Mediated Spiritualities: A Colloquium Exploring Global Enclosures, Disclosures, Possibilities, Limitations

This colloquium explores textual and spatial sites of spiritual mediation across a variety of religious, institutional, geographical, and cultural boundaries. We will discuss how spiritual writers disclose rhetorical modes of escape as they enclose corporeal and spiritual experiences into mediated texts—often from cloistered environments. When considered across diverse contexts, spiritual texts promote insight into many aspects of culture, including gender, writing, theology, spirituality, sexuality, and politics. What is the relationship between spiritual writers and their communities? What social conditions, identities, spaces, and texts enable and constrain spiritual activity? How do these conditions evolve across geography, temporality, culture? What types of comparative approaches can we offer to our classrooms and scholarship in thinking about spiritual texts in various religious traditions? Finally, how might a broader awareness of global expressions of spirituality shape future research in the humanities?

All are welcome. Breakfast and boxed lunches will be served. Reception with light refreshments to follow.

Advance registration is required. RSVP to: cw2772@princeton.edu. 

This event is sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature (Princeton), the Humanities Council (Princeton), the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (University of Pennsylvania), the Department of Spanish & Portuguese (Princeton), the Program in Latin American Studies (Princeton), the Department of Religion (Princeton), and the Department of English (Princeton).