Religion from the Outside: Paper Abstracts

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Session 1 — Parliament Hall

Wagner’s Parsifal
Michael Downes

Richard Wagner’s final music drama, Parsifal (1882), stands somewhat apart from the rest of his output, for a number of reasons. It has a unique generic description: Bühnenweihfestspiel (stage festival dedication play). This reflects the fact that it was the only drama Wagner completed with a knowledge of how the unique staging and acoustic conditions of the Festspielhaus he built in Bayreuth for the premiere of The Ring of the Nibelungen (1876) would actually work in practice. This in turn means that the sound-world and in particular the orchestration of the drama is conceived somewhat differently than in any of the earlier works. But Parsifal also occupied Wagner’s thoughts for a longer period than any of his other dramas, longer even than the quarter-century genesis of the Ring: he first read his principal source, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in 1845, making his first prose draft twenty years later.

Wagner intended that his final work should only ever be performed at the Festspielhaus: ‘there alone may Parsifal be presented, now and always,’ he wrote to his most generous patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. When he died barely six months after its premiere, his widow, Cosima, sought to honour his memory by extending the copyright on the work in perpetuity so that no other theatre could produce it: see my article in the Guardian for further detail on this. Though Cosima’s attempts were ultimately unsuccessful, the special association between Parsifal and the building that came to be seen as a shrine to its composer’s memory has always encouraged Wagner’s admirers to attribute a special status to Parsifal – as a work more akin to a religious ritual than a theatrical experience.

My talk will consider how far this attribution is justified, in the light of what we know about Wagner’s own religious convictions (he was far from being an orthodox Christian, though he did draft prose sketches in the 1840s for an opera entitled Jesus of Nazareth), and the changes he made to his principal sources (Eschenbach’s Parzival and Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval) to emphasise the Christian symbolism of the story. I will focus on two of these changes: the conflation of the Grail in the medieval sources with the cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught drops of the blood of the dying Christ), and the suggestions in Wagner’s libretto that Parsifal himself is a Christ-like figure.

Death, Consolation, and (Christian) Symbolism in Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem
Sarah Moerman

Part musicological case study and part theological exploration, this paper considers the use of Christian symbolism by non-Christian composers. Brahms’ Requiem is one such work that frequently finds itself at the crossroads between various forms of Christianity and secularism; both ‘sides’ staking claims as to where this work is situated. Although Brahms draws extensively on biblical texts and liturgical associations, he himself is characterized by contemporaries as a religious skeptic and a humanist. The Requiem’s enduring popularity has encouraged theologians to recover or (re)construct theological meanings within it, often treating its Christian aspects as evidence of an underlying confessional vision. Yet such readings raise a broader interpretive problem: how should Christian symbolism be understood when it appears in works created outside Christian belief?

This paper engages recent discussions concerning the migration of Christian symbols beyond the theological and liturgical grammar from which they originate. I argue that Christian symbols need not retain their primary theological reference in order to function meaningfully. In Brahms’ hands, scriptural texts and eschatological imagery are neither straightforward affirmations of Christian doctrine nor misguided religious appropriation. Rather, they are redeployed as elements of a shared cultural vocabulary through which fundamentally human concerns—grief, consolation, mortality, and communal remembrance—are expressed. By examining this process, this paper proposes a framework for distinguishing between theological meaning, cultural inheritance, and symbolic reuse, offering a more precise vocabulary for analysing Christian symbolism in works produced by artists who neither profess nor advance Christian faith.

Lana del Rey
King-Ho Leung

Session 1 — Senate Room

Lema Sabachthani: The Forsakenness of God — Suffering, Memorial, and Existential Strife in Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross
Charles Howell

This paper takes as its point of departure Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958–66), a cycle conceived explicitly for the gallery rather than the church, and asks what happens when a historically devotional form is appropriated for a non-ecclesial, and arguably non-theological, use. In Newman’s cycle, the Stations no longer function as a narrative of the Passion or as an aid to devotion, but as a serial structure that withholds resolution. The repeated vertical divisions do not advance a story but return the viewer to the same formal tension, such that the cry of abandonment is neither illustrated nor overcome but structurally sustained. The series thus operates less as a representation of suffering than as a condition in which meaning is indefinitely deferred, and in which the viewer is compelled to confront the possibility that no theological horizon will be secured.

The force of this displacement becomes clearer when situated within the history of the Stations themselves. Traditionally structured as a liturgical sequence guiding movement, narration, and interpretation, the Stations had, by the mid-twentieth century, already undergone significant transformation. Post-war iterations expand the sequence through the addition of a fifteenth station, embed the Stations within memorial landscapes, and adopt increasingly abstract visual languages. In the work of artists such as Otto Hajek, the Stations are integrated into architectural and commemorative contexts in which Christ’s Passion is aligned with collective memory and historical trauma. These developments do not abandon the form but loosen its narrative and theological determinations.

