Enseigner les faits religieux : Quels enjeux ? (Débats décole) (French Edition)

How many times have you and your colleagues voted to bolster the interests of Big Business to the detriment of your constituents and the natural world? Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, recognized what every study I have seen corroborates, that learning with a mentor, who models passion for the topic, will result in the student being more likely to excel in that area.

The same cannot be said of telephones and cars, or even clothing, to name a few aspects of society that have evolved over that time. God forbid some subversive thinkers choose to question the sanctity of those institutions! Perhaps the greatest possible aspiration of this Bill could be, to be more closely connected to a segment of the population, the non-mainstream schoolers, that have the means and resources to engage with our children in developmentally appropriate activities that capture the imagination and spur on the desire to grow and to learn. They have already realized that sitting for inordinate amounts of time in a classroom listening to a teacher, or a machine, is hardly an awe-inspiring or developmentally appropriate experience.

Are you assuming that I am not concerned about when my child learns to walk, talk, read, write, do math and learn to play a musical instrument. The average Canadian watches 22 hours per week of television and also spends considerable amounts of time playing video games, in front of computers and other electronic screen devices. These are, in part, the results of following the norms of a flawed and malfunctioning educational system.

Please excuse me if I choose for my child to opt out. It seems that all non-mainstream students will be required to register with their local school boards, pay fees and incur new additional costs. All the while these students will not be using the resources, facilities or materials from the school board. Sounds like a cash grab!!! It would be encouraging if the government were anticipating a return on a potential substantial investment, which has yet to be announced, in which the government would grant homeschoolers and unschoolers, financial resources and tax breaks — at least equivalent to the amount of money that they save the government, by not requiring their educational services and draining resources from the public kitty i.

Incidentally, both homeschoolers and unschoolers play important roles in supporting a diverse range of economic activities; for example, they attend museums and use other community facilities parks, libraries, etc. And, because they are often not affiliated with a group or school, they do not pay the subsidized costs that school children often do. They often pay full price.

Anyone who can provide their child with a safe and loving environment, full of rich opportunities to learn and grow, should be given the freedom to do so; and to have their voice heard. That said, if any child, who fully understands the implications, decides to opt for conventional schooling, they should certainly be granted that right. Sadly, I see my primary role as a licensed teacher within the Quebec Educational system, as helping my students lead healthier, happier and more productive lives, through facilitating the healing of wounds that were inflicted upon them, to a large extent, by their conscription into mainstream schools?

Typically, my students fear ridicule and resist sharing their thoughts and ideas — unless there are marks attached! They have suffered much in a system that has so often extinguished their intrinsic and spontaneous desire to learn. They have come to expect that conforming talent will be rewarded, and difference will be marginalized, and even penalised. Why not investigate any cases of neglect and inappropriate refusals to send children to school, rather than impose strict educational attendance and pedagogical norms across the board?

But, I strongly doubt that they would possess the skills to do that adequately or effectively. I want my child to be healthy, to consume healthy foods, to recognize the importance of minimizing screen time and the use of electronic devices, to retain and continue to develop his incredible imagination, to be autonomous, think critically, be happy, not need drugs to live a healthy life, be confident, loving, compassionate and empowered to confront the diverse challenges confronting his generation.

Proulx, I hope that your formal education has given you the skills and ability to honestly and effectively address these questions and concerns. An anonymous unschooling parent, who will now shudder every time I have to engage with an institution hospitals, etc. Tammy Mackenzie, tammy redaq. Thank you for your interest. Questions about socialization are familiar to people practicing alternatives to state-led education.

Here is gentle response to some of those questions as well as a look at the current situation in Quebec. Socialization is about learning to adopt certain behaviors and attitudes. From a sociological view, the idea of entrusting a mission of socialization to school comes from the need to ensure a common culture among the various cohorts of young people integrating into adult life. From a psychological point of view, the concept of socialization refers more to the question of the development of the know-how in the individual for behaving in a respectful and effective way among different groups of people.

