In the week after Easter I had the privilege of travelling to the Republic of Macedonia to take part in a conference on ‘The Bible and Literature’. It was co-hosted by the Macedonian Academy of the Sciences and Arts – a research university in the capital city of Skopje – and the Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture, a Christian organisation seeking to engage with academic circles and promote interfaith discussions in Macedonia and surrounding areas. This was the first time the two organisations had worked officially together and the result was a fascinating and wide-ranging bilingual conference touching on scholarship from manuscript studies to feminist theory.
The two keynote speakers represented two different ways of taking the title of the event. The first, my fellow guest Professor Simon Horobin of Magdalen College, Oxford, looked at Biblical aspects of literature – specifically, the genre of the saint’s life in a fourteenth-century collection he identified for the first time only ten years ago. The second, our host Academician Katica Kulavkova of MASA, examined literary aspects of the Bible, pondering the discourses of the sacred in the parables of Christ and their modern adaptation by the twentieth-century Serbian writer Borislav Pekić.
I also had the opportunity to present on my research, analysing the use of the Psalms in a thirteenth-century text. Other topics included the ‘feminine principle’ in the Bible and apocryphal texts; the Book of Malachi in James Joyce’s Ulysses; creation in Marilynne Robinson’s novels; the image of the suffering Virgin Mary in medieval frescoes and contemporary Macedonian poetry, and various others. I found it particularly stimulating to hear from Eastern Orthodox perspectives, and also from a number of academics who are also poets. This pairing of vocations seemed much more common in Macedonia than has been my experience in the UK!
The Balkan Institute for Faith and Culture stems from the small minority of evangelical believers in Macedonia, and is committed to fostering real and productive dialogue between different expressions of Christian faith, other religions, and more secular elements of society. This was certainly a feature of the conference, and for me also provoked the question of how this could be done more effectively in academic and literary spheres in the UK. The humanities have certainly seen a ‘religious turn’ over the last several decades, which (in my discipline especially) has borne fruit in history, theory, and interpretation which takes seriously the living power of religion. In a world where, in the West as well as the East, the centrality of religion in human decision-making and lifestyle is ever more obvious, Christian academics have an opportunity to speak into what can be a self-deceptively ‘secular’ academy with the authority of personal experience as well as disciplinary expertise.
The conference took place on 20-21 April 2017.
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