Newman’s cycle emerges from within this already transformed field, but radicalizes it by appropriating the form into the gallery and stripping it of both figuration and liturgical function. His fifteenth work, Be II, echoes the post-war expansion of the sequence, yet refuses to restore a recognizable resolution: it introduces the possibility of affirmation without securing it. The paper argues that Newman’s Stations should therefore be understood as a strategic redeployment of a religious form in which its theological function is suspended rather than fulfilled. In this redeployment, the series operates in a probing, subtly subversive manner: it raises, for those within the church, questions about the meaning of the Stations and the legitimacy of representing Christ’s Passion, while for those outside the church it reopens the question of whether “Jesus” can be said to signify at all. Addressing its audience not through conceptual mediation but in an existential register, the work stages the encounter with a form that no longer guarantees meaning, but compels the viewer to confront the conditions under which such meaning might still be possible.

Anatomy of a Void: The Subversion of the Predella, and the Evacuation of Grace in Francis Bacon’s Three Studies
Andrew Birch

Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) stands as a seminal paradox of twentieth-century art: a deeply atheistic vision entirely reliant upon the architecture of Christian devotion. Originally conceived as a predella for a larger crucifixion scene, the triptych exemplifies how Christian visual syntax can be radically reinterpreted and redeployed from the outside. This paper explores how Bacon utilised the structural and historical weight of the altarpiece to anchor a bleak, post-war cosmology.

Viewed through the lens of systematic theology, the traditional predella serves as a foundational space of witness, typically housing figures such as the Virgin Mary and St. John. Their presence anchors the crucifixion in an economy of redemptive grace and divine kenosis. Bacon, however, systematically evacuates this theological core. By replacing the mourning saints with the Eumenides – the blind, vengeful Furies of Greek tragedy – Bacon substitutes divine grace with animalistic vengeance. The cross is stripped of its salvific narrative, reduced to what Bacon famously termed a mere “armature” upon which to hang the visceral reality of human brutality.

By examining the juxtaposition of Christian form and secular nihilism, this paper demonstrates that Bacon’s use of the predella is an act of architectural subversion. He relies on the viewer’s ingrained reverence for the altarpiece to communicate monumental horror in a universe devoid of God. Ultimately, Bacon’s Three Studies provides a compelling framework for understanding how sacred structures are retained and commodified for their psychological power long after their theological referents have been discarded.

“The Spirit of Something”: Presence and Absence in Andrew Wyeth’s Pentecost
Elizabeth Goings

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), an American regionalist landscape painter, reframes Christian imagery of Pentecost in his 1989 painting of the same name. In Pentecost, large fishing nets hang out to dry on poles, illuminated gold by the sun. A wind is made visible by the nets themselves, which expansively fill the space between earth and sky. This suggestion of wind, paired with the visual of the gold-tinged net bridging the space between heaven and earth, call to mind the rushing wind and tongues of fire described in the Pentecost event of Acts 2. Wyeth creates a salient image of the activity of Pentecost in the painting, especially in visual comparison to installation artworks in churches which illustrate Pentecost on visually similar terms, such as Nancy Chinn’s Tongues of Fire (1988).

However, I argue that Wyeth significantly redeploys Pentecost terminology and imagery. When asked about spiritual meaning in Pentecost, Wyeth, who was not a Christian, responded: “I felt the spirit of something when I did it. You see, at that time … a young girl was washed out to sea in a storm. They couldn’t save her. In time the body floated by off Pemaquid Point. I was thinking about that girl’s body floating there underwater, and the nets became her spirit.” Based on his statement, I contend that Wyeth offers an inverted interpretation of Pentecost which contrasts to the Scriptural account of the Holy Spirit descending as a generative, empowering gift to the early church. Visual analysis of the painting yields presence and absence in dissonant ways: visual signals of spirit in Pentecost pair with a stark absence of human figures, and negative space in the net perceives the disembodied nature of the spirit. Wyeth’s reframing of Pentecost imagery as an aesthetic suggestion of a singular spirit dissipating into the world, in response to a death in his locale, is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s being-towards-death: an encounter with death which strikingly highlights the question of Being. It is also indicative of American culture’s shift towards the “crypto-religious” in art in the late twentieth century, where religious themes were reframed to express something other than conventional belief. Non-Christian artworks of the period which engage with the sense of a supernatural presence are “often made more intense by [their] separation from formal religion.” Wyeth engages in a sense of mystery responding to a felt spiritual presence in Pentecost, but reframes the “spirit of something” as a negation of generativity, and an omnipresence of mortality. Reading the image of Pentecost with its reframed meaning raises questions of what happens to the soul after death, what Pentecost means, and who Pentecost is for. I will conclude that the dissonance between presence and absence in Pentecost can act as a tool to consider the Christian Pentecost as the antithesis of emptiness.

