Preliminary Program

Below is a summary of our call for papers at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature on Nov. 23-26 2024 in San Diego, California. Links are provided in the titles of each of the sessions to a fuller description of each session.

If you would like to submit an abstract for one of these sessions, please go to the SBL meeting website (https://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/), select the link for the Annual Meeting, then the Call for Papers and finally the Greco-Roman Religions Section. Please make sure that you indicate in your abstract the number of the session for which you are applying (Session 1, 2, 3, or 4).

If you are not currently a member of the SBL, but you wish to submit an abstract for consideration, please contact one of the co-chairs of the Greco-Roman Religions Section, Barbette Spaeth (bsspae@wm.edu) or Maria Doerfler (maria.doerfler@yale.edu).

Abstracts are due by March 20, 2024. 

SUMMARY

Session 1:  “Movement in and beyond the Ancient Mediterranean: Migrants, Tourists, Pilgrims, Travelers.”

Recently, scholarly attention has increasingly turned to different modes of movement in premodernity and the effects that movement had on the social, cultural, and religious life of persons and peoples. This session explores how the movement of individuals and people groups, whether forced (e.g., through exile, displacement, or natural disaster) or voluntary (e.g., in pilgrimage, travel, or through imperial expansion), transformed religion within and beyond the ancient Mediterranean.

Session 2: “Goddess Worship in Greco-Roman Antiquity”

Ancient Greek and Roman worship of goddesses was commonplace and highly variegated. This panel explores three themes related to this phenomenon: the viability of “Goddess worship” as a scholarly category, regional and chronological variations in these cults, and Greco-Roman goddess worship in relationship with other religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and neopaganism.

Session 3: “New Work in Greco-Roman Religions”

This session is completely open: we invite papers dealing with any aspect of Greek or Roman religion, including their interactions with Judaism, Christianity, and modern paganism.

Session 4: “Reaching Far and Wide: Elite Values and Wider Social Interactions in Religious Settings across the Ancient Mediterranean” (with the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions)

While elite influences have shaped both ancient religions and the surviving evidence for them, religious events were also often opportunities during which individuals could encounter others beyond their familiar contexts. This panel invites papers discussing such interactions, including those concerning less mainstream religious ideas and actions.

Greco-Roman Religions this year will offer four sessions at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Antonio (Nov. 18-21, 2023): three of these include an open call for abstracts, while the fourth will have invited speakers. Please click here and scroll down to submit an abstract for one of our open call sessions on the SBL site. Please indicate in your abstract the session (1, 2, or 3 below) for which you wish your paper to be considered. All abstracts are due by March 14, 2023.

