artists, musicians, playwrights, and filmmakers, and focuses on how these adaptations alter the sense of homecoming in the original.
Homecoming for the Mahayana Buddhist practitioner is never more than a waypoint on a longer journey: for the Buddhist bodhisattva, one who has vowed to end the suffering of all sentient beings, there is no resting place, either literally or figuratively. When one has arrived at the end point of spiritual attainment—nirvana—one must set off again for the benefit of others. 
The 12th c. Chinese Oxherding Pictures, a Zen visual parable that portrays the path of the bodhisattva, depicts this journey of unrest. Its ten allegorical frames, arranged like a comic strip, show a novice who has lost his ox (his true self or “Buddha Nature”) and, after finding and taming it (through spiritual self-discipline), brings it back home (7th frame below), where he rests, at ease with himself from having realized his true nature and become enlightened. But the parable continues: home is not a place the enlightened monk can stay. He returns to the world as a teacher and helps others along the way (final frame).



As twentieth-century artists from both Asia and the West have adapted the Oxherding Pictures in a variety of media, they have retold the simple story so that it is not always explicitly Buddhist but about personal awakening in general. Because of the changes that often occur in these adaptations, the idea of reentering the world is often lost. Adaptations sometimes end with the homecoming and leave off the rentry into the world, or they reinterpret just what the homecoming and return to the world actually mean. 
I will examine how these disruptions of the parable sometimes weight the homecoming over the return to the world, and what this tells us about the use of Buddhism in modern culture. What does this homecoming actually mean when the parable is rewritten through the lenses of different media? Does the desire for home win out in our times over the original parable's spiritual calling?



Tim Lavenz

In light of u-topia: place, poetry, and personhood in Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech

Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech, delivered in 1960, is the only prose expression of his poetics and is thus essential to understanding his poetic work as a whole. In this speech, he ends by saying that poetry "is a kind of homecoming." In this paper, I explore the meaning of this phrase as it pertains to three indissoluble modalities of existence at stake in his work: place, poetry, and personhood. I argue that for each of these, "homecoming" can mean nothing other than engaging and encountering an elsewhere: with others in conversation, with the otherness "within" myself, with silence and language, all on the way to a placeless place: u-topia. We can only go in the direction of such a "home," study "topoi" in its light, and reach for it along an "impossible route." Similarly, the absolute poem, which would lead us this direction, does not and cannot exist, although every poem must somehow respond to its demand. In terms of personhood, we are able to set ourselves free through the poem, yet as an estranged "I," ever-changed in our search for an origin. This is where self becomes sign, where communication is brought to its limits, where we seek out the "other" and the "wholly other." The priority in poetry is thus not given to tropes, metaphors, and imaginative creation, but to the capacity of the poem to reach, to send oneself and to be received, and to perceive places that cannot be empirically proven or found. Out of these imperatives, Celan emphasizes attentiveness above all, namely, attentiveness to beings and things such that poetry is given a chance. It is through attentiveness that the familiar becomes strange, yet renewed; where the self-same becomes other, encountering itself; and finally, where home itself becomes an opening, a free and uncanny space, impossible: u-topia.



Jennifer Loman
Ph.D. Student in English, University of Iowa



A Vision of Himself Entire: Rodriguez’s “Late Victorians” and Augustine’s City of God
While much has been written about the connections between Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs and the Augustinian confessional tradition, little has been written about the connections between Rodriguez’ “Late Victorians” and Augustine’s City of God specifically. This is surprising given that Rodriguez alludes to City of God. “Late Victorians” begins:

St. Augustine writes from his cope of dust that we are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality. Intuition tells us we are meant for some other city. (26)