Session 2 — Parliament Hall

Blasphemy: To offend or shock
David Brown

In contemporary literary art most potential examples of blasphemy can be seen to be based on a desire to offend, as, for example, the Gay News poem that was the basis of criminal proceedings in 1976, or the occasional gratuitous references in Derek Jarman’s meditation on the garden he created on the barren coast of Dungeness (Modern Nature, 1991). By contrast, there are quite a number of cases in visual art where the intention seems to be to reinvigorate an established image by giving it an alternative slant rather than attempt its total dismissal. So I talk here of shock that reinstates rather than unqualified offence.

But before coming to the present day, it is worth recalling earlier moves in the history of Christian art where what was found as ‘blasphemy’ by some Christians was treated by others as justified. According to Eastern Orthodoxy only the Son may be represented as human, and then only as human (i.e. not as a Lamb). Following John 1.29, Western Christianity not only included cases of Jesus portrayed as lamb but also the other persons of the Trinity as human (most especially the Father but on occasion the Holy Spirit also). At the Reformation much Protestant thinking followed the same line, while Rome continued with traditional patterns. The defence lay commonly in an appeal to symbolism: the Trinity as a whole did adapt to the human in its generous desire to communicate to humanity.

A similar perspective may also be canvassed for a proper appreciation of some modifications to traditional Christian symbolism offered today: an intention not to ‘offend’ through blasphemy but rather to use ‘shock’ as a means of re-invigorating existing codes of interpretation. I shall consider two types here: the presentation of Christ as female, and the use of bodily fluids as symbolic.

Christ as female

Here one might think of the English Edwina Sandys’s Christa (1975), American Renée Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper (1996) and the Australian Arthur Boyd’s Crucifixion (Shoalhaven). Only one of these artists (Boyd) had a strong link to Christianity, Nonetheless, it is arguable that with all three their art was intended as a helpful critique rather than deliberately to offend without any hope of change. Indeed, it is possible to quote a precedent from much earlier in the history of Christianity from within the heart of orthodoxy, as in St Bridget of Sweden’s account in her Revelations of the shepherds needing to ask whether the child was male or female.

Allusion to bodily fluids

Here one might quote two rather different examples: Andreas Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) and Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (1999) and The Upper Room (2005). Serrano argues that the golden hue given to a crucifix plunged into a jar of his own urine indicated an identification of the crucified with the realities of daily living, indeed that there could be a certain beauty in such identification. Ofili was also challenged for his use of elephant dung. His response was partly that it was a form of currency in traditional African societies, while in The Upper Room it helped elevate the various figures despite them all being presented as rhesus monkeys.

Narrative as Atheist God-Talk in the Non-Realist Fiction of Italo Calvino
Rebecca Walker

Among twentieth-century Italian writers, perhaps none was more preoccupied with what literature does, and how it does it, than Italo Calvino (1923-1985). In his mid-late career, Calvino began to reflect intensely on the role of literature in twentieth-century society, where he perceived certain key psychological and technological shifts to have taken hold and felt authentic human consciousness to be under threat of dissolution. At the same time, his fictional texts moved increasingly toward absurd or fantastic forms and metafictional approaches that question what it is for characters to be whole, how readers expect literary lives to take shape, and how textual worlds come into being or end.

Calvino’s upbringing was staunchly secular, a position to which he remained committed throughout his life. Nevertheless, my contention in this paper will be that his deliberate troubling of literary ontologies maps onto a series of concerns that have clear theological dimensions, namely: wholeness, fulfilment or completion, and creation and un-creation (beginnings and endings). More specifically, in line with Calvino’s interest in the Derridean absence of an “outside-text” (1967) and after Terry Eagleton’s claim that “most aesthetic ideas (creation, inspiration, unity, autonomy, symbol, epiphany and so on) are really displaced fragments of theology” (2014, 174), I will argue that narrative, for him, appropriates and absorbs functions that have their roots in theological modes of thinking, becoming a form of atheist God-talk. Using examples from the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-59), Invisible Cities (1972), and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), I will demonstrate how across these texts narrative itself is conceived as a complete system that brings worlds into being, bestows or withholds wholeness, shapes the world now, and anticipates worlds to come.

Session 3 — Parliament Hall

The Kenosis of Korda: The Narrative Corollaries of Gianni Vattimo’s Theology in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme
Ian DeGroot

This paper explores how both film auteur Wes Anderson and postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo use Christian symbolism as a framework for a conceptual reconciliation with suffering and death. Anderson, famous for his stylised feature films, has explicitly stated that he is not religious and does not make religious films. Why then is his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme (2025), full of religious imagery? In his own words, the religious symbols are “a way of engaging with the big unknowns and in [the protagonist’s] case the very present prospect of being dead.” Anderson, despite his non-confessionality, finds cathartic value in co-opting the connotations of Christian grammar into his art. Vattimo, also a non-believer, has likewise said that religion “returns” in the postmodern world through “the experience of death,” and that “if I were to strip myself of the biblical world of meaning and reference, I would strip myself of meaning altogether.”

