Michael E Heyes | Lycoming College (original) (raw)
Calls for Papers or Chapters by Michael E Heyes
The Journal of Gods and Monsters
The Journal of Gods and Monsters is issuing a rolling call for papers. Those interested in answer... more The Journal of Gods and Monsters is issuing a rolling call for papers. Those interested in answering the call may do so in one of three ways listed in the attached file. In the case of questions please contact the editorial team at editorsJGM@gmail.com or at their professional email addresses.
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While there has been significant scholarly interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his work in the United ... more While there has been significant scholarly interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his work in the United States in recent years, little English scholarship has treated his impact on Japan. Lovecraft's widespread popularity is reflected in his influence on popular authors (Edogawa Ranpo [江戸川 乱歩] and Ken Asamatsu [朝松 健]), manga authors (Shigeru Mizuki [水木 しげる] and Junji Ito [伊藤 潤二]), and film and television creators (Chiaki J. Konaka [小中 千昭]), as well as the immense popularity of The Call of Cthulhu TRPG (クトゥルフの呼び声/クトゥルフ神話).
This edited volume seeks scholarship that explores the connections between the work of HP Lovecraft and Japan, broadly construed. We welcome submissions that examine the influence of Lovecraft on Japanese media, the reception of Lovecraftian media in Japan, Japanese interpretations of Lovecraftian horror, and the impact of these productions in other nations.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
•Lovecraftian depictions of monstrosity in Japanese media
•Japanese video games and themes of Cosmic Horror (e.g., …いる！/...Iru!, エターナルダークネス/Eternal Darkness)
•Intersections of Lovecraftian horror and Japanese popular culture (kawaii culture,otaku culture, contents tourism)
•The relocation of the monstrous Other (i.e., Lovecraft – famously bigoted – hadmany monsters that represented non-American or non-white populaces. Whenadapted in Japan, what form do these monsters take?)
•Lovecraft’s work and its relationship to yokai culture, local histories, or myths andlegends.
•The use of Lovecraft’s material to contextualize social issues within Japan (poverty,demographic crisis, foreignness).
We encourage submissions from scholars of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Though proficiency in Japanese is not required for publication, those articles which treat with original language sources will be particularly welcome.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to both dkrichar@ucsc.edu and heyes@lycoming.edu by April 30th, 2024.
Full chapters will ideally be between 5000 and 8000 words (though longer treatments will be considered) and will be due by December 30th, 2024. This volume is under contract with McFarland and Company, Inc. All submissions will be peer reviewed.
We look forward to receiving your submissions in this expanding research area.
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Monographs by Michael E Heyes
Routledge Studies in Religion, Oct 2024
Demons in the USA argues that a discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century... more Demons in the USA argues that a discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination.
The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed. As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this ‘Anti-Spiritualist’ paradigm to condemn the movement. This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through The Exorcist. The author considers how the success of this film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, entangling it with entertainment, science, and politics such that it influences psychology, the Satanic Panic, and the contemporary QAnon movement. This entanglement points to the broader argument of the work: While we may wish to think of a film as ‘entertainment’ (and thus, having no bearing on ‘reality’) or demonic material as ‘religious’ (and thus, exempt from categories like ‘politics’ or ‘science’), the truth is that categories are not so easily separated. The author contends that the need to enforce the boundaries of such categories (and the failure to do so) is a hallmark of the intellectual construct of modernity, and that those who believe in demons in the contemporary United States are surprisingly modern in their views. The book grounds the importance of media to the twentieth and twenty-first century religious experience, arguing that the US of today would not be possible without The Exorcist and its products.
Demons in the USA will be of particular interest to scholars dealing with religion in America, those with a focus on religion and film, or those involved with contemporary demonology.
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Routledge, 2019
St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout th... more St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret’s monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret’s importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained.
More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints’ Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints’ Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.
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Edited Volumes by Michael E Heyes
Holy Monster, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, Jul 27, 2018
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States examin... more Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of this book—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of this book attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.
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Articles by Michael E Heyes
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2020
Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, ... more Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, and other forms of unease. However, it is clear from the semantic range of the term “monster” that the category encompasses beings who evoke a wide range of emotions. I suggest that scholars have largely displaced first-person accounts of the monstrous and those accounts which do not rely upon horror oranxiety, and I propose a three-category system to correct this displacement. These categories draw from Derrida’s notion of the domestication of the monster and Žižek’s notion of a “fantasy screen” for the monstrous. These categories encourage further research, both between categories of the monstrous and categories that would not typically fit within this descriptor.
