Religion from the outside: Christian symbolism in non-Christian art Art as Revelation one-day conference - £45
Christian symbolism gains its primary meaning within the theological and liturgical grammar of Christian faith. Yet many of its images, narratives and visual motifs circulate widely beyond explicitly Christian contexts.
This conference, organised by Art as Revelation (AaR), will explore how Christian symbols are reinterpreted, reframed and redeployed in non-Christian settings across literature, music, visual art, film, television and digital media. Papers may examine cases ranging from nineteenth-century opera and modernist literature to contemporary animation gaming, and popular culture.
Art as Revelation (AaR) joins three research trajectories in aesthetic cognition: an innovative theoretical account, a programme of empirical research, and a world-class research cluster.
The research group invites contributions to this conference that investigate how Christian imagery functions when detached from Christian confession: as aesthetic resource, cultural memory, critique of Christianity, vehicle for other spiritualities, or simply as widely understood symbolic vocabulary. They are particularly interested in the use of Christian symbolism to offer alternatives to Christianity and its use in contexts so far from its origins that it develops an alternative system of reference. The preference is to focus on central cases of work by artists not professing Christianity: edge cases may be considered at another time.
Scholars from all relevant fields are invited to submit abstracts of papers for presentation. Submissions should be case study papers of 15 minutes, to be followed by a panel discussion, or analytical research papers of 25 minutes, to be followed by a response and questions.
Please send a paper title, abstract, and CV or weblink to [email protected] by 30th April. The registration link can be found on the conference website and will close on 6 June.