School is an environment that fosters socialization.

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• Education Physique: école, société, laïcité, citoyenneté, incivilités.
• Lois et Valeurs , valeurs à l'Ecole!
• Le Réseau des écoles démocratiques au Québec;
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However, homeschooling does not preclude the social learning necessary for the child to integrate into society and into their culture. In practice, it is rather the reverse. Most of the others are entrepreneurs. They make judicious use of scientific exploration centers, museums and cultural centers.

From the psychological point of view of socialization, learning to speak with kindness, to wait our turn, to express emotions with respect is done in countless spheres of life: There is a concern that children in school not become too isolated, too much indoctrinated to the beliefs of their parents, and that their talents be recognized and supported. This concept that it takes a village to grow a child is often at the heart of family decisions.

This is addressed by the professionals of the DPJ and our youth protection laws as well as by experienced orthopedagogues. Apart from those rare and complex circumstances, studies have been consistent for several decades: They remain confident, can express their needs and are committed citizens into adulthood. Among other solutions permitted by law, learning centers provide a synthesis of the benefits of homeschooling and the benefits of public schooling. These centers work with passionate specialists with a variety of experiences, focuses, and resources.

Their directors respond promptly to the specific needs of families through flexible and democratic processes on which depends their capacity to deliver the benefits of both operations, as well as appropriate services. Although the unique nature of such an organization must be preserved in order to maintain its effectiveness, there are several possible structures for the organization of a learning center, almost all active today in Quebec: Thanks to the educators and the families who run these centers, our young people have access to options that our good universities and some years of the practice of educational alternatives offer.

Those who are lucky enough to live near a learning center can benefit from an education and socialization of the highest quality. In Quebec, it is more difficult than elsewhere in Canada, the United States, or Europe to provide a rich social life for our children in homeschooling. Always aware of the need, our families form self-help groups, with few resources and little certainty of respect for their rights from one decision to another.

The somewhat bizarre situation of democratic schools, also called free schools, is an example of a situation that the reform can resolve. Being secular and urban, and often established by engaged and educated parents and teachers, these centers respond particularly to families who wish to promote critical thinking, creativity and civic involvement in young persons. There are more than public democratic schools in the world, including 20 in France, 7 in Canada and more than 30 in Israel. However, although all other centers on the list above exist in Quebec, the status of democratic schools remains unclear.

There are no such schools in Quebec. To be in operation, such a learning center must be able to hire professionals to teach workshops or series of courses, to do so in line with rights-based pedagogy, and offer its services to families in all socio-economic situations. There is the issue of parental supervision for young children to consider, as well. These are costly and not very useful complications.

Our historical reform is taking place in these short weeks and months, and your voice on these issues is very important. In parent groups, among experts and school boards, and among our elites and elected officials who dedicated themselves to the issue of home education in recent months — several actions are possible and started, and there is a lot of good will. Today we have a great opportunity to involve people who are interested in the educational experiences of our young people. Thank you very much for your interest and for your comments.

Here are some paths to actions and discussions of the Quebec community in. Education, home education, and reform. Thank you, Ms Boesveld, for your excellent article. I am an unschooling mom, an entrepreneur, and an educational reformer in Quebec. In Canada, the majority of unschooling families are secular, urban, educated, and middle or upper middle economic class — enough for one parent to stay home and to cover the costs of all the materials and outings. That is not accurate. In some cases, curriculums make the difference between unschooled people who do well, and those who struggle, because plans are pretty useful though not required for a person to be well adapted to their society.

Sometimes that society is a tiny community in the Kootenays. But as you mentioned, civic engagement is high among the measured results for unschooled kids. Many people have similar concerns to those of Prof. Ungerleider, whom I quote hereon from the NP article:. The families who choose to live in a different society, such as world-schoolers for example, elite athletes and musicians, or off-gridders, retain their rights under the Canadian charter, the UN Charters of Human Rights and on the Rights of Children, and many provincial charters to a culturally appropriate education, and to make socialization choices appropriate to those cultural ones within the confines of child protection laws, thus allowing for a diversity of childrearing practices.

