Webmaster’s Note: The following notes of various definitions, conceptions, and formulations of heresy offered during the 2014 ISHS Conference were recorded by Jordan Miller.

Possible wording for use in the Society’s bylaws:
The society recognizes fully that as definitions of “religion” are notoriously problematic, in turn, varieties of religious expression or reactions against particular religious expressions are also impossible to define comprehensively. As a result, each term––”heresy,” “blasphemy,” and “unbelief”––is dynamic and the Society’s understanding of these definitions leaves them each, by both necessity and design, open-ended and slippery. They mutually constitute each other and are context-dependent. Read the rest of this entry »

At the risk of sounding irreverent (or a bit heretical?), I was struck by how much the ISHS can sound like the “International Society Haunted by Spirituality.” This was most evident in James Wood’s wonderfully allusive plenary, but there were undercurrents in other discussions and papers. As a religion scholar, it’s very interesting to watch people tiptoeing into the shallow end—or diving into the deep end—of the topic which I have made my professional focus. My sense is the Society can be a new “middle space” between the American Academy of Religion and the Modern Languages Association. The breadth of interdisciplinarity was exciting and refreshing. It was probably the most diverse meeting I’ve attended.

This will be a fun, stimulating group to hang out with!

[Webmaster’s note: This post is part of a series offering impressions of, and reflections on, the 2014 ISHS Conference by participating Society members.]

James Morrow
Novelist

I think our premiere convention proved a ringing affirmation of heretical literature in all its glorious paradoxicality. Valuable poems, plays, stories, and novels embrace simultaneously the discursive and the dramatic; they cannot be domesticated. During the Friday afternoon roundtable I introduced the image of Ivan Karamazov “returning his ticket”—his unwillingness to accept the tortured child as the price of a harmonious universe—and I was pleased when James Wood, in his keynote address that evening, reminded us of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s anxiety that the vivid character of Ivan might eclipse Father Zosima in the reader’s mind. Dostoyevsky’s fear was not unfounded. His novel revels in ambiguity. And so the conversation continues…

[Webmaster’s note: This post is part of a series offering impressions of, and reflections on, the 2014 ISHS Conference by participating Society members.]