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Journal of Religion & Film, 2017
Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and it... more Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters by Michael E Heyes
The Journal of Gods and Monsters 4:1 Winter, 2024
The latest edition of The Journal of Gods and Monsters
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Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2022
Special Issue #1: Religion, Monstrosity, and the Paranormal Lead Issue Editor: John Morehead Dead... more Special Issue #1: Religion, Monstrosity, and the Paranormal
Lead Issue Editor: John Morehead
Deadline for Submission: March 15, 2022
Although typically dismissed and viewed as fringe phenomena by scholars, the paranormal is enduring. The Chapman University Survey of American Fears, which includes survey data on paranormal beliefs, those phenomena at odds with mainstream science and orthodox religion, reported in 2018 that large numbers of people find the paranormal of interest. Some 58% believe that places can be haunted by spirits, 57% believe in lost ancient civilizations like Atlantis, and 41% believe aliens once visited the earth in the ancient past. The paranormal often functions as a source of transcendence and meaning for people, even as it draws upon various forms of monstrosity. We would like to produce a theme issue of the journal on the paranormal intersecting with monstrosity and religion.
Special Issue #2: Candyman
Guest Editor: Joseph P. Laycock
Deadline for Submission: March 15, 2022
The Journal of Gods and Monsters seeks papers for a special issue on Candyman, to be guest edited by Joseph Laycock. We especially seek papers interpreting the 2021 film directed by Nia DeCosta. However, we also encourage papers that consider the previous films (1992, 1995, and 1999), as well as Clive Barker’s original story “The Forbidden” (1985).
Some possible angles of analysis might include:
• The significance of ritual and summoning in the Candyman mythos
• Candyman as monstrous object of horror and/or prophetic agent of justice
• The nature and function of narrative and folklore in the Candyman mythos
• Candyman as object of worship
• The intersection of the monstrous with anxieties over race and (in 1992 film) miscegenation
• How the religious dimension of the BLM movement has influenced the Candyman mythos
• Themes of damnation, destiny, and the Gothic in Candyman
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2021
Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in... more Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in this issue to unsettle the boundaries between the sacred and the monstrous.
As editors, one of the things that drew us to this topic was the wide variety of ways in
which deities and monsters intersect, overlap, and help define each other, all while complicating any sense of stable boundaries or identities. As most who have studied religion know, the things we worship and the things we are afraid of are often difficult to distinguish from one another. This means that questions of Gods and Monsters can be found in a wide range of disciplines, over an abundance of texts, and in times both ancient and modern. Not only do these explorations question the boundaries between Gods and Monsters, but they also destabilize boundaries between academic disciplines, literary genres, and even so-called high and low culture.
But in the midst of this bewildering range of diverse topics, there are also fascinating
thematic connections that keep bubbling to the surface. The three articles in this issue come from very different corners of the scholarly world: Matthew Goff’s essay on the Enochic traditions, Steven Engler’s study of the Brazilian religion Umbanda, and Gerardo Rodríguez-Galarza’s exploration of how close attention to monsters can help unravel what the author refers to as “the colonialism of time.” Even though they might seem to belong in very different journals – perhaps journals on the topics of Second Temple Jewish literature, religious studies, and postcolonial theory - these articles are brought together through the lens of monsters, and through the attention to what we can learn by analyzing the figure of the monster (and the narrative in which it appears) through a variety of lenses.
Perhaps most importantly, these articles pay attention to the myriad ways in which the
figure of the monster announces a rupture in conventional thought, an anxiety which cannot be captured through traditional semantics – and which escape confinement by traditional modes of theological thinking. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted, the monster always escapes; in these three essays, that escape is something akin to Ricouer’s “surplus of meaning,” an escape from an interpretation that can be exhausted through explanatory modes of thought. In essence, the monster calls to the places where intellectual understandings – of texts, of historical events, of religious practices, of the oppressive forces of colonialism – fall short. The monster begs us to
interpret it, and through this act to come at least a few steps closer towards understanding the system that the monster inhabits.
--The Editors
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The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2020
Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the in... more Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters, we are exploring this displacement and the role of religious traditions in its construction, maintenance, and complication. Such beings labeled as monsters might be displaced from biology, such as the cynocephalic protagonist of the Greek Life of St. Christopher. Then again, a monster’s displacement could be cultural, as seen in contemporary efforts by some Burmese Buddhists to displace and monstrosize the Rohingya minority. Or it could be soteriological, like the transhistorical phenomenon of Jews and Muslims being made into monsters via their exclusion from some structures of Christian salvation.
In this special issue, we present three methodologically-diverse submissions that tackle the issue of monstrosity and displacement from a wide range of regional and temporal arenas, including 1960s West Virginia, 16th-century France, and 1940s science fiction literature. We also present reviews of new and important materials in the field of Monster Theory.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Chapters by Michael E Heyes
Terrifying Texts: Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror Cinema, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, 2018
On its surface, the premise of the television show Sleepy Hollow is absurd. The show revolves aro... more On its surface, the premise of the television show Sleepy Hollow is absurd. The show revolves around Ichabod Crane – a British professor embroiled in the American Revolutionary War – thrown 250 years into the future, where he teams up with police officer Abbie Mills to carry out a mission from George Washington himself: stop the Headless Horsemen from enacting a literal Biblical apocalypse in present day America. Despite this premise, the television show was a sleeper hit, garnering 25 million aggregate viewers for its premiere. “Our jaws were on the floor,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman told TVGuide.com.