Like in any family, the parenting philosophies of unschoolers run the gamut from helicopter to hands-off. In hands-off families, independence is earlier and wider 2: Most families sit somewhere in the middle, depending on the topic. For example, some families set strict screen time limits, some set none. These are questions in all families, of course, not just for unschoolers. For example, in Quebec, it is challenging to arrange opportunities for the kids to learn something without parental supervision during school hours.

Parenting Report — they have to get pretty creative to meet that goal: Setting those things up incidentally increases their independence, which is useful but often needlessly complicated. Unschoolers are encouraged to take on projects or themes to answer the questions they have about the world, as are kids in schools. Many of the same resources are used — books, curricula, clubs, web resources, experts, field trips. Measures of success are linked to the original question.

If it is a simple one: Then the child has succeeded when they get the answer. If it is a complex one: Then the child will work on the question until it is answered to their satisfaction and, like in good schools but with a very much more focused mentorship, will be given the resources to succeed algebra, space camp, rocket-building club. Success is measured by results. As for charting over time and keeping records, some do it with portfolios, others with journals or blogs or vlogs, or photo essays.

A great many find various artistic pursuits. This will often comprise a significantly more complete personal record and progression of learning than might school grades, Some unschooling families would very much appreciate classes on various pedagogical skills, including year-to-year tracking. There is a definite push against traditional schools, particularly in areas of the country that have had to deal with child protective services instead of teachers to get educational support. This is often offered through schools, but too often not to homeschoolers.

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Among students, our literacy rates are great, but our STEM rates are dismal. According to this study, 6: Psychology Today , unschoolers tend to do well academically in tertiary education, be intrinsically motivated, and be more satisfied with their careers later on. When they do have trouble, they tend to be more adept at managing.

As mentioned in your article, these young people are used to speaking up for their needs and getting the resources they need, as compared to their age peers. This is especially vital in rural areas and for poorer families, who are mostly excluded from this educational option at this time. Ricci says studies have found homeschool kids do better on SAT tests and rank better in citizenship than their school-going peers. Awareness about this educational option is really helpful to getting the rights and support these families and communities need, and clearing some questions for concerned others extended family, policy makers.

In this podcast, we debated who would be the best NHL boys band. We also talked about who we thought had the best season at forward, in goalie… There might be some beeps here and there, because of maturity. You can give us money for our trip to New York here. They talked about where Gary Bettman would like to have his next team, whether Patrick Laine scored in his own goal on purpose and much more.

In this podcast, Jessica , a child from Mont-Libre and Marc, one of the facilitators talk about their favorite cartoon characters. They may or may not have had a significant disagreement at the end. Effectivement, comme un accident de voiture…. In this podcast, Jessica, a child from Mont-Libre, and Marc talked about our favorite movies, although Marc only managed to talk about his favorite action movies This is Mr.

Mark writing right now! We will be talking about new stuff in our Murp series. Also available on Itunes. Les relations des Etats-Unis avec le monde musulman. In contrast, what is striking is the ubiquity of religion. The role of religion in international relations may be analyzed through: The role of religion in the definition of US foreign policy. In addition to the notorious pro-Israeli, evangelical or Christian Anglo-Saxon lobbies, it may asked to what extent religious freedom is or has been a goal of US foreign policymakers, particularly since the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act.

The role of religion in theories of international relations—for example realism, liberalism, constructivism—or foreign policy schools of thought, such as neo-conservatism. Bush and his successor. Paper proposals should be sent, by December 15, , to Jean-Marie Ruiz. Leaving or Living the Theological Age? However, beyond the question of the decline or return of the religious lies another question, just as fundamental to the understanding of western modernity: The British classical economists thus substituted the invisible hand of the market for the providential god of the French physiocrats as a guarantee of social and economic harmony.