Both Anderson and Vattimo view Western culture as inescapably grounded in Christian imagery and concepts which are simultaneously useful and problematic in a postmodern context. This paper investigates The Phoenician Scheme’s use of Christian symbolism by analyzing Anderson’s postmodern narrative exploration of suffering alongside Vattimo’s philosophical explications.

First, this paper gives an overview of the philosophy of both creators, and makes clear their similarities of thought despite their differences of form. It then argues that Vattimo’s philosophical concepts are not only illustrated but are furthered by their being played out in Anderson’s film. A close reading of the film establishes the protagonist, Zsa-Zsa Korda, as serially embodying each member of Anderson’s imaginative trinity (God the Father, Mankind, and God the Son) in a reckoning of their individual ability to provide a sustainable reconciliation with suffering. After dismissing God the Father (from a lack of nearness) and Mankind (from a lack of ability) as potential rescuers of humanity from the experience of pain, Anderson concludes his narrative with the assertion that the self-sacrifice of God the Son is the only plausible way forward. The kenosis of the character Korda is the mechanism through which pain, suffering, and death are reconciled with. This is the same kenosis for which Vattimo advocates, and which he sees as the logical fulfillment of Christianity itself. The doctrines of the church are metaphysical artifacts which must be kenotically died to if Christianity is to reach its full potential of caritas, or love.

This paper concludes by assessing how successfully the narrative utilizes the demythologized Christian symbols used throughout the film. Anderson and Vattimo evocatively make use of religious motifs to propose an alternative, postmodern, answer to suffering which is grounded in kenosis consummated in caritas. In the paradigm of pure kenosis, however, there is no arbiter of moral judgement and the plot of The Phoenician Scheme displays the repercussions of this philosophy. Anderson’s film, then, is an excellent example of a piece of art which uses religious symbols to propose a non-religious paradigm of reconciling with human suffering.

Cruel Angels: Sartrean Condemnation of Objectification in Neon Genesis Evangelion
Adelaide Hannum

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1997) deploys Judeo-Christian symbolism (via depictions of crucifixions, messianic figures, creation mythology, and the promise of beatific union) entirely outside of any confessional Christian framework. This paper argues that creator Hideaki Anno mobilises these symbols not to affirm or explicitly critique Christianity, but to construct an alternative existentialist framework in which the desire for salvation and an end to suffering is exposed as ontologically impossible and, in Sartrean terms, in bad faith.

Drawing on Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism, this paper presents NGE‘s “Human Instrumentality Project” (a forced merging of individual souls into a collective consciousness intended to eliminate shame and suffering) as analogous to Sartre’s critique of self-objectification practiced in religions such as Christianity. Just as Sartre’s paper-knife metaphor identifies belief in God as self-deceptive (characterising conscious subjects as beings-in-themselves with a predetermined, externally controlled essence), the Human Instrumentality Project promises its participants an existence without the unpleasantness of subjective person-to-person interaction. Both positions, the paper argues, are in bad faith: attempts to comprehend being-in-itself-for-itself are ontologically contradictory. The Human Instrumentality Project fails accordingly.

Brief attention is given to the density of Christian symbolism throughout the series, establishing a pattern of recognition before the climax of End of Evangelion. The paper focuses primarily on this climax, in which Anno inserts live-action footage of the series’ actual audience into the film, literalising the Sartrean keyhole scenario and forcing viewers to literally self-objectify. Christian imagery here functions not as theology but as a device to condemn self-objectification and insular views of oneself. These devices identify and criticize the bad faith Anno locates in his target audience’s overconsumptive, voyeuristic media habits.

This reading positions NGE as a significant non-Christian deployment of Christian symbolism, one in which the soteriological visuals and structure of Christianity are appropriated to critique the objectification individuals like Sartre claim it promotes.

Vestiges of the Christian Imagination in (early) Dungeons & Dragons
Oliver Langworthy

The emergence of Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D) in 1974 following its departure from traditional wargaming was accompanied by the active and imaginative development of its different component parts, most especially monsters, classes, and alignment systems. This paper focuses on how all three of these drew deeply on, among other things, Christian theological thought and imagination in their earliest iterations. The presence of these Christian concepts, absent their context and original signification, would continue in D&D. Over time, they would come to be used in entirely novel ways, retaining only a very loose relationship to both their introduction to D&D but also an entirely distinct character to their initial Christian source. This re-imagining has come to create an entirely new mythology which contains recognisably Christian or Christian-originated terms used in a parallel configurations to be encountered by an audience which is increasingly unfamiliar with their original use. The implications of this emergent project of myth-making and its relationship with contemporary Christian ressourcement are discussed.