Rodriguez’s second line refers to City of God’s Book VIII, Chapter XIV titled “Whether mortal men may attain true happiness” in which Augustine ponders the “great question whether man can be both mortal and happy” (Healey 98).  To Augustine, “human unhappiness” (as Rodriguez later puts it) is a requirement in order to “become immortal after death and be joined in fellowship with the eternal blessed angels” (98). This fellowship occurs in the eternal home, the “Heavenly City.” This is the “other city” to which Rodriguez alludes. To Augustine, believers are not meant to find satisfaction on Earth. Rodriguez’s “restless hearts” appear to echo Augustine’s temporality. Edward Smither notes: “The fundamental point made by [St. Augustine]…is that Christians live in this world, but they are not of this world. They are present here as strangers sojourning in a foreign country... Heaven is the Christian’s true home” (7). However, Rodriguez challenges Augustine by emphasizing the import of our earthly home. Much like Robert Orsi who views “lived religion” as synonymous with “lived experience” -- meaning it is found “at work, in home, in the street” (7) -- for Rodriguez, “lived religion” dynamically integrates belief with experience, including the gay experience. Rodriguez investigates deeply-entrenched notions of homosexual identity within the normative built environments of home to question who he ought to be, who Christians ought to be, and who Americans ought to be in the face of the AIDS crisis. Infusing these spaces with tropes from City of God, Rodriguez weaves a postsecular fabric which recuperates homosexuals as integral members of both the secular and spiritual community. 



Robert Luce



Epic in Epic Fantasy

Modern critics and readers have a hard time justifying the use of the term “epic” to describe modern literature. One reason is that this term is difficult to define using ancient texts which have been classified as “epic” for thousands of years, much less applying the term to modern prose. Though a difficult task, it is still tempting to place the epic label on modern texts due to the high status it has in the literary world. One example of this is the use of the term “Epic Fantasy” for the subgenre of science-fiction literature first made popular by J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels. This classification appears to come from the grand scale of these works as well as have plots which revolve around great heroes. While both of these conventions have been argued to be consistent with epic, they are by no means pervasive and seem to be a superficial means of classification.
This essay does not seek to disagree with the term “Epic Fantasy” but instead to constitute the term on more solid ground. Using contemporary genre criticism of epic, this essay will look at the theme of nostos in ancient epic, primarily the Homeric epics but also Gilgamesh, as the central theme of the genre. More specifically though, it is the specific uncanny use of nostos, characterized by Freud, that is characteristic of the genre and which Tolkien uses in his creative works as well as his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” This essay does not postulate that this form of nostos is the only characteristic of ancient epic which is part of this specific fantasy genre, but instead that it is the central narrative function which links ancient epic to Tolkien and others in fantasy.



Julia Madsen
Brown University



The Difficulty in “Exchang[ing] Meaning”: Gertrude Stein’s Return to the Home in Tender Buttons and the Uncanny Critique of Capitalism
In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein returns to the home, the cornerstone of the Victorian family where the woman reigns as “angel.”  However, as opposed to the Victorian notion of religion, for Stein capitalism becomes a religion.  She operates in the realm of the oikos—that is, the household economy, as a means of illuminating capitalism at large.  Stein places an emphasis on currency and exchange throughout her work as she enumerates the objects, food and rooms of the home.   Her keen focus on and perhaps “worship” of the household economy and the currency, exchange and labor necessary to keep it alive becomes a sort of religion with a morality of its own.  Louis Althusser argues that ideology presents itself as eternal, which he relates to Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is eternal.  Ideologies such as that of capitalism reside in the unconscious, where one represses the fact that they are not ultimately eternal.  Furthermore, Althusser’s emphasis on ideology as eternal illuminates the way in which it may be similar to religion.  In “Capitalism as Religion” Walter Benjamin claims that capitalism is “a purely cultic religion” and writes of “the permanence of the cult” in that “each day commands the utter fealty of each worshipper.”  Stein shows how capitalism unconsciously resides in everyday life, and through her estranged language she defamiliarizes capitalism, which creates an uncanny effect in the recognition that it is not ultimately eternal.  She also critiques capitalism through what P. Inman calls “slow writing.”  According to Inman, “[any] unitary word” can be “a point of resistance, an interruption in the ongoing transmission” of capitalism.  He asserts that “[if] writing does nothing else it should always verge on the non-assimilable.”  Through her estranged language which often points to the failure of signification and is ultimately ‘non-assimilable,’ Stein makes it difficult “to exchange meaning.”  In doing so, she has hope for an “incredible justice” that will alleviate the suffering and injustice caused by capitalism.  Through the techniques that I will discuss, Stein paints an uncanny picture of the home in order to critique capitalism.



