Last weekend I escaped the very brown and cold upper-Midwest for Oregon, where I presented a paper on Tim Winton’s Dirt Music at the Western Region’s Conference on Christianity and Literature. The conference focused on the sacred/secular divide as represented in Isaiah 1:22, where innkeepers are blamed for mixing water with wine, a passage that left many early commentators to conclude that sacred and secular wisdom should not be mingled. Papers at the conference ranged from work on Adrienne Rich’s appropriation of Simone Weil to roundtables about designing courses around special topics. While it is always wonderful to hear about everyone’s current research and commiserate about the papers piling up for grading as the term draws to a close, the highlight of this year’s conference was, for me, hearing some of the undergraduate papers from students at Corban University in Salem, Oregon. These young men and women truly held their own in a professional setting, presenting insightful papers on a range of topics.
grace & peace,
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