Scholars of Religion Gather for Annual Meeting

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/reverend-dr-malcolm-clemens-young/scholars-of-religion-gath_b_4313613.html

Reverend Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young
Silicon Valley Theologian and Episcopal Priest

Posted: 11/22/2013 2:40 pm



This weekend the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) will hold its annual meeting in Baltimore. Last year 10,700 people gathered in the massive halls of McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago to hear and give papers, to see old friends, to pitch book proposals, to interview for jobs as professors, librarians, grant administrators, editors and deans of seminaries, and to visit an exhibit hall that scores of publishers make the largest religious bookstore in the world. If you care about religion there is nothing like it.

There were papers with titles like "How Mourning through Facebook has Transformed the Grieving Process," "Zorba the Buddha: Embodiment, Sacred Space and Globalization in the Osho International Meditation Resort" and "The Achaemenid Royal Iconography and the Implementation of Heavenly Order on Earth."

Last year many of my former Harvard teachers were being especially honored and I spent most of my time at those sessions. My friend and Master's degree thesis advisor Gordon Kaufman died that year and a group of his students spent an afternoon considering the effect that he has had on theology and our lives.

Kaufman dedicated the last decades of his life to a theology which integrated our modern scientific and social scientific worldview with both contemporary culture and a Christian experience of transcendence. He passionately proposed that we are biohistorical beings who engage in theology as "imaginative construction" and that the divine mystery can be pictured as the evolutionary process of "serendipitous creativity" that we experience in the universe.

more at link