Iconic books are texts revered as objects of power rather than just as words of instruction, information, or insight. In religious and secular rituals around the globe, people carry, show, wave, touch and kiss books and other texts, as well as read them. This blog chronicles such events and activities. (For more about iconic books, see the links to the Iconic Books Project at left.)

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Presentations at AAR/SBL 2011

Members of SCRIPT (The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts) were active presenters at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), November 18-22:
  • Jim Watts (Syracuse) talked about "Iconic Electronic Texts, or How Ritual Makes Virtual Texts Material," in the Religion and Media Workshop's day-long session on "What’s Next for Texts: Scripting Religion in a Networked World" (November 18)
  • Dori Parmenter (Spalding) and Yohan Yoo (Seoul) presented to the AAR's Arts, Literature, and Religion Section's session on "The Arts of the Book: Reading Images, Looking at Words" (November 20)
  • Jason Larson (Bates) talked about "The Iconic Gospel as Monument: Gospel Books as Imperialized Sites of Memory in Late Antiquity" to the SBL's Religious World of Late Antiquity Section's session on "The Materiality of Texts / The Word as Object" (November 20)
  • David Dault (Christian Brothers) presented "'It Fell from Heaven': The United 93 Crash Site Bible as Icon and Totemic Object" to the AAR's Religion and Popular Culture Group (November 22)

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

SCRIPT CFP

The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) has issued an open call for papers for its May 4-5 concurrent meeting with the EIR/AAR in Waterloo, Ontario.

Please consider joining in doing new research on iconic books and performative texts. Click here for details about SCRIPT. Click here for online membership form. Membership includes an online subscription to Postscripts, which later this year will publish the papers from the third Iconic Books Symposium in 2010.