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Many other examples of transcendence underlying diverse social fields could be given: Proposals should be sent to Gilles Christoph and Sabine Remanofsky. Les suggestions ci-dessus ne sont pas exclusives. America has constructed itself from its beginning upon the religious. The Promised Land dreamt of by the Pilgrim Fathers is nonetheless inhabited by other imaginations, other forms of spirituality, other conceptions of the sacred, some of which are Judeo-Christian, while others come from distant horizons, which interpenetrate the Puritan heritage in diverse ways.

In what ways does this dialectic prove to be the vector of identity and political claims? One might consider for example the place accorded the Bible in Black and Jewish American writing, the forms of Catholicism imbued with Aztec beliefs in Hispanic writing, the attempts to symbolically re-appropriate the Lost Earth as it manifests itself in American Indian writing.

In what ways does postmodernism make use of beliefs and rituals, and above all of labels and dogmas, juxtaposing them in order to form strange alliances, surprising and ironic configurations? Magical realism, imprints, borrowings, breaks, distortions and dissemination of the Grand Narratives and myths of origin, are so many ways of making the secular and the religious, the same and the other, the individual and the collective, the past and the present, co-exist.

The above suggestions are not exclusive. It consists of two parts, called the Old and New Testaments. The development of American poetry in the nineteenth century coincided with sweeping changes in the practice of religion. The Second Great Awakening, spanning the first four decades of the century, combined with the publication of new translations of the Bible, brought about in the young republic a novel approach to the Scriptures, their spiritual message, and their language.

Textual criticism imported from Germany by practitioners of Higher Criticism gradually made the King James lose much though not all of its canonical status just as an interest in sciences—pseudo and real—, and philosophy—German, Eastern, then gradually home-grown—spread among the population through proliferating printing workshops.

The Good Book, in those circumstances and in whatever version it was read, managed nonetheless to confirm its prominence as prime reading material. The Bible should be the standard of language as well as of faith. The Bible, its Jacobean lilt, and its omnipresence in American households, became the systematic metaphor for exactly the type of literary excellence most likely to leave an indelible imprint on the minds and hearts of US citizens. Writers appealed to the Bible as the gold standard in literary creation.

It might be of interest, therefore, to study the way American poets of the nineteenth century used the Bible in their writings—essays, poems, letters, lectures, etc. The Bible may also be studied as the prime text through which some of these poets tried to overcome what they perceived as a crippling European influence on their endeavors—to echo Dickinson—to take their power in their hand. Abstracts of words should be sent to Eric Athenot by December 15, Questioning the association of modernity with secularization as a secure foothold for criticism implies searching for what escapes the process of secularization in poetic writing.

American poets from Dickinson to Ginsberg largely acknowledge and accept the death of God and the disenchantment this entails. But their poetry, qua poetry, may remain the very place for metaphysical questioning. We need to ask ourselves what resists secularization in modern American poetry, and why of all literary genres poetry is particularly apt to welcome such resistance or insistence. Indeed, to the extent that writing always implies positing an absolute Other and that poetry is a dramatization of writing itself, it may be inseparable from theological questioning, whether or not the existence of God is accepted as a premise.

Yet such displacement inside writing does not make it any more easily circumscribable. Writing has to turn to itself for an answer, or for a question, pointing to itself as the rationale for what it cannot account for. Religion no longer binds the subject to a divine other, but to language as the symbolic other. Many poets express their faith in and faithfulness to writing as it should be, that is to say, writing which accepts the unpredictable and tries to salvage grammar from all forms of dogmatism. Dedication to language and writing can thus appear as a form of disinterested, absolute love: Has the signifier itself superseded god as an object of worship?