Ayesha Malik (Ph.D Candidate)
Institute: English Department, SUNY, Buffalo



James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: The Uncanny Existence of the Colonized 
‘For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live’ is Theodor Adorno’s obiter dictum in exile that befits Joyce and his writings considering the British colonial rule that dissipated his homeland and ensued a self-imposed exile. Joyce’s writings became the uncanny home he left behind. He wrote Dubliners in 1914, at the height of a search for national identity and purpose. ‘The Dead’ is the last and the most famous story in the collection that concluded the search with an uncanny existential answer for the colonized.  
This paper will be an extension of the ongoing debate in postcolonial studies of Joyce’s oeuvre and an interpretation of “The Dead” is presented as an instance of the uncanny and spectral lives of the subjects of the colonial rule whose collective past is devastated by the colonizers and who desperately try to live the past, inducing nostalgia, inertia and mourning only. The paper will underscore the fact that under colonial rule, the present of the subjects cease to exist; their memories revert to a fragmented past that can’t sustain their existence. They become symbols of bygone virtues and struggles of that collective past; all the characters (except the protagonist, Gabriel) can be described as faulty representations of Irish generosity, political dilemma, romantic love, and folklore. 
Gabriel represents the struggle of a conscious mind for a lost home and identity that Joyce as a writer is undergoing. Gabriel shares the present with Joyce whose sacred home and secured past is disrupted by the excess of an uncanny and disruptive power. He refuses to submit to the nostalgia that his fellow characters exhibit and struggles to hold onto something that can give meaning to his present. But unfortunately, as is the case in all colonized communities, his present no longer holds any substantial grounds for his identity. At the end of the story, he realizes how ‘One by one, they were all becoming shades’ under the crippling power and submissively resign to his fate; entering the ‘grey impalpable world’ and becomes one of the dead.


Jessica Schad Manuel
Institution: The Master's College




Spiritual Nomadology

Spiritual warfare in the Christian religion requires a certain kind of war ethic, a weapons system, and a mode of operation. The sixth chapter of Paul's letter to the church of Ephesus provides the believer with details on what God provides for their spiritual armor, but what exactly does a spiritual battle look like? What kinds of people and forces are involved? What would the most effective approach be? The concept of Spiritual Nomadology is a fusion of spiritual battle and nomadology. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of nomadology functions when the individual loses that which he pledges allegiance to: family, state, nation, and so on. The ideal nomad for Deleuze and Guattari is the schizophrenic. The schizophrenic embraces every flow of desire and is not limited by Freud's daddy-mommy-me paradigm of psychoanalysis. This paper is a philosophical and theological approach to the concept of homecoming in the believer's life. I explore how the believer who regularly goes into spiritual battle and follows their flow of desire, is a walking example of Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic nomad. 



Christine Mazurkewycz, Ph.D. candidate
University of Iowa, English


Marguerite Duras’s 1958 novel, Moderato cantabile, tells the story of ten unhurried days in the life of Anne Desbaresdes, a wife and mother who leaves home each day to visit a café on the industrial outskirts of town following a murder that she in part witnesses.  Her memory of the event initiates these daily trips to the café where she drinks wine and meets Chauvin, an uncompromising masculine figure of identity and authority.  The meetings between Anne and Chauvin that ensue begin to embody elements of the psychoanalytic scene as they become ritualized and fraught with indeterminacy.  The repetitive and contrapuntal structure of their dialogue, borne along by a narrating consciousness too impersonal to contain it, slowly discloses an unspoken, because unsayable, psychic pain.  This pain is fully realized in the novel’s penultimate chapter, for not until then does Duras situate Anne in her own home, a home not unfamiliar to readers because of its tortured recurrence in the dialogue between Anne and Chauvin.          
As an ideological space marked by leisure, privilege and autonomy, Anne’s home is now unhomely, marred with her own vomit and self-abuse—the price she willingly pays to confront and be done with the horror in herself.  I will offer a psychoanalytic reading of Moderato cantabile that focuses on the home as an overdetermined, contested site of both symbolic and semiotic excess.  On the one hand, home is the psychological space of repression from which Anne seeks refuge.  She feels drawn to the café because, unlike her home, it hovers on the prohibitive yet liberating fringe of jouissance, which is invested, according to Kristeva, “in cracking the socio-symbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself” (Revolution 79).  On the other hand, home is the physical space where Anne receives, as a result of this upheaval, “the strange nourishment that has been forced upon her” (MC).  In Moderato cantabile, home may be understood then as both a liminal space of psychic dislocation and a site of somatic re-integration, an argument I will explore in relation to Duras’s interstitial status as a French migrant.        



