Religious Competition in Late Antiquity

Call For Papers: The first session, co-sponsored with the Social-Scientific Criticism of the New Testament Unit, addresses the topic of "Social Network Theory and Competition." We invite proposals for papers that consider the mechanisms and processes that make early religious groups successful and competitive on the religious landscape of the Roman Empire. Preference will be given to papers that explicitly engage with Social Network Theory. For our second session and in collaboration with the Christian Apocrypha Unit, we invite papers that focus on competition in apocryphal Christian writings; for example, around issues of authority, interpretation, cult practice, etc. Furthermore, given the heightened cultural awareness of sexual assault and toxic masculinities, we are particularly interested in the ways that competing understandings of these concepts find expression in the Christian Apocrypha. Our third session examines the topic of asceticism in religious competition. We invite papers that look at how ascetic behavior functioned as a competitive practice for various Jewish, Christian, and other Mediterranean religious traditions. We are especially interested in papers that utilize sociological or psychological theories of asceticism to redescribe texts, practices, or material evidence for such practices.

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