1. “Interactions between Human and Divine in the Ancient and Modern World,” co-sponsored with the AAR Contemporary Pagan Studies unit, is an open call session. We invite papers for this session that address divine epiphanies in ancient Greek and Roman religion and/or in contemporary paganism. Divine epiphany and appearing gods define the vitality of Greco-Roman cults in the lives of ancient cult adherents – experiences of this nature define these religious traditions and the gods as real, as well as contributing to shaping social identities and cultures. Mindful that “paganism” in Mediterranean antiquity simply means traditional cults and practices in local and translocal manifestations, contemporary paganism may include deliberate re-installing and performances of ancient cults or modern adaptations of these in new settings, often countercultural in character, within a context of hegemonic Christian cultures or secular societies. This circumstance invites comparative description because the juxtaposition raises the question of the relationship of modern paganism to ancient cultic discourses and practices. In addition, proposals may also explore the function of contemporary reconstituting of ancient cultic traditions in comparison to the function of cults in antiquity. Papers will ideally address issues of divine epiphany and the differential reception of the divine in the Greco-Roman and modern worlds. Proposals that pursue comparative theorizing are also welcome.
2. “Reconsidering Belief in Greek and Roman Religion,” focuses on a theme prominent in recent scholarship, namely that of belief as central to Greek and Roman religion. This session will consist of two parts. A panel of invited speakers will review Jacob L. Mackey’s Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton University Press 2022), and the author will respond to these papers. For the second part, we issue an open call for papers addressing the issue of belief in the various manifestations of Greek and Roman religions. Long considered idiosyncratic of (Protestant) Christianity, belief has for the past two decades been reevaluated in light of new theoretical approaches, with scholars (including Mackey) attributing to belief a vital role in the functioning and even the foundation of religious traditions. For the open portion of the session, we welcome studies that do not necessarily engage with Mackey’s book, although appropriate papers might apply or challenge featured aspects of his theoretical approach (e.g., “Intentionality” of belief, relationship of belief to emotion and action, shared belief, “deontology” and its relation to morality, “social ontology”), or present case studies that demonstrate the application of theory to specific religious phenomena that complement without duplicating Mackey’s richly informative array of case studies (on Lucretius’ Roman theory, children’s cult as cognitive apprenticeship, “folk theology” of Roman prayer, and inauguration). Given that Mackey’s book focuses almost entirely on Roman religion, papers on religions of Greek or explicitly Greco-Roman cultural heritage would be especially appropriate for the open portion of the session.
3. “Secrecy and Sociogenesis: Mysteries, Restricted Rituals, and the Growth of Religious Communities,” co-sponsored with the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions, is another open call session. We invite papers that address the following question of why do rituals sealed by secrecy – or even just rumored to be – generate robust trajectories for emergence, growth, and longevity in social groups? The question underwrites a broad range of religious phenomena in the ancient Mediterranean, including the mystery cults of Eleusis, Dionysos and Mithras, Egyptian polytheism, Christian communities, and Jewish Kabbalists. Theoretical frameworks from Georg Simmel onward emphasize the productive irony of the social contagion that arises through restricted access, acts of silence, and the mechanisms which simultaneously advertise and maintain the unspeakability of core ideas. The exploration of secrecy integrates the sacred with questions of hierarchy, political domination and resistance, rhetorical strategies, religious architecture, sacred viewing, scriptural hermeneutics, and the aesthetics of concealment.  This panel will focus on the paradoxical dynamics of secrecy and sociogenesis in ancient Mediterranean contexts. Papers should be rooted in specific case studies, and engage with the critical frameworks drawn from Religion, Anthropology, Biblical and Classical traditions. Possible avenues of inquiry include: what kinds of data – material, epigraphic, liturgical or literary – support the investigation of ancient secrecy? What are the benefits and boundaries of models drawn from living cultures in these investigations? Do the uses of secrecy change over the long history of a cult or ritual? To what extent do practices of secrecy coincide with the boundaries between public and private religion? How does the use of secrecy as vilification compare to the use of secrecy as a confirmation of authority and authenticity? How does secrecy differ in its deployment between urban and rural cult?   
4. In addition to these three sessions with open calls, GRR will also offer a book review panel with invited speakers on Jae Han’s Prophets and Prophecy in the Late Antique Near East (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The list of speakers will be posted here before the meetings.

GRR will hold four sessions at SBL 2022. A business meeting will be held online after the meeting. For more information, please contact the GRR section chairs: Barbette Spaeth and Maria Doerfler.

S19-314
Greco-Roman Religions
11/19/2022
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: 706 (Street Level) – Convention Center (CC)
Theme: Materiality and Religion in the Greco-Roman World

Barbette Spaeth, William & Mary, Presiding

Kristi Lee, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Corinth’s Protector: Aphrodite as Goddess of the Military (25 min)

Thomas R. Blanton IV, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt
Apotropaic Amulets from Pompeii: A Study in “Material Religion” (25 min)

Gerhard van den Heever, University of South Africa
Of Space, Materiality, and Agency: The Tango of Religious Space, Discourse, and Practice in Two Case Studies: The Mythraeum and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (25 min)

Laura Carnevale, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
The Altar of the Sacrifice: Reconstruction and Legitimation of the Binding of Isaac’s Story from Judaism to Christianity and Beyond (25 min)

Sissel Undheim, University of Bergen, Respondent (25 min)

Discussion (25 min)

S20-320
Greco-Roman Religions
11/20/2022
4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Room: 106 (Street Level) – Convention Center (CC)
Theme: Encountering Monsters: Religious Interactions with the Monstrous in Greco-Roman Antiquity

Jeffrey Brodd, California State University – Sacramento, Presiding

Nathan Fredrickson, University of California-Santa Barbara
Erysichthon and the Suppression of Human Monstrosity Relative to Ecological Devastation in Greco-Roman Myth (25 min)