Yet, when considered against the conceptual backdrop of American Civil Religion and American Exceptionalism, the show’s success is rather unsurprising. Sleepy Hollow reinforces for American audiences what they already “know:” that America is a special place with a special role to play on the world stage. By connecting the Founding Fathers and the “sacred” events of the Revolutionary War to a contemporary interpretation of Revelation, the show re-mythologizes America’s past and ties this mythology into the modern period.
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Encyclopedia Entries by Michael E Heyes
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 2019
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A contribution to War and Religion: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict (ABC-Clio Greenwood).
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Keynote Addresses by Michael E Heyes
In American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Michael Cuneo contends that one of ... more In American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Michael Cuneo contends that one of the most important factors in the rise of exorcism in the United States is the release of the 1973 film, The Exorcist. While the ability of the movie to resuscitate the practice of exorcism may seem like magic, I will argue that the film is constructed to abrogate the authority of contemporary medical and psychological practice. Through depictions of medical doctors as bumbling, testing processes as painful and unnecessary, and medical practitioners as willfully ignorant of the “obvious” supernatural cause of Regan’s disease, the film makes modern medicine monstrous and misinformed. In so doing, it gives the demonic an authoritative voice and opens an intellectual space for the audience to view the practice of exorcism as a valuable alternative to medical and psychological practice.
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Book Reviews by Michael E Heyes
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Review for Nova Religio.
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Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions
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The Journal of Gods and Monsters
The Journal of Gods and Monsters is issuing a rolling call for papers. Those interested in answer... more The Journal of Gods and Monsters is issuing a rolling call for papers. Those interested in answering the call may do so in one of three ways listed in the attached file. In the case of questions please contact the editorial team at editorsJGM@gmail.com or at their professional email addresses.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
While there has been significant scholarly interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his work in the United ... more While there has been significant scholarly interest in H.P. Lovecraft and his work in the United States in recent years, little English scholarship has treated his impact on Japan. Lovecraft's widespread popularity is reflected in his influence on popular authors (Edogawa Ranpo [江戸川 乱歩] and Ken Asamatsu [朝松 健]), manga authors (Shigeru Mizuki [水木 しげる] and Junji Ito [伊藤 潤二]), and film and television creators (Chiaki J. Konaka [小中 千昭]), as well as the immense popularity of The Call of Cthulhu TRPG (クトゥルフの呼び声/クトゥルフ神話).
This edited volume seeks scholarship that explores the connections between the work of HP Lovecraft and Japan, broadly construed. We welcome submissions that examine the influence of Lovecraft on Japanese media, the reception of Lovecraftian media in Japan, Japanese interpretations of Lovecraftian horror, and the impact of these productions in other nations.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
•Lovecraftian depictions of monstrosity in Japanese media
•Japanese video games and themes of Cosmic Horror (e.g., …いる！/...Iru!, エターナルダークネス/Eternal Darkness)
•Intersections of Lovecraftian horror and Japanese popular culture (kawaii culture,otaku culture, contents tourism)
•The relocation of the monstrous Other (i.e., Lovecraft – famously bigoted – hadmany monsters that represented non-American or non-white populaces. Whenadapted in Japan, what form do these monsters take?)
•Lovecraft’s work and its relationship to yokai culture, local histories, or myths andlegends.
•The use of Lovecraft’s material to contextualize social issues within Japan (poverty,demographic crisis, foreignness).
We encourage submissions from scholars of all backgrounds and levels of experience. Though proficiency in Japanese is not required for publication, those articles which treat with original language sources will be particularly welcome.
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to both dkrichar@ucsc.edu and heyes@lycoming.edu by April 30th, 2024.
Full chapters will ideally be between 5000 and 8000 words (though longer treatments will be considered) and will be due by December 30th, 2024. This volume is under contract with McFarland and Company, Inc. All submissions will be peer reviewed.
We look forward to receiving your submissions in this expanding research area.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge Studies in Religion, Oct 2024
Demons in the USA argues that a discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century... more Demons in the USA argues that a discourse on the demonic that developed in the nineteenth century continues to exert a powerful hold over the American spiritual imagination.
The book begins by tracing the conservative Christian encounter with Spiritualism in the nineteenth century and the mode of thinking about the demonic which developed. As Spiritualism’s core principles reappeared in the New Age, Christian interlocutors once more drew on this ‘Anti-Spiritualist’ paradigm to condemn the movement. This condemnation is absorbed by and amplified through The Exorcist. The author considers how the success of this film disseminates the anti-Spiritualist paradigm in surprising ways, entangling it with entertainment, science, and politics such that it influences psychology, the Satanic Panic, and the contemporary QAnon movement. This entanglement points to the broader argument of the work: While we may wish to think of a film as ‘entertainment’ (and thus, having no bearing on ‘reality’) or demonic material as ‘religious’ (and thus, exempt from categories like ‘politics’ or ‘science’), the truth is that categories are not so easily separated. The author contends that the need to enforce the boundaries of such categories (and the failure to do so) is a hallmark of the intellectual construct of modernity, and that those who believe in demons in the contemporary United States are surprisingly modern in their views. The book grounds the importance of media to the twentieth and twenty-first century religious experience, arguing that the US of today would not be possible without The Exorcist and its products.