The belief in language as an untraceable, all-powerful other may have spawned a new form of mysticism in which many modern American poets may be said to partake. Far from denying the influence of sacred texts, modern poets often resort to anaphora, repetitions, to create new forms of self-addressed incantations. Is the notion of secularization still relevant here, or should we rather talk of a displacement of spiritual power?

La transcendance sans Dieu: However low-key in its beginnings, the plan to question the censorship enforced in the name of God becomes an open strategy of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. In the wake of the Nietzschean, Freudian, and Marxist revolutions, despite the crippling contradictions and costly dogmatic statements arising from the difficulties of reconciling spirituality and writing, poetry keeps looking for transcendence without God. Meanwhile, William Carlos Williams, and the Objectivists after him, desperately tried to rid American poetry of its Puritan ancestry, relinquishing it willingly to the so-called Confessional poets.

What if American literature were a religious fiction? This panel will explore to what extent religious affect, from the seventeenth century onward, has fashioned the body politic and the emerging communal voice, both performed and vehicled by literature. Religious discourse, then, may be redefined as a political aesthetic , giving form to a community of affects , an alternative to building the common through abstractions such as the State, or the nation. This tension can be traced throughout American literature: The political work of religious sentiment however was not only about healing wounds and making up for exclusions.

The sacred bonds of the nation therefore proved conspicuously loose when it came to fitting the supposedly extravagant religiosity of women or African Americans in the communal web. To perform its office religere: This workshop will investigate how in American fiction the literary reclaims the religious as form, tying and untying communal affections better to reshuffle the authorized bonds of the political common.

La foi dans les forces-surnaturelles et son corollaire, la force de la foi, persistent envers et contre tout. William James argued that religious certitudes provided believers with reasonable grounds for taking action in the absence of any certainty. Faith precluded indwelling doubts in the face of insufficient evidence and beliefs were liable to prove self-fulfilling prophecies, whether they be founded or groundless, since they were bound to be performed or played out. That they should be basically true or not hardly mattered because they were to be appraised, above all, in terms of their practical impact.

James was concerned with the forceful after-effects they generated rather than their foundation on truth in the first place.

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The will to believe, however self-deluded it might be, is not without effect. The issue of beliefs as fabulous fiction fulfilling a function was taken up in Varieties of Religious Experience , in which William James set out to observe the psychopathological symptoms that betrayed the harrowing spiritual crisis undergone by Bunyan, George Fox or Swedenborg: But the essay was also fraught with messianic overtones: Like Max Weber, Henry Adams underscored the determining factor of faith throughout history: Paradoxically enough, Darwinism, far from being diametrically opposed to Christianity, was viewed as a makeshift religion, in so far as the rule of natural selection regulated the free play of variations and restored a semblance of finality in creation.

The engine and technological achievements in general came to be credited with a religious aura in the age of relativity. Faith in some supernatural power and, conversely, the superpower of faith still lived on. Significantly enough, too, Lafcadio Hearn reported his journey into the Far East Gleanings in Buddha Fields , while immigration laws against Asian aliens were implemented in order to ward off the Yellow Peril.

The fact that Hearn went so far as converting to Buddhism was highly symptomatic of the prevailing state of spiritual disorientation and the longing for a makeshift mystique. There is more than a family likeness between a marginal like Lafcadio Hearn and the Metaphysical Club or the Society for Psychical Research.

The aim of this workshop is to compare unclassifiable texts at the crossroads of autobiographical testimonies, travelogues, philosophical meditations and such experimental sciences as psychology, sociology, history and ethnography, insofar as they each revolve around religious beliefs. Please send your proposals to Michel Imbert by December 15, In other words, might we not discover, in the presence of spectres, ghosts, spirits—and these phenomena will have to be distinguished carefully—a form of survival, a life beyond death, indeed a superior mode of being as suggested in the very noun sur-vival as the expression of a need to assert a victory over our programmed dissolution?