Jonah Bissell, First Baptist Church of Freeport, Maine
The “Onocentaurus” in Greek Isaiah and the Nile Mosaic of Praeneste (25 min)

Gregory E. Lamb, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Becoming ‘Monsters’? Paul’s Use of Dehumanizing Terms as Boundary Markers in Philippians (25 min)

Discussion (30 min)

S21-144
Joint Session With: Greco-Roman Religions, Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
11/21/2022
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: Centennial F (Third Level) – Hyatt Regency (HR)
Theme: Remodeling the Motel of the Mysteries

Barbette Spaeth, William & Mary, Presiding (5 min)

Chris Atkins, Yale University
Sacred Rites, Cult Poetry, and Curse Tablets at Selinous (20 min)
Tag(s): Classical Studies (Interpretive Approaches), Archaeology of Religion (Archaeology & Iconography)

Discussion (5 min)

M. David Litwa, Australian Catholic University
The Naassene Preacher and the Mysteries: A Historical Analysis (20 min)
Tag(s): Greco-Roman Period (History & Culture), Greece/Greek (Greco-Roman Literature), Church History and Ecclesiology (Other)

Discussion (5 min)

Ryan Abaomowitz, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Art and Sensory Experience in the Ancient World: Reanimating the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the Island of Samothrace (20 min)
Tag(s): Archaeology of Religion (Archaeology & Iconography), Pedagogical Theory (Learning & Teaching), Art History (Archaeology & Iconography)

Discussion (5 min)

Gerhard van den Heever, University of South Africa
Having a Blast in the Motel of the Mysteries: A Redescriptive Archaeology (20 min)

Discussion (5 min)

Jennifer Larson, Kent State University Main Campus, Respondent (10 min)

Discussion (10 min)

S21-312
Greco-Roman Religions
11/21/2022
4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Room: Centennial H (Third Level) – Hyatt Regency (HR)
Theme: Embodiment and Identity in Greco-Roman Religions

Laura Carnevale, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, Presiding

Zsuzsa Varhelyi, Boston University
Epiphany and the Embodied Experience of Healing Waters: Imagining Roman Nymphs (25 min)

Courtney Friesen, University of Arizona
From Actress to Actor: Gendered Impurity in the Conversion of Ancient Mimes (25 min)

John Ladouceur, Princeton University
Between Philosopher’s Cloak and Ascetic Habit: Religious Identity and the Transformation of the Tribōn in Late Antiquity (25 min)

Discussion (45 min)

We invite papers for the following sessions at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 2022. To submit a paper for consideration, please visit the SBL site.

1. Materiality and Religion in the Greco-Roman World: on the “material turn” in the study of religion, including studies of amulets, clothing and cosmetics, cult architecture, the protection of doorways, funerary artifacts and spaces, the arrangement of altars and votives, iconic books, etc., that discuss matters of efficacy, agency, assemblage, human/thing interaction, and discursive reflections on object-agency. Papers should be explicit in their understanding of “materiality of religions.”

2. Sex, Embodiment, and Cult Spaces in Greco-Roman Antiquity: on embodied religious experiences associated with cult spaces, including pilgrimage, devotional behaviors, ritual performances, sacred prostitution, therapeutic practices. We welcome papers mapping processes of religious continuities and discontinuities, individual or collective conversions, transformations and reconstructions of places and space.

3. Encountering Monsters: Religious Interactions with the Monstrous in Greco-Roman Antiquity: on interactions with monstrous beings in the literature and material culture of ancient Mediterranean religions. We welcome papers exploring the place and function of a wide range of human and non-human monstrous entities in myth, cultic rites, apotropaic contexts, processes of identity construction, including mutation from/into human form, and other phenomena of relevance for Greco-Roman religions.

4. Remodeling the Motel of the Mysteries: Innovations in the Study of Secret Cults (joint session with the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions): on recent innovations in the study of mystery religions, including analyses of soundscapes, affective impact, social identities, network analyses, digital reconstructions of sacred spaces, the descriptions of mystery rites by the Church Fathers, the intersections of mystery cult with magical practices, and distinctions between Greek and Roman mystery rites.