Sam Mickey
University of San Francisco



Our Planetary Home: The Anthropocosmic Vision of Religion and Ecology
Figures of home pervade the world’s religious traditions.  In recent decades, a new figure of home has been emerging, one for which home is understood in terms of ecology (from the Greek oikos, “home” or “dwelling”).  In response to increasing environmental crises and increasing scientific awareness of the interconnectedness of humans with other forms of life and with the evolutionary processes of the universe, religions are entering what Mary Evelyn Tucker, founder of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, calls their “ecological phase.”  That is to say, environmental crises and scientific developments compel religions to move away from narrowly human-centered (anthropocentric) attitudes, which marginalize and instrumentalize values intrinsic to the rest of the natural world, and they compel religions to attend to human-Earth relations instead of focusing only on human-human and human-divine relations.  As religion are entering an ecological phase, their understandings of home are moving away from anthropocentrism, overcoming notions of humans as belonging to an exclusively other-worldly home that grants them the privilege to reduce the natural world to a collection of objects to be used and exploited.  In this paper, I discuss examples of various religious traditions that are making a transition from anthropocentric to anthropocosmic understandings of home.  Whereas anthropocentric perspectives consider humans and the natural world to be mutually exclusive opposition, anthropocosmic perspectives recognize the ecological interconnectedness and complex relationality of humans (anthropoi) and the natural world (kosmos).  The word “anthropocosmic” has been used throughout the twentieth century, first appearing in contexts of religious studies (Mircea Eliade, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz) to account for the microcosm-macrocosm correspondences found in religious phenomena.  The word was also used in contexts of phenomenology (Gaston Bachelard, Paul Ricoeur, and Gabriel Marcel) to describe the existential situation of human consciousness, which is always already intertwined with the world.  In the twenty-first century, those strands phenomenology and religious studies converged among many scholars of religion and ecology (Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Tu Weiming), who propose anthropocosmic environmental ethics in efforts to cultivate care for our planetary home in a time of crisis.      

Ryan T. O’Leary
University of Iowa



“Returning to Gaia:
Coming Home to the Earth Mother on the Other Side of Estrangement”
According to the existentialist philosophical and theological thought or figures such as Paul Tillich, estrangement is a universal (existential) human condition.  In fact, in many ways Christianity is based in a deep awareness of the condition of estrangement—the idea that somehow the human condition is one of exile into a world that is not home.  This is expressed symbolically in the story of the Fall, and the anticipated return to home is figured symbolically in terms of redemption.  Meanwhile, science is bringing us back to an awareness of our “linked-in-ness”—the ecological interconnectedness and interdependence of all life—at the same time that increasing dependence on technology reinforces our separation from the “natural” world.  New, green religious trends—both Christian and non-Christian—can thus be read in terms of a longing for return to a lost home, as a sort of redemption.  This paper will suggest that the symbol of Gaia can (and does) function as a symbol of that to which we are connected, that from which we come and from which we are estranged even as we live within it, and that to which we return in green forms of religious devotion and thought.  Further, it will suggest that though Gaia is a “pagan” symbol it is compatible with Christian theology so long as Gaia is seen as one manifestation of the outpouring divine creativity—that is, as created—and not made synonymous with God.