American literature, undoubtedly the offspring of its English forerunner in this respect, has managed to carry on and extend the richly ambiguous poetics that crosses the boundaries between phantom and phantasm whose common etymology, as pointed out by Longinus in his treaty on the Sublime, underscores a kinship between the visions of delirium and poetic creation. The paradoxical nature of the ghost, hovering as it were between materiality and absence, and striding such oppositions as those between the angelic and the demonic, the return of the dead and the imposition of mere fancy, has from early on from Charles Brockden Brown onward informed a questioning of the reliability of perception, and has thereby generated philosophical interrogations on the enduring powers of the spiritual and on the nature of man and God.

Psychoanalysis in its turn, from its very beginning, has explored the possibility of a return of the repressed—be it personal, familial, or phylogenetical, and used the spectre as a metaphor that gives shape to the unspeakable. Here too, the spectre simultaneously objectifies and dematerialises the life of our spirit.

The spectral, in short, is intimately linked to the representation of the unconscious. It jointly signifies the possibility and the impossibility of the very act of writing, and thus expresses both the failure and the persistence of transcendence. This panel will primarily welcome proposals that set themselves the task of endeavouring to define the nature of the spectral as a trace of the religious, seen as an alternative and creative form of the spiritual. Please send proposals to Marc Amfreville by December 15, Avec audace, la prose iconoclaste de Gertrude Stein combine un rythme incantatoire et un mysticisme sans Dieu.

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Sherwood Anderson et ses grotesques , T. Set between the romance, and destined to shift toward naturalism, W. Like Howells, Edith Wharton responded to this new ethics—both social and fictional, but when her House of Mirth was published in , the western world was already adopting new cultural and social practices that would unseat tradition and usher America into modernity. It is commonly agreed that the process of modernization that took place at the turn of the twentieth century confirmed the erosion of the evangelical ideal initiated by the positivist ethos during the nineteenth century.

However, it would be misleading to consider that this process generated tight boundaries between the secular and the religious. It is more rewarding to explore the dialectic between the sacred and the profane that informs American literature written during the period spanning the s to the s and s. The paradox is that, in this socio-cultural environment where meaning reveals itself in absentia , it is the encroachment of the sacred on the profane that rules the narrative economy of many fictional works: The subtle interweaving of the religious and the secular, characteristic of these literary and artistic practices, goes well beyond the mere resurgence of the sacred within the profane.

It also shows in the marvelous and the supernatural with their rites, superstitions, magic , in the representations of the machine and the body, in the simulacra of the consumer society, etc. Eliot confronted with the Waste Land, J. Dos Passos and the dehumanized metropolis , Hemingway enduring the mystery of bull-fighting or the ecstatic intertwining of life and death, John Steinbeck revisiting the rhetoric of the Bible in The Grapes of Wrath —all of them share in the same experience.

Here are a few suggestions, which may serve as guidelines for our discussion: The nature and function of creative imagination in a world that gradually loosens its bonds with religious beliefs and practices. The marvelous in modern American fiction. Le verbe deviendrait-il religion? Have words themselves become a religion? What means does the Southern writer have at his disposal to give his text a religious dimension or turn it into a parable?

So how can we define the South and its people today? Where does the writer stand? Is the short story, so emblematic of this region of story-tellers, part of the biblical tradition? Does the South write its way into the world of religion or does it, through its literature, fully assume its Original Sin? The aim of this panel will be to provide a place where religion and writing may speak freely to each other. It is a heap of nouns and verbs enclosing an intuition or two. In American culture, religion is intimately linked to a concern for literalness. According to Protestant principles—whose impact on the American tradition has been considerable—theological thought and religious practice are inseparable from specific modes of reading and require a keen attention to the letter of the Biblical text.

This hermeneutic approach to spirituality raises several crucial questions. What is the best way to read? What interpretive tools or strategies are to be preferred? What other texts may be read alongside Scripture? Is it possible, let alone advisable, to interpret it literally? These familiar issues have lost none of their relevance today, and it might be interesting to examine them again in the light of the most recent developments in American writing. In the final analysis, even more pressing problems come to the fore, calling into question not just religion, but the fundamentals of all literate culture.