Session 3 — Senate Room

Belief and Doubt in Barbara Kruger’s Kunst-Station St. Peter Installation
Sara Codington

This paper examines how Christian symbols are reinterpreted, reframed, and redeployed in non-Christian contexts through a close reading of Barbara Kruger’s installation practice, with particular focus on her 2003 floor installation at the Kunst-Station of St. Peter in Cologne. Situating Kruger’s oeuvre within the conference theme “Religion from the Outside,” the study argues that her sustained engagement with devotional imagery, especially praying hands, cruciform bodily references, and liturgical spatial cues, constitutes a significant instance of Christian visual language being utilized beyond confessional boundaries, where it is neither affirmed nor simply rejected, but strategically re-situated.

At the center of the analysis is Kruger’s St. Peter installation, in which a monumental image of clasped hands in prayer is stretched across the nave of an active Roman Catholic church and overlaid with interrogative text. Although the work is frequently interpreted through frameworks of media critique and feminist theory, this paper explores the way in which Kruger’s work opens itself to new possibilities of meaning when situated in Kunst-Station St. Peter. The installation does not function as traditional religious art nor as straightforward critique. Instead, it activates Christian imagery within a hybrid field of aesthetic, institutional, and liturgical meaning.

By drawing connections to Kruger’s wider practice, including earlier collages and later immersive installations that repeatedly stage prayerful gesture, bodily subjection, and quasi- liturgical address, the paper demonstrates that Christian symbolism in her work is persistently displaced into contexts of doubt, media saturation, and ideological interrogation. These symbols retain affective and structural force even as they are stripped of doctrinal certainty, suggesting that Christian visual forms remain culturally operative outside explicitly religious frameworks.

The paper also engages the curatorial theology of Fr. Friedhelm Mennekes SJ and the Kunst-Station St. Peter project, which explicitly positioned contemporary art within an active church as a form of “liturgy as question.” This institutional framing complicates any simple inside or outside binary by showing how non-Christian or post-secular artistic interventions can be absorbed into, and reshaped by, liturgical environments.

Icons of Lost Words: Presence and Participation in a Modern-Day Bestiary
Christina Eickenroht

“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children.” So begins the fairy-tale preface to The Lost Words, written by Robert Macfarlane and illustrated by Jackie Morris. This preface alludes to the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which had culled “outdoor and natural” words deemed irrelevant to modern-day childhood—words like acorn, adder, bluebell, conker, dandelion, fern, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, newt, otter, and willow—and replaced them with “indoor and virtual” words like blog, bullet-point, chatroom, and voice-mail. The Lost Words is Macfarlane and Morris’ creative protest. As such, The Lost Words defies classification into any one genre. It is a spellbook and a “spelling” book. It is an illuminated manuscript, whose tale is told in gold. It is a modern-day bestiary without explicit religious reference. It is a book of painted “icons” of priestly and kingly creatures. In the words of Alison Milbank, The Lost Words aims to awaken in us “a new sensitivity to the splendor and strangeness of the world … a religious sense of the mystery of the real.”

This paper addresses how Morris endeavors to re-enchant us by rendering each “lost” creature in the recognizable form of an icon—painted in vivid color, set against a background of gold (or green, or gray) leaf. By invoking the tradition of Christian iconography, Morris playfully explores theologically inflected dynamics of absence and presence, inviting us into participatory engagement with the natural world which does not claim mastery, but marvels at mystery.

Spectral Semiotics: Christian Symbolism, Spirit Photography and the Visual Grammar of the Unseen in Victorian Britain
Gianna French

This paper examines the watercolours of George Jones RA as part of a wider nineteenth-century visual culture, shaped in part by the shifting landscape of religion in the Victorian age, concerned with rendering the invisible. Best known for his oil paintings of battle scenes, Jones nevertheless produced a substantial body of drawings and watercolours in his later life, many of which depict biblical and supernatural subjects. While he frequently represents scriptural episodes, his work also draws on literary sources including Milton and Shakespeare, placing Christian imagery alongside other traditions of supernatural encounter. Rather than functioning solely within a theological framework, these images participate in a broader symbolic vocabulary shared with contemporary practices such as Spiritualism and spirit photography. Through close visual comparison, the paper analyses how angels and apparitions in Jones’s work emerge through material strategies of haziness, layering, and abstraction — echoing the aesthetics of spirit photography. In this context, Christian motifs operate less as expressions of doctrine than as flexible visual tools for representing the unseen, contributing to what might be described as a nineteenth-century ‘grammar of invisibility.’ Focusing on case studies drawn from albums of Jones’s work in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the paper argues that his images demonstrate how Christian symbolism could be detached from confessional meaning and absorbed into a wider system of visual reference of the unseen spanning religion, literature, and emerging occult practices in Victorian Britain.