Demons in the USA will be of particular interest to scholars dealing with religion in America, those with a focus on religion and film, or those involved with contemporary demonology.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge, 2019
St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout th... more St. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in medieval England and, throughout the Middle Ages, the various Lives of St. Margaret functioned as a blueprint for a virginal life and supernatural assistance to pregnant women during the dangerous process of labor. In her narrative, Margaret is accosted by various demons and, having defeated each monster in turn, she is taken to the place of her martyrdom where she prays for supernatural boons for her adherents. This book argues that Margaret’s monsters are a key element in understanding Margaret’s importance to her adherents, specifically how the sexual identities of her adherents were constructed and maintained.
More broadly, this study offers three major contributions to the field of medieval studies: first, it argues for the utility of a diachronic analysis of Saints’ Lives literature in a field dominated by synchronic analyses; second, this diachronic analysis is important to interpreting the intertext of Saints’ Lives, not only between different Lives but also different versions of the same Life; and third, the approach further suggests that the most valuable socio-cultural information in hagiographic literature is found in the auxiliary characters and not in the figure of the saint him/herself.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Holy Monster, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, Jul 27, 2018
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States examin... more Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States examines the intersection of religion and monstrosity in a variety of different time periods in the hopes of addressing two gaps in scholarship within the field of monster studies. The first part of this book—running from the medieval to the Early Modern period—focuses upon the view of the monster through non-majority voices and accounts from those who were themselves branded as monsters. Overlapping partially with the Early Modern and proceeding to the present day, the contributions of the second part of this book attempt to problematize the dichotomy of secular/religious through a close look at the monsters this period has wrought.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2020
Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, ... more Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, and other forms of unease. However, it is clear from the semantic range of the term “monster” that the category encompasses beings who evoke a wide range of emotions. I suggest that scholars have largely displaced first-person accounts of the monstrous and those accounts which do not rely upon horror oranxiety, and I propose a three-category system to correct this displacement. These categories draw from Derrida’s notion of the domestication of the monster and Žižek’s notion of a “fantasy screen” for the monstrous. These categories encourage further research, both between categories of the monstrous and categories that would not typically fit within this descriptor.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Religion & Film, 2017
Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and it... more Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters 4:1 Winter, 2024
The latest edition of The Journal of Gods and Monsters
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2022
Special Issue #1: Religion, Monstrosity, and the Paranormal Lead Issue Editor: John Morehead Dead... more Special Issue #1: Religion, Monstrosity, and the Paranormal
Lead Issue Editor: John Morehead
Deadline for Submission: March 15, 2022
Although typically dismissed and viewed as fringe phenomena by scholars, the paranormal is enduring. The Chapman University Survey of American Fears, which includes survey data on paranormal beliefs, those phenomena at odds with mainstream science and orthodox religion, reported in 2018 that large numbers of people find the paranormal of interest. Some 58% believe that places can be haunted by spirits, 57% believe in lost ancient civilizations like Atlantis, and 41% believe aliens once visited the earth in the ancient past. The paranormal often functions as a source of transcendence and meaning for people, even as it draws upon various forms of monstrosity. We would like to produce a theme issue of the journal on the paranormal intersecting with monstrosity and religion.
Special Issue #2: Candyman
Guest Editor: Joseph P. Laycock
Deadline for Submission: March 15, 2022
The Journal of Gods and Monsters seeks papers for a special issue on Candyman, to be guest edited by Joseph Laycock. We especially seek papers interpreting the 2021 film directed by Nia DeCosta. However, we also encourage papers that consider the previous films (1992, 1995, and 1999), as well as Clive Barker’s original story “The Forbidden” (1985).
Some possible angles of analysis might include:
• The significance of ritual and summoning in the Candyman mythos
• Candyman as monstrous object of horror and/or prophetic agent of justice
• The nature and function of narrative and folklore in the Candyman mythos
• Candyman as object of worship
• The intersection of the monstrous with anxieties over race and (in 1992 film) miscegenation
• How the religious dimension of the BLM movement has influenced the Candyman mythos
• Themes of damnation, destiny, and the Gothic in Candyman
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2021
Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in... more Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in this issue to unsettle the boundaries between the sacred and the monstrous.