What does reading entail? What is a text? What counts as text? What is, or counts as, a letter? Can interpretation exhaust the possibilities of the letter, and is it necessary for it to be interpreted at all? While these questions are crucial to literature, it should be borne in mind that they are no less important to philosophy and literary theory. For a native English speaker, to read the Bible is to be reminded that it originated in a cultural setting where the Roman alphabet did not occupy a dominant position, if indeed it was present at all.

This is a matter of some importance since the Hebrew alphabet, for instance, is traditionally associated with a wholly different conception of the letter and of its spiritual, not to say mystical or magical, aura. However, this issue is no less important to a number of authors raised in the Christian tradition, e. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Thus formulated, the question of literalness has an impact in return on the religious thinking out of which it arose.

More broadly speaking, the existence of rival writing systems and, in particular, the interest many American authors e. Pound take in logogrammatic scripts call into question the validity of theological discourses that aspire to universal validity even as they rely on alphabetic writing, which is tied to a specific cultural or linguistic environment. With what types of spiritual quest is logogrammatic writing associated, and how does it interact with the traditions indigenous to the English-speaking world, where the Roman alphabet predominates? If so, then what is the status of the empirical mark, of the letter as the eye sees it, as distinguished from its manifestations in the mind?

Is it possible to imagine—and to locate in American literature or theory—a poetics of inscription based on the hypothesis that the latter question can be answered in the affirmative? Propositions should be sent to Mathieu Duplay by December 15, American literature is filled with attempts at understanding the world by resorting to supreme entities.

Yet the twentieth and twenty-first centuries saw a diversification of the sources from which a religious feeling could emanate. Steve Tomasula, in parodic and ironic modes, tells the experience of the sublime hosted in a contemporary world in which space and time coordinates have changed radically. Especially in his novel VAS, An Opera in Flatland , he examines the existence of a supreme being that could rule over this ever-changing world that most are inclined to call posthuman.

Turn-of-the-century American fiction portrays or suggests the existence of parallel worlds that duplicate or originate the world we live in, infusing it with mystery. These groups compel us to define the religious anew by reconsidering what binds a community together. The modes of existence of these secret communities seem to be worth analyzing: Among readers too, especially readers of electronic literature, or of heroic fantasy, groups are formed sometimes, united by an almost religious fervor, itself fueled by computerized communication means. Electronic literature promises to broaden the scope of our research by focusing on the power of the reader to take command of the book like a God-like figure, or conversely, like a prophet or a messianic figure, to obey and trust a superior machine-like God.

Works including messianic characters could provide interesting material. Children seem most apt to endorse such a role and open onto other worlds—or otherworldliness—or again to supersede godly figures. The fictions conveying a sense of the religious, outside of any known religion, are characterized by the invention of languages, to say the mystery of the world or worlds and to rule over the relationships between the members of the sects or cults.

Do those languages recycle stylistic features borrowed from acknowledged religious discourses, be they lexical, syntactical or more largely structural? Attention will be paid to the means resorted to so as to deviate religious discourse towards fields and objects which will need to be defined. How does religious discourse address readers, be it the individual expression of a religious sense, or a collective discourse reflecting and reinforcing the existence of a religious or at least spiritual community?

More precisely, do readers feel welcome or called upon, as though in a seduction enterprise, or on the contrary do they perceive this language as hermetic and aimed at excluding them? The reception and aesthetics proper to such progeny of the religious in contemporary fiction will also be given attention. The question will be raised whether language itself is not the very object of worship in those works animated by a mystique of language. In some of the works, does not the quest for some superior force meant as total otherness go through the elaboration of an excessively innovative language tentatively pointing at its other?