Session 4 — Parliament Hall

“Embracing Paradox”: Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) and Religion from the Outside
Melody Schwarting

What do we make of poetry written by a nonbeliever so full of Christian language that it is adopted by Christians for devotional use? Ruth Pitter’s early poems, most notably in A Trophy of Arms (1936), go farther than using Christian symbolism as aesthetic resource. She invokes Jesus Christ in “Help, Good Shepherd,” presents a vision of resurrection in “A Solemn Meditation” and one of glorification in “For Sleep, or Death.” Despite being an outsider to Christianity, Pitter’s work finds faith in the resurrection, glorification, a benevolent deity, and other Christian doctrines, without assenting to creedal Christianity. Pitter’s use of Christian aesthetics in her poetry shows how they become a means of imagining faith without personal belief: T. S. Eliot’s “poetic assent” and John Keats’s “Negative Capability.” Pitter’s wartime conversion and later confirmation demonstrate her later assent to the Christian faith, which is explicit in her later poetry, yet it is these earlier poems that are anthologized in The Oxford Book of Christian Verse and devotional collections. Pitter’s pre-conversion poetry is a case study in religion from the outside in 1930s Britain.

Outside of the Church: Jewish Experience of the Russian Orthodox Landscape in the 19th Century
Elizabeth Aley

In this essay, I will examine the Lithuanian born artist Isaac Levitan’s (1860-1900) landscapes through the lens of his Jewish identity and upbringing. I will focus in particular upon the Russian Jewry’s experience and understanding of diaspora and religious identity and their relationship to Russian Orthodoxy in the 19^th century. Many of Levitan’s landscapes depict the sacred Russian landscape, that is, a landscape united with the Orthodox Church and the Russian people’s piety, visually manifested in the physical body of the Church’s architecture. In works such as Beyond the Eternal Peace, Levitan seems to go beyond sheer observation, instead drawing out the eschatological and sentimental significance of the Orthodox church in the Russian landscape. I will link Levitan’s own experience as an outsider looking to the broad experience and understanding of identity of the Russian Jewry in the 19^th century, movements in Orthodox mysticism which emphasized a connection to creation and nature, and his close friendships with Orthodox Christians such as Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Nesterov. Ultimately, I will argue that while his work can be viewed as mere secular observation and realism, by understanding Levitan’s autobiography and identity, we can view his work as an exegesis of the Russian Jew’s experience, and at times symbolic in nature.

De-Contextualized Gospel Music in Contemporary Musical Theater
Gracie McBride

This paper will examine three examples of contemporary musical theater songs in the gospel genre that occur outside of its expected religious and/or cultural context. In these examples, the musical symbols of gospel work alongside the bodily symbols it recalls to express fervor for a cause (“Run, Freedom, Run” from Urinetown), convey a posture of jubilant worship(“Super Sea Star Savior” from SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical), and convince others of a position (“Love Thy Neighbor” from The Prom). I will first provide a contextual background: identify the key symbols and language of the gospel music genre and give a brief overview of the musical theater genre and the use of gospel music in it. I will then turn to my three examples and show how the religious memory that the gospel genre evokes, and the participatory nature of that memory, makes it a particularly efficacious genre in the medium of musical theater for stirring up joyful emotion and rousing characters to action.

The symbolic language of gospel music is not only auditory, but bodily as well. It demands to be moved along to and invites participation from all members of the congregation. Therefore, when musical theater composers utilize the auditory symbols of the gospel genre, even in a non-religious setting, they also gain access to its bodily language (as seen in the above examples through tambourine playing, foot-shuffling as if in a shout, miming being “slain in the spirit,” and other ecstatic choreography). Furthermore, the fact that this bodily language is of religious origin means that it still maintains an idea of reverence (which could be interpreted as irreverence, depending on usage), and a sense of being filled with the spirit, even when de-contextualized.

Session 4 — Senate Room

Wonder and the Monastery: Perceptions of Christian Art and Sacred Space in the Medieval Islamic Diyārāt Tradition
Bashar al-Idreesi

This paper examines how Christian art and sacred space were perceived within medieval Islamic literary culture, focusing on the diyārāt tradition – Arabic texts that describe monasteries across the ʿAbbāsid and Faṭimid worlds. Whilst these works have often been used as sources for interreligious contact, they have not been fully considered as sites in which Christian visual and spatial environments are actively constructed and mediated for Muslim audiences. Focusing on al-Shābushtī’s tenth-century Book of Monasteries, the paper argues that monasteries are not simply recorded as religious institutions, but are perceived and rendered as spaces of aesthetic experience. Through anecdote, poetic citation, and descriptive narrative, the text frames monastic settings – encompassing architecture, landscape, social life, liturgical objects, and images – as environments to be seen, encountered, and appreciated. Particular attention is given to the presence of images and material decoration, including icons, which are not treated as markers of confessional difference but are integrated into the broader perceptual and aesthetic f