Jessica L. Osnoe
Campbell University



“A Scottish Girl in an English Village:” The Search for Home in “Doctor Who”

When “Doctor Who” returned for its sixth season in 2010, head writer Stephen
Moffat introduced afresh the themes of displacement and the search for a homecoming
which have accompanied the Doctor on his travels for decades. The Doctor himself is a
weary wanderer who roams the Universe in a time machine/spaceship which, like him,
is the last of its kind - the lone remnant of a home long since destroyed. While the
previous seasons have addressed the issue of home, season six features it in the story
of the Doctorʼs new traveling companion, Amy Pond, and the quest to restore the home
& identity which she doesnʼt realize sheʼs lost.
When the Doctor first meets her as a child, he remarks that he understands &
can help her because “[she] is a Scottish girl in an English village and [he knows] how
that feels.” Amy, her home and her family become the center of the plot from that point
forward. Her world becomes a microcosm for humanity and the desperate, often
inexplicable longing for home which characterizes us all. The particular beauty of Amyʼs
story is that she doesnʼt remember and, therefore, cannot realize what sheʼs lost in her
home & her family until she regains them
This aspect of the story also lends itself particularly well to a theological reading;
as beings separated from the presence of God by the fall, humans donʼt fully realize the
communion theyʼve lost until their spirits are made alive again through salvation in
Christ. Like Amy, many spend seasons in sadness, longing to go home and mourning
their separation from it. Yet, when they discover salvation, their rejoicing in a restoration
beyond their hope or expectation so greatly outweighs their previous sadness that they
have difficulty recalling life before the present. Likewise, the season-ending joy in
“Doctor Who” recompenses Amy for the sadness & wandering sheʼs endured by
rewarding her with a family reunion on her wedding day. This homecoming establishes
the ubiquity of humanityʼs search for home, the need for such stories to affirm the quest
and the hope of finding joy at the end.



Seeing and Being Seen: Contemplating a Theological Vision of Home
Abstract
Michele Petersen
University of Iowa
Human being, originally endowed with finite freedom, is a mediating being between two elements of itself that are necessarily unequal, the finite and the infinite.  These mediations are partial, and so a fallible human being, according to Paul Ricoeur.  Language is the medium of these fragile mediations.  Fallenness and fallibility give rise to hermeneutics; and, with hermeneutics comes the possibility of capable human.  An understanding of the relation between silence and discourse is one essential element that comprises capable human.  I show the relation of silence to discourse in appropriating the phenomenological work of Bernard P. Dauenhauer.  I then open up a depth dimension of silence in grafting the practice of contemplative silence onto this structure.  The adjective “contemplative” adds to silence this element: The depth of meaning is held in consciousness amidst silence.
I explore a theological vision of capable human, who with contemplative awareness, carries out the practice of contemplative silence in seeing and being seen.  In this way, the practice assumes spiritual and ethical import.  Human being fashioned contemplative silence as a transformative practice in order to more fully understand the truth of redeeming grace in lived existence, that is, to be able to look continually with fresh eyes and see the world in ever new ways.  The practice of contemplative silence can be seen as the means and end of spiritual transformation in that it is one approach to redeem fallen human being.
One way to think about the nature and meaning of the practice of contemplative silence is as an ongoing mediating activity of understanding the relation between human fallibility and human capability in lived hermeneutical existence.  There is deepening awareness of both fallibility and capability, which are held in creative tension with the practice.  Hence capable human moves between an understanding of finite freedom and human fallibility, and infinite capacity and human capability, which gives way to a new mode of capable being.




Brad Pickens, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Farmhouse Mission, Inc.


Home, in Time:
The Paradise of Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymn and the Broken Worlds of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Cinema
The idea of home is a function, not simply of place, but of time.  Time infuses place with memory, symbol, and metaphor, and it allows the inhabitant to experience meaning that transcends geographic location.  The fourth century hymnodist, Ephrem the Syrian constructed his theology through hymns built around paradox, typology, and the malleability of language.  Ephrem’s great cycle, Hymns on Paradise, explores the idea and nature of Paradise, which he enters in mystical vision.  For Ephrem, the world is infused with sacramental character, and he understands the Paradise of Eden and the Paradise of the eschaton to be the same place, humanity’s true home, as it is displaced in time.  His hymnody is an attempt to make the eschaton present in time, through the sacrament of Christian worship.  

