Through innovative workshops, senior and emerging scholars collaborate to explore the vital link between religion and fictio, or world-making. The public understanding of both terms, religion as well as literature, has for too long been constrained by polemical assertions about the differences between imagination and reality. This can and should be countered by innovative work in religion and literature, as the field aims to incite new questions and profound insights about fiction’s capacity to change reality.
Scholars working across religious and literary studies have much to offer one another, yet they (and their work) confront a disciplinary divide. Religionists are largely aligned with religious studies or theology departments, mining literary texts as archival evidence of religious themes, histories, and ideas. Literature scholars, usually trained and teaching in language or comparative literature departments, tend to deploy “religion” as a critical apparatus for reading literary texts. The primary institutional point of connection between religion and literature has long been—and to a surprising degree remains—the subfield known variably as Religion and Literature or Literature and Theology, a modern dialectical field that has focused most fully upon a post-Enlightenment Western canon. With exceptions, what counts as religion, as literature, and the terms of their connection have been proscribed in ways that still draw on mid-twentieth-century understandings of these categories.