As I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Stonewall: Saintly Iconographies in the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art
Alex Lednicky

What do trans and queer appropriations of Christian visual language look like in queer contemporary art? The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art has its roots in the aftermath of the Stonewall Riots and the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It collects, curates, and displays exclusively trans and queer art and artists. Their online catalogue provides some insight into which saints are being appropriated and how their visual languages are being used by trans and queer artists. Some of these depictions are obviously and explicitly Christian. But others, such as the case studies for this presentation, are far more subtle. Each of these works was created in a post-Stonewall Riots world, the biggest impetus for the modern queer rights movement. They reflect the persecution and suffering that trans and queer people have faced then and continue to face now.

The appropriation of Christian visual language presents an interesting dichotomy between figurative works and abstract works. The figurative works are typically subtle but clear depictions of saints, such as St Sebastian, while the abstract works often require at least knowing the title to understand. The figurative works tend to build on the pre-existing visual language and aesthetics of Christianity. But the abstract works remove the icons and renegotiates the tools of martyrdom, removing the formal elements of saintly iconographies, to create new references and patterns. Focusing on four specific artworks, this presentation will investigate the ways in which trans and queer artists are utilizing Christian visual language as a tool for understanding and representing their own persecution.

Richard Wagner and the Industry of the Bayreuth Festival at the Turn of the Century:An Examination of Three French Novels of Pilgrimage
Adeline Heck

The opening of the first Bayreuth Festival in the summer of 1876 was widely reported in the German and foreign press as a seminal musical event. From the very beginning, Bayreuth was conceived of as a shrine that sought to glorify the art and person of Richard Wagner. In the press as well as in travel books, Bayreuth attendees used religious rhetoric to describe the lure of the once-sleepy Franconian town and the enthusiasm with which the first performances of the Ring cycle were received. In the eyes of Wagner’s admirers, Bayreuth was a locus of pilgrimage, its Festspielhaus a temple, and Wagner himself a living God. After he died in 1883, the Bayreuther Kreis further consolidated the Wagner cult, giving it a decidedly nationalistic and far-right interpretation that solidified Bayreuth’s image as a holy monument of German culture.

In a previous article (published with Music & Letters in March 2026), I have examined a corpus of four fin-de-siècle French novels that critiqued this religious narrative. My argument was that the dual outsider status of fin-de-siècle French literary authors writing about Bayreuth in their novels and short stories—that of a French person in Germany and that of a literary writer in a musical environment—is what allowed them to gather enough critical distance to point to the hollowness at the centre of the Wagnerian project, which, despite the religiosity of its regular attendees, remains more of a nationalistic spectacle than an edifying religious experience. With this presentation, I aim to extend the scope of my previous work in order to focus on three French female writers from the early 1900s—Colette, Jacque Vontade (Augustine Bulteau) and Ossit (Madeleine Deslandes)—all of whom wrote novels taking place in Bayreuth that perform a similar critique as that of their male counterparts, but with an added sense of awareness and irony regarding the specificity of the Bayreuth religious experience for female concertgoers.

Session 5 — Parliament Hall

The Orthodox Icon and the Abstract Art of Kandinsky and Brancusi
Aidan Hart

It is not by chance that the founders of twentieth-century abstract art came from Orthodox Christian countries, chiefly the father of modern abstract sculpture, Constantin Brancusi from Rumania, and the father of modern abstract painting, Wassily Kandinsky from Russia. To these we might add the Russian composer Ivor Stravinsky, a key figure in modernist music. To what extent did the icon tradition of the Orthodox Church in which these men were raised, and to a large extent continued to value throughout their lives, influence the formal, symbolic, and metaphysical qualities of their art? Like many artists of their time, they drew on a variety of spiritual, artistic, and philosophical traditions. To what extent therefore did the symbolism and metaphysics of their work differ from that of the Orthodox icon tradition? This paper concentrates on the work of Kandinsky, but also references Brancusi.

Sanctuary on West 22nd Street: Robert Gober’s Installations and American Religion after 9/11
Taylor Worley

In the spring of 2005, the Matthew Marks Gallery opened its doors for a show of new works by the New York artist Robert Gober. Known for his use of everyday forms, Gober can be mistaken for another provocateur of ‘readymades’ (à la Marcel Duchamp), but on closer inspection, the sculptor’s works reveal themselves to be the product of a painstakingly delicate and care-laden set of processes. Such is the case with his unmistakably chapel-like installation for Matthew Marks Gallery in 2005. Despite the seemingly ecclesial orientation of space, the installation’s references to Christian imagery were so deeply encoded that the gallery produced a companion two-volume text called A Robert Gober Lexicon. Far beyond any merely playful engagement with religious imagery of the artist’s Roman Catholic upbringing, the installation spoke in a curious tongue to the rampant social division expressed in the political aftermath of 9/11. Just as we saw in its re-installation (without its wooden cross, shockingly) for MoMA’s retrospective for the artist ten years later, such a work still speaks to the ways in which artists in a post-secular society continue to mine for their purposes the imaginative value of the most obvious and the most obscure examples of historic Christian imagery.