In like manner, the masterful 20th century Soviet filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky, was occupied with the concept of home, time, and sacrament, though his reflections on these themes are quite different from those of Ephrem.  Tarkovsky’s films are profound meditations on what it means to be human, and they explore the possibility of the re-sacralization of the world after the death of God through Tarkovsky’s attempt to break the artistic and ideological boundaries of 1960s and 1970s Soviet Realism.  Tarkovsky’s mode of exploration is through memory and the constant remembrance of home, as home transcends spatial boundaries and exists as an ever present moment with the individual throughout time.

These two dissimilar poets demonstrate in their work an essential characteristic of home: they show that home is a longing for what is past and is simultaneously a hope for the future.  Time is the mechanism that allows Ephrem to experience Paradise in the midst of a fallen world and to allow Tarkovsky to create a similar return to an idyllic past in the midst of the devastation of the earth and of the human person.  As such they demonstrate the ability to live at home, in time.


Eric Rothgery
Assistant Professor
Religion and Philosophy
Roanoke College
Salem, VA

“Re-imaging home: patronage of the arts as a way to regain wellbeing in a Sufi tomb in India”

In 2007, the centuries-old peace of the hillside Sufi tomb sanctuary of Moinuddin Chishty (d. 1230) in Ajmer, India was shattered by a bomb set off on the fringes of the dargah tomb complex.  This event set off a cascade of panic and frantic pleas to help bring the victims to area hospitals.  It also set off a desire to regain a sense of wellbeing for those heirs and helpers (khadims) of the Sufi saint buried there who call the dargah tomb complex home.  One of the primary heirs of Moinuddin Chishty, the present gaddi nashin, Syed Salman Chishty, in 2009 created a foundation dedicated to renewal of the space—and of Sufism in general—through art.  I explore renewal of Salman Chisty’s sense of home where he lives in the tomb complex of his ancestor through his patronage and exposition of traditional Qur’anic calligraphy, Sufi paintings and music, and through contributing his own photographic images that depict life not just at the dargah in Ajmer, but the life of Sufi devotees across the Muslim world.  Through personal interviews with Salman Chisty as well as some exploration of his writings, blogs and websites, I show that his spiritual sense of home was shaken by the blast, but that through his work with his foundation—the Chishty Foundation—he is personally reforging his home again as a place of peace, religious tolerance and inclusivity and remaking for his community of khadims and pilgrims to the tomb a sense of refuge from the ugliness of violence and extremism.  His patronage of the arts in his effort to renew a sense of home at the dargah in Ajmer is an effort to put into action to words of his forbear, Moinuddin Chishty, who taught, “Love towards all, Malice towards none.”



David Seamon, 
Department of Architecture, 
211 Seaton Hall, 
Kansas State University, 


“Gaston Bachelard’s Topoanalysis in the 21st Century: Home and Inhabitation as Portrayed in Alan Ball’s HBO Television Series, Six Feet Under”

In Poetics of Space, phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard defined topoanalysis as “the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives.” This presentation contributes to topoanalysis by asking how home and inhabitation are to be interpreted in the 21st century. To provide insight on this question, I explore their portrayal in writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its fifth and final season in 2005.
            In this comedy-drama, a widowed mother, her teenage daughter, and two adult sons live in the upper stories of a Pasadena dwelling that, on ground and basement levels, houses their family mortuary business. In their love and concern for each other, though sometimes left unspoken and often expressed awkwardly, this family represents a more or less ordinary American home. But in many other ways—the fact that the daughter skirmishes with drugs and sex, one son comes out as a gay man, and the mother struggles with the sudden loss of her husband, that the brothers as morticians bring the outside world of differences into their home through death—this program’s picture of contemporary inhabitation accommodates otherness, dysfunction, and emotional travail, both of the home and of the world the home enjoins.
            I argue that, topoanalytically, this television series intimates the need today of an at-homeness that directs itself inwardly toward inhabitants but also directs itself outwardly toward the world beyond the home, which is comfortable and secure yet open to uncertainty, inconstancy, strife, and difference.


