John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts Ancient and Modern

Call For Papers: We invite submissions for an OPEN SESSION on John's Apocalypse and Cultural Contexts, Ancient and Modern. While we welcome proposals on all aspects of the Book of Revelation, we especially invite papers that offer new perspectives on the text, including papers that approach the text from specific hermeneutical contexts, employ innovative approaches to the Apocalypse, and/or offer new perspectives on enduring questions. We also invite submissions for a joint session with the Bible and Culture section on Apocalyptic Scripturalization, Ambivalence, and the Utopian: Pasts and Futures of Minoritized Feminist and Womanist Criticism. The recent publication of minoritized feminist and womanist studies in Revelation—especially Shanell T. Smith’s The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire (Fortress, 2014), Lynne St. Clair Darden’s Scripturalizing Revelation (SBL, 2015), and Jacqueline M. Hidalgo’s Revelation in Aztlán (Palgrave, 2016)—point toward significant transformations in the bodies producing scholarship on the Apocalypse, the questions be asked about and around the text, and the interpretive approaches that matter for reading Revelation. We are looking for papers that jump off from these recent studies and ask what difference minoritized feminist and womanist voices make in reading apocalyptic literature. Are there significant shifts to be charted? What are the questions and approaches that might matter most in the next generation of biblical scholarship on/in relation to the Apocalypse? Our third session will explore class rhetoric and apocalyptic. The received tradition regarding early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts is that they were resistance literature of the oppressed. We seek papers that interrogate this received tradition. We are particularly interested in paper proposals that deal with economic, political, rhetorical, and religious contexts that affected the emergence and persistence of apocalyptic texts and movements.

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