As editors, one of the things that drew us to this topic was the wide variety of ways in
which deities and monsters intersect, overlap, and help define each other, all while complicating any sense of stable boundaries or identities. As most who have studied religion know, the things we worship and the things we are afraid of are often difficult to distinguish from one another. This means that questions of Gods and Monsters can be found in a wide range of disciplines, over an abundance of texts, and in times both ancient and modern. Not only do these explorations question the boundaries between Gods and Monsters, but they also destabilize boundaries between academic disciplines, literary genres, and even so-called high and low culture.
But in the midst of this bewildering range of diverse topics, there are also fascinating
thematic connections that keep bubbling to the surface. The three articles in this issue come from very different corners of the scholarly world: Matthew Goff’s essay on the Enochic traditions, Steven Engler’s study of the Brazilian religion Umbanda, and Gerardo Rodríguez-Galarza’s exploration of how close attention to monsters can help unravel what the author refers to as “the colonialism of time.” Even though they might seem to belong in very different journals – perhaps journals on the topics of Second Temple Jewish literature, religious studies, and postcolonial theory - these articles are brought together through the lens of monsters, and through the attention to what we can learn by analyzing the figure of the monster (and the narrative in which it appears) through a variety of lenses.
Perhaps most importantly, these articles pay attention to the myriad ways in which the
figure of the monster announces a rupture in conventional thought, an anxiety which cannot be captured through traditional semantics – and which escape confinement by traditional modes of theological thinking. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted, the monster always escapes; in these three essays, that escape is something akin to Ricouer’s “surplus of meaning,” an escape from an interpretation that can be exhausted through explanatory modes of thought. In essence, the monster calls to the places where intellectual understandings – of texts, of historical events, of religious practices, of the oppressive forces of colonialism – fall short. The monster begs us to
interpret it, and through this act to come at least a few steps closer towards understanding the system that the monster inhabits.
--The Editors
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2020
Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the in... more Monsters are often defined as those unfortunate beings displaced from the “normal,” and in the inaugural issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters, we are exploring this displacement and the role of religious traditions in its construction, maintenance, and complication. Such beings labeled as monsters might be displaced from biology, such as the cynocephalic protagonist of the Greek Life of St. Christopher. Then again, a monster’s displacement could be cultural, as seen in contemporary efforts by some Burmese Buddhists to displace and monstrosize the Rohingya minority. Or it could be soteriological, like the transhistorical phenomenon of Jews and Muslims being made into monsters via their exclusion from some structures of Christian salvation.
In this special issue, we present three methodologically-diverse submissions that tackle the issue of monstrosity and displacement from a wide range of regional and temporal arenas, including 1960s West Virginia, 16th-century France, and 1940s science fiction literature. We also present reviews of new and important materials in the field of Monster Theory.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Terrifying Texts: Essays on Books of Good and Evil in Horror Cinema, 2018
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the United States, 2018
On its surface, the premise of the television show Sleepy Hollow is absurd. The show revolves aro... more On its surface, the premise of the television show Sleepy Hollow is absurd. The show revolves around Ichabod Crane – a British professor embroiled in the American Revolutionary War – thrown 250 years into the future, where he teams up with police officer Abbie Mills to carry out a mission from George Washington himself: stop the Headless Horsemen from enacting a literal Biblical apocalypse in present day America. Despite this premise, the television show was a sleeper hit, garnering 25 million aggregate viewers for its premiere. “Our jaws were on the floor,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman told TVGuide.com.
Yet, when considered against the conceptual backdrop of American Civil Religion and American Exceptionalism, the show’s success is rather unsurprising. Sleepy Hollow reinforces for American audiences what they already “know:” that America is a special place with a special role to play on the world stage. By connecting the Founding Fathers and the “sacred” events of the Revolutionary War to a contemporary interpretation of Revelation, the show re-mythologizes America’s past and ties this mythology into the modern period.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
A contribution to War and Religion: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict (ABC-Clio Greenwood).
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In American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Michael Cuneo contends that one of ... more In American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, Michael Cuneo contends that one of the most important factors in the rise of exorcism in the United States is the release of the 1973 film, The Exorcist. While the ability of the movie to resuscitate the practice of exorcism may seem like magic, I will argue that the film is constructed to abrogate the authority of contemporary medical and psychological practice. Through depictions of medical doctors as bumbling, testing processes as painful and unnecessary, and medical practitioners as willfully ignorant of the “obvious” supernatural cause of Regan’s disease, the film makes modern medicine monstrous and misinformed. In so doing, it gives the demonic an authoritative voice and opens an intellectual space for the audience to view the practice of exorcism as a valuable alternative to medical and psychological practice.
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Review for Nova Religio.