Jennifer Shook
University of Iowa (English  PhD student)


“Into the Forest (for the trees): Cultivation and Wilds in Fairy Tales”


The persistence and generativity of fairy tales speaks to the deep cultural longings and fears these tales address.  In fairy tales from the Italian Renaissance to the Versailles court to the nation-building Grimms to twentieth-century feminist poetry to Broadway musicals, trees have marked the intersection of nature and culture. Through such tales, we cultivate nature into civilization, and our use of language—its symbols, its history, its form, tells us stories about that growth.  In fairy tales, ancient mythologies of many religions and cultures layer into new combinations, still holding spiritual authority and markers of their place of origin as well as the ability to build a new home.  While in some eras, generational struggle for control over the home reflects growing emphasis on the importance of domestic space, a carving out of the non-wild, in others heroes and heroines leave home for trial or adventure, finding in the woods a place of transitional education.  Proper behavior in nature orients and marks the journeyer for proper placement in culture upon their return home.  Fairy tales anthropomorphize the intangible through metaphor, and bear marking of their origins in ancient religions and cultural systems.  Their providence incarnates through material symbols.  This paper follows the symbol of trees through comparative readings of fairy tales as a means to track cultural issues such as gender, generations, industrialization, nation-building, seduction, the sacred, loss, legal personhood, free will, and fate.



Ann S.F. Swaner, PhD
Barry University


Pilgrimage: Finding a Home in Sacred Space and Time
One might suppose that in our secular, technological age the rite of pilgrimage would be dying.  But participation in pilgrimage (a voluntary, purposeful journey to a sacred place) is growing in all religions, even as traditional church participation declines.  Pilgrimage to sacred sites to break away from the regular routine of life, to move to a new life stage, to atone for sin, to receive healing, to gain knowledge of the world, to commune with other pilgrims, and to encounter ultimate reality is a fundamental feature of religion.  Even those who believe that God is everywhere sometimes feel the need to seek Her in certain sacred spaces.
What draws pilgrims of all ages, cultures, walks of life, and religions is related to ‘home’ in many ways: 
Fundamental to pilgrimage is the separation from the social and spiritual status quo, ie, home.
The pilgrim seeks what home has not been able to provide.
The pilgrim travels to find her ‘true home;’ one aspect is to be at home within oneself.
The pilgrimage allows one to feel at home in the sacredness of earth (the encounter with nature is a prominent feature of most pilgrimage accounts); this includes feeling at home in ones own body.
The pilgrim is invited to find a home within the communion of saints. The experience of fellow travelers raises awareness of different ways of being human and awakens the pilgrim to his solidarity with companions on the journey across time and space.
The pilgrim leaves home to return to it transformed by the journey, able to see home from a fresh perspective.  The purpose of a pilgrimage is not to leave home forever but to return with a new sense of hope and purpose.  The goal is to be more at home, spiritually, physically, and socially.
This paper will look briefly at the history and function of pilgrimage in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and then explore the commonalities of pilgrimage across religious boundaries, in process and in theme, especially as they relate to home, leaving home, and finding a true home.



Andrew Williams
University of Iowa



Uncanny Islands: The Religio-political Implications of Crusoe’s Un-Home-Like Homes
The status of Robinson Crusoe (1719) as an enduring classic is due in part to its conflation of a number of archetypal narrative patterns: exile and return, fall and redemption, conversion, and development from survival in the state of nature to fulfillment in a social state.  These basic narrative structures are complicated by Crusoe’s ambivalence towards his island; initially driven to despair by his isolation, Crusoe eventually transforms the island into a home, valuing his condition for the spiritual possibilities that it creates.   This ambivalence emerges most clearly in Crusoe’s uncanny homecomings.  The first is Crusoe’s arrival on his island, which, if it is not immediately recognizable as such, eventually becomes a true home.  The second is his return to England, which, while offering the comforts of society and mercantilism, can never be a home for Crusoe again.  In turn, this ambivalence points to a number of issues that Defoe negotiates in the text, two of which I will examine in my paper.  The precise alignment of Crusoe’s exile on his island with the rule of Charles II and James II, along with his parody of absolutism, suggests a political allegory dealing most explicitly with the issue of religious toleration or “Liberty of Conscience.”  Defoe uses the ideas of home and homecoming in order to add emotional weight to his critique of later Stuart rule, pointing to a sense of exile experienced by English dissenters like Defoe.  This political allegory exists in uneasy tension with another of Defoe’s ideological projects, the attempt to delineate what Michael McKeon calls “the highly experimental identity of the Christian capitalist.”  Crusoe’s island serves as an ideal space for the attempted conflation of economic and spiritual “application” and “improvement.”  Nevertheless, the contradictions inherent in the Christian capitalist identity become apparent in the conflicting pulls of the island and England as home spaces more amenable to either spiritual or economic imperatives.  Ultimately the concept of home in Robinson Crusoe is fundamentally related to the experience of spiritual development; the novel’s uncanny homecomings offer a useful approach to a nexus of religious, economic, and political issues.      


