GRIT@UoN

I am the current convenor of the Group for Religious and Intellectual Traditions (GRIT), which is based in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Newcastle. Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Newcastle scored 4* in the recent Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessment, one of only four other universities in Australia to do so (none scored 5*).

The collaborative work of this research group focuses on the philosophical, cultural and historical study of religion and other intellectual traditions drawing on the discipline areas of Classics, History, Philosophy, Sociology and Anthropology, and Religion and Religious Studies. This cross-disciplinary approach to the study of religion and intellectual traditions is an area of growing international and national significance. GRIT aims to provide cutting edge interpretations of the changing religious cultures of today’s world and the worlds of the past.

Since 2003 GRIT and its predecessor RECER (Research Group for Religious Cultures, Ethics and Reason) has functioned informally as a research group with a research seminar, occasional workshops and capacity to provide support for individual researchers conducting ARC-funded research grants.

 

2011 Seminars and Public Lectures

3.30-5pm Tuesday 19 April in the Auchmuty Library Cultural Collections Room

Prof. Hilary Carey will speak on her new book God’s Empire: Religion and the Settler Revolution. Drinks reception to follow with the book’s launch.

Prof. Carey’s talk will introduce her new book, God’s Empire, where she charts Britain’s nineteenth-century transformation from Protestant nation to free Christian empire through the history of the colonial missionary
movement. This wide-ranging reassessment of the religious character of the second British empire provides a clear account of the promotional strategies of the major churches and church parties which worked to plant settler Christianity in British domains.

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Tuesday 24 May 3.30-5pm in the Auchmuty Library Cultural Collections Room

Dr. Tim Stanley, The Return of the Scroll: From Codex to Google

Search is a feature on almost every software application we use today, and it explains why a much older information technology has returned along with it, the scroll. Of course the scroll does not return in the precise manner as the ancient papyrus rolls of antiquity, but rather, it gives a crucial clue to the longer history of information technology which precedes our digital era. In other words, if we are to understand the return of the scroll in our digital screens today we must look back to the rise of the bound pages of the codex roughly 1800 years ago.

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Tuesday 21 June 3.30-5pm in the Auchmuty Library Cultural Collections Room

This seminar will be co-hosted with the Endangered Languages Documentation, Theory and Application Group

Dr. Jim Wafer, Semantics of “soul” in the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language

Lancelot Threlkeld, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of the Hunter River-Lake Macquarie language (HRLM), recorded almost no indigenous texts, but devoted himself to scripture translation. From a linguist’s perspective this might perhaps be considered a deficiency, since it deprives us of the opportunity to understand HRLM verbal art as it was practiced by the speakers themselves. Nonetheless, it gives us the chance to investigate semantically HRLM’s approaches to the issues of human subjectivity with which the scriptures deal, and these are less likely to be encountered in indigenous stories and songs.

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Public Lecture

Monday, 15 August, 2011, 7pm in the Social Sciences Building Lecture Theatre SR.LT 3

Co-hosted by GRIT and the Humanities Research Institute

Professor George Brooke, The University of Manchester 
Lecture Title: The Dead Sea Scrolls: From Mystery to Meaning

Short bio:  For over thirty years the Dead Sea Scrolls have occupied the principal place among Prof. Brooke’s research interests. Since 1992, he has been a member of the international team editing the Dead Sea Scrolls under the auspices of the Israel Antiquites Authority. His editions of the Commentaries on Genesis were published in 1996 and he is currently working with Prof. Moshe Bernstein (Yeshiva University) on a new edition of several manuscripts. He is a founding editor of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994- ) and served as an area editor for the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). With P. Davies and P. Callaway, he is the author of, The Complete World of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which has been translated into five languages and has been recently re-released in a new revised edition by Thames and Hudson. “With numerous factfiles, reconstructions, scroll photographs, and a wealth of other illustrations, it is the most comprehensive and accessible account available on the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

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4-5pm Tuesday 13 September

Roland Boer will speak on the topic Lenin: The Gospels and What is To Be Done?

One of Lenin’s key texts in the early years of the Russian Social democratic Worker Party is What Is To Be Done? Laying down a strategy for the merger of socialism and the worker movement in Russia, with an argument for professional revolutionaries and a regular, widely distributed newspaper (iskra, The Spark), Lenin clarified a highly effective strategy that led to the revolution. However, at the centre of the work is the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, around which are gathered a range of other parables dealing with agricultural metaphors. I explore three dimensions of this unnoticed feature: why Lenin preferred the Gospels; Lenin’s propensity to develop his own parables; and the radicalising effect on Gospel interpretation, radicalising the figure of Jesus and the disciples.

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4-5pm Tuesday 18 October

Dr. Kath McPhillips will speak on Sainthood in Modern Australia – Contradiction or Possibility?

Last October, Australia celebrated the canonization of its first saint – Mary MacKillop. Unlike other Western nations, particularly in Europe, the tradition of sainthood is relatively unknown in secular Australia, and it is no surprise that the processes of beatification and canonization were somewhat perplexing to the average citizen. This paper will consider what sainthood might mean for the modern secular Australian nation, and why in a secular age, we are asked to sit – often very uncomfortably - with this ancient religious tradition? How might we ‘read’ the life of Mary MacKillop to produce understandings of who we are as a nation and as individuals?  I shall argue that the saint disrupts the symbolic orders of gender, and through this, the idea of the nation, to provide a new understanding of ethics, justice and love.

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4-5pm Tuesday 15 November

Dr. Kathleen Butler will speak on Religion and Aboriginal intellectual traditions, Title, TBC.