CCL Mideast 2010
Call for Papers

Conference on Christianity and Literature

2010 Mideast Regional Conference
“Pilgrims in Place”

Grove City College    Grove City, PA

March 11-13, 2010

Mideast 2010 Conference on Christianity and Literature "Pilgrims in Place"

The 2010 Mideast Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature will be held at Grove City College in Grove City, PA, March 11-13, 2010.  We will explore intersections between Christianity, literature, and notions of pilgrimage and place—particularly the seeming tension between the necessary discipline of place that Wendell Berry writes about and the equally compelling disposition of Gabriel Marcel’s homo viator or Walker Percy’s castaway (among many others).  G.K. Chesterton’s concern with cultivating a proper kind of exile, which he termed “homelessness at home,” may also illuminate our discussions.  Stories of return, penitential or existential journeys, liturgical processions, ventures of immigration or emigration, the involuntary exile of the refugee, the ethic of hospitality, “lighting out for the territory”—all of these might prove fruitful as well.  We hope you will consider joining us.

This conference will include traditional panels by faculty and undergraduate student panels with faculty moderators. Proposals for panels, roundtables, or individual twenty-minute presentations are invited.  For more details about the conference and the call for papers, please visit the conference website: www2.gcc.edu/dept/engl/CCLmideast2010.  Send 300-word abstracts or panel proposals by November 16, 2009 to H. Collin Messer, English Department, Grove City College, hcmesser@gcc.edu.

Featured Speakers

Steven Bouma-Prediger
Professor of Religion, Hope College, Holland, MI

Steven Bouma-Prediger is most recently the co-author of

Beyond Homelessness:  Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Eerdmans 2008).

Farrell O’Gorman
Novelist and Associate Professor of Catholic Studies, Depaul Univ., Chicago, IL

Farrell O’Gorman has published a novel, Awaiting Orders (Idylls Press 2006), and a highly acclaimed study of Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, Peculiar Crossroads:  Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction (LSU Press 2004).

Conference Details

• Early next month, we will be providing information for hotels in Grove City, which should be available at a conference rate.

• The conference will kick off on Thursday evening, March 11, with our first keynote address, and will finish up around noon on Saturday. The cost of the conference (including lunch and dinner on Friday, as well as lunch on Saturday) will be in the neighborhood of $75, plus membership dues for CCL (http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/info/) if you are not already a current member.

• We will be working on the schedule over the next few weeks as submissions come in. You’ll note that we’ve extended the deadline. Please visit this page in late November for more details.

• In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if we can be of any service or answer any questions.