What a successful conference!

What an awesome conference!

I want to thank all who participated or attended for making it a truly successful event. I learned an enormous amount from my colleagues and from the students who all gave papers.

Here is our company in front of the reflecting pool at the Rothko Chapel.

From left to right: back row: Enoch Olujide Gbadegesin; Kocku von Stuckrad; Andrei Orlov; Jeff Kripal; John Turner; Claire Fanger; Grant Adamson; Bill Parsons; Justin. Front row: Stephen Finley; April DeConick; Marcia Brennan; Bernard McGinn; Chad Pevateaux; Shira Lander. Not present for photo: Ata Anzali; Dustin Atlas; Benjamin Brochstein; Kelley Coblentz Bautch; David Cook; Jonathan Garb; Margarita Simon Guillory; Greg Kaplan; Anne Carolyn Klein; David Porreca; John Stroup; Franklin Trammell; Claire Villarreal; Betul Yavuz.

Edited volume: Histories of the Hidden God...to come.

Hidden God, Hidden Histories Schedule

Today is the day! This afternoon at 3:15 the Hidden God, Hidden Histories Rockwell Symposium convenes.

HERE is a link to the poster and the detailed schedule. Scroll down the page and the first hyperlink will bring up our beautiful poster. The second hyperlink will bring up the detailed schedule.

There is no registration fee. The conference is open to the public. Please join us for any or all of the sessions if you are in the area and looking for something to do.

Poster Art

Here is the poster artwork for the approaching conference, Hidden God, Hidden Histories. I think it is stunning and look forward to the conference. It is open to the public, so if you are in the area, stop by for a session or two. I'll post a final schedule soon.

The name of my John talk

The name of my talk on the Gospel of John for the Hidden God, Hidden Histories conference is: "What is hiding in the Gospel of John? Reconceptualizing Johannine Origins and the Roots of Gnosticism".

My "paper" has become so full and so detailed that it looks like it is going to become the basis of another book. I already have the title for it:

John Interrupted: What can the Gospel of John tell us about the origins of Christianity and Gnosticism?

The work I'm doing is from the ground up, straight back to the ancient sources. And all because one day, while preparing to deliver an undergraduate lecture on the Gospel of John, I stumbled upon a passage in Greek that is not translated accurately in any modern translation I have been able to find.

Main Speakers for Hidden God, Hidden Histories Symposium

I have now the list of main speakers for the Rockwell Religious Studies 2010 Symposium: Hidden God, Hidden Histories. There will be graduate student speakers involved in each session as well.

In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived to be humanlike creator, king, or ruler enthroned in heaven. But what about the God of the unconventional Western traditions, the God of the mystics, gnostics, and sages? Like almost everything else in these esoteric traditions, God is hidden, secreted away. Sometimes God shows up in another universe beyond our world. Other times God is cloaked behind veils in celestial palaces or within a body of blinding light. Often God is understood to be utterly transcendent, utterly beyond us, while also immediately immanent, immediately within us. This symposium, the inaugural event of the Department of Religious Studies’ new Program on Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism (or GEM) offers academic reflections on these secreted traditions about God, from the ancient world to the modern period.


ROCKWELL SYMPOSIUM, April 15-18

April 15, 3-5 p.m.

April D. DeConick, Rice University
“The Gospel of John as a Transtheistic Early Christian Gospel: Reconceptualizing Johannine Origins and the Roots of Gnosticism”

John Turner, University of Nebraska
“From Hidden to Revealed in Sethian Revelation, Ritual and Protology”

BURKITT PUBLIC LECTURE, April 15, 7:30-9 p.m.

Kocku van Struckard, University of Groningen
“The Esoteric Quest and Western Culture”

April 16, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

Kelley Coblentz-Bautch, University of St. Edwards
“The Hidden God in the Pseudo-Clementines”

Andrei Orlov, Marquette University
“Adoil Outside the Cosmos: God Before and After Creation in Enochic Traditions”

Bernard McGinn, University of Chicago
“The Hidden God and the Hidden Self in Christian Mysticism”

Claire Fanger, Rice University
"God's Occulted Body: Divine Involucra in Alan of Lille and Bernard Silvestris"

David Porreca, University of Waterloo
"How Hidden is God? Revelation and Pedagogy in Ancient and Medieval Hermetic Writings"

David Cook, Rice University
“The Vision of God in Muslim Dreams”

Jeff Kripal, Rice University
"On the Mothman, UFOs, and Other Monsters: John A. Keel and the Superspectrum of the Occult"

John Stroup, Rice University
"The Multidimensional Physics of History and the Problem of Transtheistic God-Language as Cultural Critique in the Popular and Learned Works of Joseph P. Farrell"

April 17, 8:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m.

Gregory Kaplan, Rice University
"How (Not) to 'Immanentize the Eschaton' and Other Problems for Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin"

Steven Finley, Louisiana State University
"Hidden Away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam"

Anne Klein, Rice University
“The Transcendent, the Mysterious, and the Hidden in Tibet: A Buddhist Logos”

Shira Lander, Rice University
“Scholarship on Ancient Palestinian Helios Mosaics: Hiding the Revealed God”

Marcia Brennan, Rice University
“The Modern Museum and Mystical Houston”

April 18, 8:30-11 a.m.

Jonathan Garb, Hebrew University
"Shamanism and Modern Kabbalah"

Bill Parsons, Rice University
“Contours of an Emerging Psychoanalytic Spirituality: Prospects and Problems”