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Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions
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Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 2014
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Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft
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The Life of St. Margaret is one of the most important Saints’ Lives in medieval England. While sc... more The Life of St. Margaret is one of the most important Saints’ Lives in medieval England. While scholarly work tends to focus on Margaret’s powers as an intercessor during pregnancy or her role as an exemplar for virgins, this paper will concentrate on the depictions of her persecutor, Olibrius, in several different versions of the Life in Latin, Old, and Middle English. In each of the depictions surveyed, Olibrius will be shown to have a hybrid religious identity composed of pagan, Jewish, and Muslim identity markers. Olibrius is further painted in each of these narratives with a demonic brush (either by associating him with other demons in the narrative or by a supposed relationship with Satan). By combining these identities, Margaret’s struggle against Olibrius’ sexual advances becomes the struggle of the Christian against un-Christian forces in the world, thereby reinforcing already salient sexual boundaries between Christians and other religious groups.
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This paper will explore the Othering of the Jewish community in three narratives from medieval En... more This paper will explore the Othering of the Jewish community in three narratives from medieval England that deal in the supposed crime of Blood Libel: Thomas of Monmouth’s *The Life of William of Norwich*, Matthew Paris’ *The Life of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln*, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’ Tale.” In particular, I am interested in the way that the Jews and their motives are depicted in each of the narratives: in William’s Life, as perpetrators of a depraved Passover ritual to reclaim their “fatherland;” in *The Life of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln*, as ritual reenactors of Christ’s death for the purposes of insulting Jesus and performing magical operations; and in Chaucer, as the murderers of the infant Christ who are driven by demonic lusts. These depictions will be placed against the backdrop of historical events to further inform the development of anti-Semitic sentiment in pre- and post-expulsion England.
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In The Life of St. Margaret, when Margaret enters her prison cell, she crosses a boundary in whic... more In The Life of St. Margaret, when Margaret enters her prison cell, she crosses a boundary in which she ceases to engage physical opponents and instead encounters spiritual ones. As she crosses this boundary, a dragon emerges from the corner of her prison cell, attempts to swallow her, and is rent in twain for its efforts. After the dragon dies, a small black demon emerges who claims to induce individuals to sin in a variety of different ways, frequently citing sexual sin as its most devious “weapon” against the faithful.
While this focus on sexual sin speaks to other boundaries (e.g. licit/illicit sexual practice), the demon of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 calls to an arguably more forbidden boundary: the sexual boundary often maintained between “man” and “beast.” When Margaret encounters the demon of the CCCC 303 version, he loudly proclaims that he is the one who causes others to “have sex with four-footed beasts.”
Although this may seem nothing more than an oddity, the demon’s identification of this sin is a valuable indicator of another boundary, a boundary between two portions of the original audience. Through identification and interpretation of this boundary, I will argue that CCCC 303 was authored by a monastic community focused on the pastoral care of a rural lay community.
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While Margaret of Antioch accomplishes many heroic feats in her Life – including the subjugation ... more While Margaret of Antioch accomplishes many heroic feats in her Life – including the subjugation of a demon and resisting extreme forms of torture – the heroic act for which she is best know is the slaying of the dragon that appears in her prison cell. Although the scene is relatively short, its word count belies its importance to the story. With respect to her adherents, Margaret’s most famous offering (safe birth) is intimately related to her bursting from the dragon, while artistic renderings of the scene are some of the most frequent depictions of Margaret. The scene also attracted considerable attention from a subset of Margaret’s hagiographers, such as Jacobus de Voragine and the author of the South English Legendary, who tend to dismiss the dragon swallowing Margaret as “apocryphal.” Scholars have primarily argued that such authors deny Margaret’s physical contact with the dragon due to the degree of corporeality such contact would require for the demonic figure. Counter to this claim, I will argue that the Margaret tradition is instead drawing upon the older life of St. Anthony, creating a parallel between Margaret’s encounter with the dragon and Anthony’s struggle with demonically induced lust. As such, medieval readers would have viewed the draconic encounter as distinctly sexual: by defeating the dragon, Margaret is transformed from the fearful young girl who is overcome by the “fear of death” into a heroic virgin martyr “whose name is blessed through the ages.” Paradoxically, it is Margaret’s close encounter with the overly sexualized dragon that secures her transformation into a holy virgin. I am primarily interested in the way in which comparing Margaret’s Life to Antony’s may help us understand the greater Margaret tradition, particularly the aforementioned authors’ rejections of the draconic encounter and the way in which this crucial scene was understood by Margaret’s adherents.
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" Written by Athanasius of Alexandria in Greek and translated soon thereafter into Latin by Evagr... more " Written by Athanasius of Alexandria in Greek and translated soon thereafter into Latin by Evagrius of Antioch, the Life of St. Antony represents one of the most important texts for understanding monasticism in the antique period. Recent research by authors, such as David Brakke, has highlighted the importance of the demonic in works such as the Life for determining monastic identity: by defining their opposition, the monks define aspects of themselves.
Contrary to present research on the Life, I will argue that there are two distinct types of demonic corporeality present in the Greek and Latin Lives: pneumatic and somatic, respectively. The Greek Life presents demons as beings capable of influencing thoughts, creating illusions, and even causing others to feel psychosomatic pain, but also as entities incapable of affecting and influencing their environment on the same physical level as human beings. Contrary to the Greek Life, the Latin Life offers an entirely different and more frightening portrayal of demons: creatures capable of shattering doors, beating opponents nearly to death, and struggling with monks on the tops of mountains.