The curious testimony offered by the grid is that at this juncture he tried to decide for both. Although this condition could be discussed openly in the late nineteenth century, it is something that is inadmissible in the twentieth, so that by now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence. The peculiar power of the grid, its extraordinarily long life in the specialized space of modern art, arises from its potential to preside over this shame: Many are the examples of writers whose work is fraught with just such a tension or who dip into a reservoir of themes, images, or artistic attitudes partaking of a spiritual nature.

All these examples, selective as they might be, would tend to reinforce, while underlying its problematic nature at the outset of an open dialogue, the connection between literature and spirituality. Our panel will focus on examining the ways religion is in turns voiced and hushed, praised and denounced as intrinsically violent. We will also analyze how different aesthetic choices highlight a tension between the absence of transcendence and the clinging presence of religion. We would like to suggest that religion always returns, in spite of texts that not only overtly dismiss it but also ignore it, consciously or not.

This leads to an opposition between, on the one hand, the inability to ward off the impact of religion however vital the need to reject it and, on the other, its almighty presence that pervades writing, if only because of its absence acting like a kind of blank in language insidiously surfacing, a remainder of the grip it has on writers and readers alike. How is this presence of absence inscribed in the very texture of contemporary American works? We will interrogate the way writing succeeds in exhibiting the rupture between the subject and a god whose absence is made so vividly palpable.

Ranging from the subversive representation of religious rituals Evenson, Gass, Gaddis to a denunciation of religion as alienation Ducornet, Evenson, Everett , through the total absence of explicit reference to religious matters Abish, Whitehead, Bartheleme , even though they sometimes create systems that recall its alienating power, those texts display a metaphysical crisis, on both thematic and stylistic levels, embodied, so to say, by a sense of gaping emptiness.

Our purpose will be to probe the paradoxes of an absence that always returns with the force of an obsession, of an unutterable void that nonetheless pervades writing, the incarnation perhaps, of the very nature of both religion and writing. The Reinvention of Nature [New York: The cyborg opposes the idea of a Creation, and by extension the myth of a return to an original unity at the end of the world while being haunted by the ghost of a transcendental soul incarnated into its hybrid body, half-human, half-machine.

The Deconstruction of Christianity , The question of transcendence has shifted onto other grounds and now bears upon the existence and possibility of the advent of a common world in its a-signifiying materiality while religious discourse took charge of the production of meaning as the promise of a revelation. Hollywood as well as American independent cinema have often represented systems of belief on screen whether they be clearly identified as part of the official dogmas Episcopalian, AME: Lastly, spirituality pervades a number of films in relation, for example, with landscape sublimity.

In this workshop, we will try to analyze the diverse ways in which directors capture the forms, meanings and functions of religion and inscribe them on screen. According to Bataille, transgression and its erotic dynamics cannot be separated from a religious, even mystical internal experience. While Bataille famously stood up in defense of Henry Miller in , it is obvious that American literature and visual arts had already been exploring for many decades some potentialities of the unholy alliance between mysticism and transgression.

As far as cinema is concerned, filmmakers such as Martin Scorcese Mean Streets or Abel Ferrara Bad Lieutenant have for some time imbued their urban ultra-violence with a profound sense of religiosity. Contemporary photography has also explored this path, with artists like Andres Serrano or Joel Peter Witkins leading the way. The works of Cindy Sherman or Jeff Walls are further examples of the transgressive potential of photography.

Secularization, the historical process in which societies move away from religious dependence Marx, Weber , is a well-recognized step in the evolution of the Western world and has become one of the main paradigms of interpretation for its modernity. The United States, however, is one notable exception in this regard. Historically, the nation fought for both freedom of religion—its founding value—and the separation of Church and State. Since the s, a revival of different forms of religiousness in American society has led some commentators to question the idea of a growing secularization throughout the United States.

Promey sheds new light on this argument by highlighting the specificity of the American case: A secularist and often pejorative view of icons and, more generally, of the image as simulacrum.