Jayme M. Yeo
Rice University

National Home in Amelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judeorum
  
For early-seventeenth-century England, the idea of the nation as a “home,” both politically and theologically, was greatly disrupted by the traumatic accession of a Scottish monarch and the escalation of religious sectarianism. These social ruptures were further magnified by their greater historical context, bookended as they were by the Protestant Reformation and the looming shadow of Civil War. The resulting instability became a testing ground for advancing different theorizations of the nation as home space, and, notably, allowing previously marginalized populations to vocalize their own ideas of a national “home.”

This paper investigates one such instance of marginal claims on early modern English homeliness, embodied in the work of the female poet Aemelia Lanyer. Although her narrative poem, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum (1611), is often read as a protofeminist invective against the unfair treatment of women, this paper argues that her poem bears scrutiny as a politically-minded work that reimagines England as home. This paper will begin by reviewing recent work on Lanyer that suggests her poem’s deep dissatisfaction with Jacobean domestic policy before arguing that her community of women centered on the compassionate Christ is as much an attempt at imaginatively restructuring England’s monarchy as it is a criticism of gender oppression. In this sense, Salve Deus Rex Judeorum offers an alternative idea of England as a political theological home.

By investigating Lanyer in the context of her contemporary politics, this essay also fruitfully contributes to studies in early modern women writers. Recent works have struggled to integrate female authors into the same conversations that their male counterparts already occupy. By focusing on the national politics, rather than the gender politics, of Lanyer’s community of women, this paper ultimately demonstrates how Lanyer reshapes the nation as a home space within her imaginative work.


Michael Zeigler
Concordia Seminary Graduate School
St Louis, MO

 “At Home in God or the World?  Homecomings in Moltmann, Gerhard, and Plotinus” 
Christianity of Modern times was often criticized as other-worldly and irrelevant.  Present concern to reverse the degradation of our ecological home continues to see heavenly-minded Christianity as no earthly good.  Jürgen Moltmann has taken pains to theologically address both Modernity’s sense of homelessness and Christianity’s perceived irrelevance.  He argues that the messianic narrative of the Old and New Testaments drives toward a final homecoming here in this world.  The aim of Christian hope is not a home in the eternity of the beyond, but in the future of this earth eschatologically renewed in the crucified, risen, and returning Messiah Jesus.  Moltmann has explicitly contrasted his vision of homecoming against that of John Gerhard, the central figure of 17th Century Lutheran Orthodoxy.  By teaching the ultimate annihilation of this present universe, Gerhard’s heavenward narrative makes his vision insignificant for embodied, communal, ecologically-minded life.  This paper examines how Gerhard’s and Moltmann’s visions of hope shape their respective narratives.  Whereas the former seeks a home in God instead the world, the later insists the two are not antithetical—ultimate homecoming in God is a homecoming in the world and vice versa.  My primary means for critically comparing these two narratives is a third homecoming narrative—that of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus, the last great philosopher of the ancient world.  As the prominent figure of the Neo-Platonism that interacted with the early Christian Church, Plotinus and his vision of the emanation and return of all things to “the One” is important for this dialogue.  Although Gerhard and Motlmann narrate contradicting Christian homecomings, both were indirectly shaped by Plotinus—Gerhard through the mysticism of Augustine, and Moltmann through the panentheism of Hegel.  This study is important in that it shows how religious narratives can be shaped by multiple traditions and lead to conflicting accounts of reality and hope with their corresponding socio-ecological ethical practices.  It has implications for those who have found their identity, security, and meaning in a particular narrative and aim to better understand and critically evaluate its sources.