The 12th International Conference of

 

ISSEI

 

In cooperation

With

International Society for the Study of European Ideas

 

 

Section IV: Art, Theatre, Literature, Music, Culture

 

Workshop:     Poetry, Religion and Diversity:  Cross Cultural Perspectives

 

Chair:   Heinz-Uwe Haus

 

An experience which most poets—and not only poets—are probably undergoing is doubt about the authenticity of values. They seem to feel rational empiricism like acid eating away at any nonutilitarian concept of life’s purposes—whether the concept stems from patriotism, morals, religion, or love.  Poetry weds faith to doubt. It also ties the depth and pathos of religiosity to the openness and discernment of narration.

 

The workshop will examine how poetry creates unique possibilities for “circumventing the mistruths that shape us as subjects and which organize our relations with the world and God” (Klitos Ioannides).

 

In recent years, poetry has “dialecticized” the Judeo-Christian mindscape through the use of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural references, which have opened up new and highly controversial issues, challenging previous paradigms and creating fresh field of study.  The wide response to the panel discussion of the 2008 ISSEI conference at the University of Helsinki – “The Sacred in European Mindscape” - as well as Klitos Iaonnides’ poetry reading in one of the workshops demonstrated a new understanding for believing in God in a climate dominated by Logical Positivism. Both events seeked to assess to what extent the understandings and meanings of sacred issues are fixed, universal and/or non-negotiable, or to what extent they are malleable possibilities for intercultural dialogue and even understanding. To what extent can “the sacred” create connections and linkages between “different” cultures and worldviews?

 

Present-day questions of cultural memory and religious phenomena, the nature of biblical texts and social thought all take their impulses from the flux of natural life—“what is past, or passing, or to come”—but are themselves “out of nature” in so far as the material questioned has a universal validity and is not subject to decay.

 

The workshop invites both, poets and scholars, to present examples of their work and/or analyzes of the subject.

 

 

Please send your proposals to:

Prof. Dr. Heinz-Uwe Haus

Dept. of Theatre

University of Delaware

Newark, DE 19716

E-mail: huhaus@udel.edu

 

 

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