These differences are important for two reasons. First, the differences between the two texts suggest that the Life of St. Antony embodies not one perspective of demons in Egyptian monasticism but two. Thus, two conflicting views of monastic identity which I will describe. Finally, as suggested by the propagation of the Latin Life over the Greek, it is Evagrius’ conception of the demonic, not Athanasius’, which continues to inform the Latin West through the end of the Middle Ages, and thus to influence not only the identities of Saints and eremites but popular literature and art for several hundred years. "
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" The Life of St. Antony has undergone several translations and transportations since its creatio... more " The Life of St. Antony has undergone several translations and transportations since its creation. Written by Athanasius between 356 and 362 CE, the Life of St. Antony depicts the life and times of the saint of the same name. Beset by demons on all sides, Antony triumphs over his diabolical adversaries and in so doing is established as an exemplum of the monastic life. Evagrius of Antioch's Latin translation (completed prior to the summer of 374) further ensured the continuation of Antony’s Life into the Latin West and Christendom at large, the topoi contained therein resurfacing throughout Saints’ Lives literature, most notably in Felix’s Life of St. Guthlac.
Contrary to present research on the Life of St. Antony, I will argue that there are two distinct types of corporeality present in the Greek and Latin lives, which I term pneumatic and somatic, respectively. In Athanasius’ Greek Life, demons are capable of influencing thoughts, creating illusions, and even causing others to feel psychosomatic pain by influencing the pneumatic bodies of humans with their own. However, these same entities are also incapable of affecting and influencing their environment on the same physical level as human beings. Contrary to the Greek Life, the Latin Life offers an entirely different and more frightening portrayal of demons: creatures capable of shattering doors, beating opponents nearly to death, and struggling with monks on the tops of mountains.
I will suggest that current scholarship’s lack of distinction between the two lives represents larger issues of translation and inherited interpretation, issues which modern scholarship would do well to consider when dealing with texts from the late antique and medieval periods.
The intersection of this paper with the topic “Religion and the Trans…” is three-fold. Of course, as a Latin prefix “trans-“ indicates movement, either across, beyond, or through. This paper will address the translation, transformation, and transportation of the Life. Yet, these common, everyday words disguise a subtle dialogue of their own which must be recognized to move from antiquity through the Middle Ages to our own time period. For Evagrius, translating (trans + latus from fero – to bear) was a “carrying over” of truth from one document to the next, rather than an adherence to grammatical forms. Since Evagrius’ truth differed so markedly from Athanasius, Evagrius’ translation transformed the nature of demons without his conscious knowledge. Evagrius’ version of the Life was then transported into the heart of the Latin West, in terms of the thought world as well as geography, such that it influenced art, literature, and demonology for centuries to come. "
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"St. Margaret is a classic prototype of noble suffering. However, through her suffering as a mart... more "St. Margaret is a classic prototype of noble suffering. However, through her suffering as a martyr her Life becomes associated with easing the suffering of her adherents, including most famously pregnant women. In both Latin and vernacular versions of the Life of Margaret, before she is martyred, Margaret utters a prayer to God for the benefit of those who pray in her name, a prayer whose benefits are echoed (and in some cases expanded upon) by a dove. These prayers and responses differ greatly in the various versions of Margaret’s Lives, differences which suggest the needs (medical and otherwise) of the community for which each version of the Lives was written.
This presentation will address Margaret’s prayers in several Lives which are classified as “Version 1” variations of Margaret’s Life or related to them. These include two early Latin versions, the Mombritius version and the Paris version (BHL 5303 and 5305 respectively); the two Old English versions in Cotton Tiberius A.iii and Corpus Christi College 303; and the Legenda Aurea version. Given time, I may look at versions outside this cluster, including those in Old French. I am particularly interested in the way that certain texts suggest economic disparities between audience members; for example when the Mombritius version addresses “whoever builds a basilica in my name or from his labor furnishes a manuscript of my passion,” it suggests that the audience will be both wealthy and literate. On the other hand, in the Old English version in Corpus Christi 303, the dove’s reply is directed at those who “for love of you prays to me and brings alms or comes with a light,” suggesting a more lowly parishioner. By looking at the wording of these prayers, and through them at the types of communities to which Margaret’s Lives were addressed, it becomes possible to see what Margaret’s suffering meant to those she promised to heal and protect."
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We seek papers that will illuminate the intersection between conflicts in contemporary institutio... more We seek papers that will illuminate the intersection between conflicts in contemporary institutions and the response of lay religious practitioners to these conflicts. We loosely define conflict here as a nonviolent struggle for change. Examples could include Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent religious resistance, lay members of the Catholic Church’s responses to child sexual abuse, the response of Brazilian Spiritualist practitioners to racial inequality, or laity of American Christian denominations protesting (or supporting) Planned Parenthood.