Inverted icons: Religious Imagery and Ecclesial Structures in Russian Prison Tattooing
Kieran Collery

Between 1948 and 1986, Danzig Baldaev created over 3000 sketches replicating tattoos he observed during his tenure as a prison guard in the Soviet prison system. His drawings, highly detailed, frequently included the stories of how prisoners came to receive these tattoos and their underlying meanings. These symbols, for their vulgarity, irony and violence, hide a hidden language – an aesthetic thieves’ cant used to decipher the criminal history of the tattooed. This history, like a symbolic narrative of their criminal life, testifies to the criminal’s status and role within the prison society of Russian thieves-in-law: the vor v zakone.

This symbolic lexicon in part employs Russian Orthodox symbols, albeit stripped of religious meaning. An Orthodox cross represents a thief-in-law, a vor, who abides by the criminal code; Orthodox church domes represent terms served in prison; the Madonna represents the death of the vor to their outside life and rebirth into the carceral world of the Sovietprison. In all cases, these symbols serve to propagate the irreligious law of the vory. These tattoos can indicate purity, showing whether a thief has maintained the thieves’ code. They can indicate hierarchy and status in prisons symbolised by the churches that shelter the congregation of thieves. Their language is communally and traditionally governed: honourable tattoos are rewarded, humiliating tattoos are forcibly applied, and tattoos discredited as unearned are brutally removed. By appropriating religious imagery in order to maintain a hierarchical system of criminal ethics, the society of the vor v zakone acts as a malignant inversion of an ecclesial community. This society presents us a unique opportunity to ask the question: what does a community of law look like without spiritual grace?

To answer this question, this abstract proposes a paper divided into two parts. The first, preliminary part will provide an overview of Danzig Baldaev’s work, drawing from his three-volume Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia. It will showcase relevant aspects of Russian prison tattooing presented in the Encyclopedia, such as how tattoos act as a language, the norms governing the acquisition of tattoos, and anyreligious aspects of the system of tattooing itself. Finally, it will provide Baldaev’s definitions of the threesymbols previously mentioned to be used in the second section: the Cross, church domes, and the Madonna.

The second, main part will look at this semiotic language through an Orthodox theological lens, drawing on two theologies indebted to Pseudo-Dionysius’ theology of images: the apologia of icons developed by John of Damascus, and the ecclesiology of Maximus the Confessor. Using these theologies, we can examine the relationship that tattoos formalise: that of the tattooed, the bodily bearer of “icons,” and that of the perceivers of the tattooed, as the unified “church” bearing witness to these “icons.”

For the tattoo-bearer, their “icons” do not image a spiritual reality, but a personal, historic one – the vor’s present state in relation to the thieves’ code. Where a religious icon for John of Damascus “represents an image of the transfigured, or divinised, world, [and] acts as a window, or passageway, between human beings and God,” the tattoo points to the judgements of the thieves’ law. This authority is actualised on the body of the tattoo-bearer as a sort of stigmata. No longer ensouled in a religious context, the ethical state of the tattoo-bearer is instead historicised by means of tattoos that reveal their history, replacing an internal moral state with the permanent results of the tattoo-bearer’s choices. Meanwhile, the community perceiving tattoos sees in them the reality of the ethical system of the vor v zakone, made manifest on the tattoo-bearer’s objectified body. In this system, religious symbols remain emblematic of ethical adherence despite their loss of spiritual meaning. As corporate symbols, they affirm the absolute governance of the ethical code of the vory and symbolise the law’s transcendence of any single individual in the community. By binding matter to morality, religious tattoos actualise a formal system and enforce a reprobate unity, mimicking Maximus’ ecclesial vision whereby, in the Church, “the intelligible and sensible parts of the universe penetrate each other without confusion, [forming] an irreducible relation between the whole and the parts.”

For both the individual and the community, the system of tattoos actualise ethics without a concept of grace. As permanent, tattoos deny both the remit of individual forgiveness and the expectation of communal mercy. Instead, power is exercised upon the individual’s body, which is entirely the property of the community and the law. The use of religious imagery to enforce a criminal anti-morality thus illuminates a conclusion which the vor v zakone’s system makes strikingly clear in its brutal adherence to law: where spiritual grace does not unite the individual to their community, material force will bind them instead.