| April DeConick, Seminar Leader |
| April D. DeConick is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of Biblical Studies. She is a historian of early Jewish and Christian thought. What fascinates her is mapping the many ways that the Jesus tradition emerges across the literature, traditions that have left behind echoes of bitter controversies and competing memories. She has a deep love for exploring the various expressions of ante-Nicene mysticism, including the spirituality of classic Gnostic thinkers. Her work has been called "revisionist," challenging us to seek answers beyond the conventional.
She has recently completed a book on the Gospel of Judas, the first to seriously challenge the interpretation and translation published by National Geographic (2006). Her book is entitled, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (London: Continuum, 2007). It has been translated into several languages and republished in 2009 in a revised format.
She is currently editing the set of scholarly papers delivered at the Codex Judas Congress (March 13-16, 2008) which will be called the The Codex Judas Papers. She is completing a book for the general public, Sex and the Serpent: Why the Sexual Conflicts of the Early Church Still Matter, and is starting another on Gnostic spirituality, The Gnostics and Their Gospels: An Introduction to Gnostic Spirituality in Antiquity.
She is on the editorial board of the Nag Hammadi and Manichean studies series published by E.J. Brill. She is an active member of the Society of Biblical Literature where she serves as co-Chair of the New Testament Mysticism Project. She also organized and chaired for many years the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism Group. She is affiliated with the North American Patristics Society, and the International Association for Coptic Studies as well.
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Project Abstract:
To write a set of academic articles that will form the foundation for my book, The Forbidden Gospels. The book will introduce students and no-specialists to the wide range of ancient Gnostic groups, practices, and metaphysics. I will argue that the Gnostic communities were secret initiatory societies whose metaphysics is tied intimately to the human's preparation for death and the afterlife journey. I plan to investigate as many groups as possible, beginning with the Ophites and the Naassenes.
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| Matt Dillon, Seminar Secretary |
| Matt came to Rice from San Francisco State University, where he completed his B.A. in Philosophy and Religion summa cum laude. While there, he wrote his senior honor's thesis on a comparative analysis of the uses of Adam in The Zohar and Ibn-Arabi, arguing for a common mystical hermeneutic that used the first man as a symbol to encode revelations of the human itself as divine, if only in extraverted mystical experiences. Now studying under Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, Matt is continuing a form of this project, though steering his historical emphasis away from Medieval mysticism and towards training as a comparativist in early Christianity and American Metaphysical Religion. His dissertation serves to focus this research on Carl Jung's recently published Red Book, where Matt is able to explore his interests in physchoanalysis, visionary mysticism, history of religions, and the transmission of "Gnostic" religious ideas into the New Age.
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Project Abstract:
In this seminar, I will explore the concept of the "Land of the Dead" as it appears in the writings of Carl Jung, especially in The Red Book and "Septem Sermones ad Mortuos." First, I will engage the issue to what extent he took the connection between the imagination and disembodied spirits literally - as maintained by Richard Noll - versus how he interpreted it psychologically. In so doing, I will deeply explore Jung's relationships to the traditions of Spiritualism and Mesmerism, and will attempt to parse to what extent we can interpret "the land of the dead" as having deeper roots in Spiritualism or the nascent psychoanalytic movement, which was, at the time, attempting to assert itself as an empirical science.
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| Adrian Umana Hossman, a native from Columbia, received her BA in Political Science and French from the University of Houston. After several years in the professional world she returned to academia where she joined the French Studies department at Rice to pursue a PhD in literature. Her work focuses on the intersections of art, death, and identity within 19th and 20th century French Caribbean literature. She recently participated in the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture where she presented a paper on Henri Matisse: "From Fauvism to the paper cutouts: an itinerary of exploration." During the summer of 2009 she represented Rice at the Dartmouth College French Cultural Studies Institute that focused on French Culture and Religion. She is currently collaborating in the translation of a Haitian novel into Spanish and English.
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Project Abstract:
Death, afterlife and nomadic wanderings in French Caribbean literature
The French Caribbean authors Maryse Conde and Rene Depestre offer a unique opportunity to study how death within a literary tradition can contribute to the elaboration of a hybrid identity, and the (re)creation of an innovative, autochthonous thought. What at first glance could be perceived as the expression of tragedy and loss in the post-colonial context, upon closer analysis emerges as the breaking of silence to (re)invigorate the long-standing French literary tradition. Or are these nomadic wanderings contributing to the mapping of a new tradition?
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| Grant Adamson is a third year PhD student in Religious Studies at Rice University. His concentration is Bible and Beyond, with broad interest in Christian Origins and ancient Near Eastern and Classical cultures. He received his MA from Brigham Young University in Comparative Studies (2008). His contribution to the Codex Judas Congress, published in The Codex Judas Papers (ed. April DeConick; Brill, 2009) is entitled "Fate Indelible: The Gospel of Judas and Horoscopic Astrology." The descent of the soul in the early church will be the topic of his dissertation.
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Project Abstract:
The afterlife journey is often a reversal or retracing of the steps taken by the soul in the incarnation process. As Heraclitus said, the way up and down are one and the same. With this in mind, for my project I will be looking at how early Christians interpreted the sower parable and other 'seed' material in the New Testament as referring to the descent of the soul along the lines of Plato's Timaeus, where the higher, rational or logical part of the soul is said to be sown by the creator.
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| Becky Gimbel is a second-year graduate student in the department of anthropology. She received her B.A. from George Mason University in 2009, majority in anthropology and global affairs with a concentration in international development. Her dissertation research, for which she began her fieldwork in the summer of 2010, explores the relationship between healing and death, political movements, and Bolivarian (Cuban and Venezuelan) medical aid in Haiti.
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Project Abstract:
Through this seminar, Gimbel is researching how concepts of the afterlife in Haiti have changed since the earthquake in January 2010, particular in terms of the newly sensual and public images of death that residents of Port-au-Prince confront in their daily lives. This project also asks how Cuban and Venezuelan relief physicians reconcile their politically and scientifically non-religious backgrounds with the various religions (Catholicism, Santeria, etc.) embedded in their societies, and how these beliefs interact with those of their Haitian patients. Gimbel is specifically concerned with the historical relationship of socialism, religion, and the aid in Latin America, and how this affects contemporary interpretations of premature death.
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| Franklin Trammell is a fourth year PhD student at Rice University. He has recently published "The God of Jerusalem as the Pole Dragon: The Conceptual Background of the Cosmic Axis in James." Pages 337-49 in The Codex Judas Papers: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Tchacos Codex held at Rice University, Houston, Texas, March 13-16, 2008. Edited by April D. DeConick. NHMS 71. Leiden, Boston: E.J. Brill, 2009. His areas of study include early Judaism and Christian origins, medieval Jewish mysticism, along with ancient biblical and "gnostic" mythology. He is writing a dissertation on esoteric currents in early Christianity, with a particular emphasis on the Shepherd of Hermas.
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Project Abstract:
In the seminar, Mr. Trammell is writing a chapter of his dissertation, focusing on ascension and the theme of building.
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| Michael Domeracki, Webmaster and Auditor |
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Michael Domeracki is a first year PhD student in the Bible and Beyond program. He completed his undergraduate degree in Reformation History with a minor in Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. After completing his masters at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Early Church History he entered a non-degree graduate program at the University of Notre Dame studying ancient languages. He primarily works with salvation models of early Christianity, specifically Egyptian. His masters thesis concerned the salvation model of the Gospel of Mary in light of relevant Alexandrian, and specifically Origenic, theology.
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