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The Humanities Graduate Student Association in association with the School of Humanities invites ... more The Humanities Graduate Student Association in association with the School of Humanities invites papers for the upcoming conference – The Rice Humanities Graduate Student Association Interdisciplinary Conference – to be held at Rice University in Houston, Texas on 7-9 February 2014.
The Rice Humanities Graduate Student Association Interdisciplinary Conference is a unique conference designed to promote interdisciplinary conversations among and between Humanities scholars and those in other disciplines at Rice University. The demand for interdisciplinary scholarship in the Humanities continues to grow as Digital Humanities and other subdisciplines emerge with the requirement that scholars understand more than one traditional field of study. Despite calls for increased interdisciplinarity in the Humanities, the propensity towards single-authored papers and studies substantially, if not completely rooted in one traditional discipline, remains strong.
The conference in question seeks to take a step towards changing this by creating a platform for interdisciplinary conversations. Individual papers may be primarily rooted in one’s home discipline, but the panels will consist of scholars each from three different disciplines. The organizers believe that multi-disciplined panels will foster conversations about how to integrate different methodologies into traditional fields, and provide the School of Humanities with a new approach to the practice of interdisciplinary scholarship. This exercise will also strengthen the work of Rice graduate students by forging connections between graduate students from different disciplines who are working on similar topics but may not have been aware of this due to the often department-specific nature of graduate study. To further the interdisciplinary nature of this conference, papers from scholars in fields related to the social sciences, physical sciences, engineering and math are also welcome.
Any topic is acceptable. Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length.
Please submit your final 300-word abstract, along with your name, institution, and year of study to hgsa@rice.edu by 5 January 2014.
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“Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques” aims to create conversations on the impact of monstrosity and ... more “Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques” aims to create conversations on the impact of monstrosity and examples of the grotesque in discourse related to religion and the sacred. The tendency to populate religious landscapes with non-human entities, literally demonize opponents, perceive monsters as existing in far-reaching geographical borders (e.g., “the East” in Medieval Europe), and decorate sacred sites with grotesques is a trait shared throughout innumerable traditions. Recently the term "monster studies" was coined to cover the recent works dedicated to monsters by such authors as John Block Friedman, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Asa Mittman, who have helped to provide a framework for the study of such phenomena, not only in religious studies but also in literature, art history, and history. Through this framework, monsters and grotesques have been revealed as important markers of marginality, social boundaries, liminality, identity, cultural borders, and the “Other.”
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What is the relationship between the hero and the monster? How is the hero transformed by his/her... more What is the relationship between the hero and the monster? How is the hero transformed by his/her encounter with the monstrous? What is the hero without the monster (and vice versa)? In an attempt to understand this association, this session invites papers on the relationship between heroes and the monsters they defeat (or by whom they are defeated). Papers will be welcomed that address heroes and monsters in all of their various formats (examples of heroes could include knights, saints, or those “just plain clever” while examples of monsters include dragons, demons, giants, etc), and which choose to play figuratively upon the concept of defeat (e.g. the giant Galehaut’s “defeat” and death via lovesickness at the “hands” of Lancelot) Of particular interest will be those papers that focus upon the way in which the hero or monster is physically/mentally/spiritually changed through his/her/its encounter, or those works in which the hero is or becomes a monster (e.g. early versions of St. Christopher’s Life which feature him as a cynocephalus; the eponymous hero from Marie de France’s Bisclavret).
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Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, ... more Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, and other forms of unease. However, it is clear from the semantic range of the term “monster” that the category encompasses beings who evoke a wide range of emotions. I suggest that scholars have largely displaced first-person accounts of the monstrous and those accounts which do not rely upon horror or anxiety, and I propose a three-category system to correct this displacement. These categories draw from Derrida’s notion of the domestication of the monster and Žižek’s notion of a “fantasy screen” for the monstrous. These categories encourage further research, both between categories of the monstrous and categories that would not typically fit within this descriptor.
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Nova Religio
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Race and religion are critical components in both Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) and t... more Race and religion are critical components in both Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954) and the later film versions of the novel. In Matheson's novel, the main character, Robert Neville, struggles against a vampiric threat to his existence, while frequently musing on his inability to believe in anything greater than himself. Reflecting racial tensions in the United States of the 1950s, Neville is eventually revealed to be the "last of the old race,"1 executed by a new society of vampires who he once mused had "no means of support, no measures for proper education,... [nor] the voting franchise."2 Conversely, both Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow's The Last Man on Earth (1964) and Boris Sagal's The Omega Man (1971) reframe the character of Robert Neville as a Christ-figure who would heal the world with his blood and defeat a race of communist sympathizers (in the case of The Last Man on Earth) or Manson-family clones (The Omega Man), thinly veiled a...
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Religious Studies Review, 2014
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Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 2015
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