&NOW 2018

Facing the Other: Fiction, theology, ethics.
What is our responsibility to the other? This is likely THE question of our time. How can we face, respond to, speak to, touch the other while respecting its boundaries, its being, its otherness? How can we face the other without trying to make it the same?
This panel believes that writing is one of the most vital and serious ways of ethically approaching the other. Hilary Plum frames this belief in terms of the connections created by private experience and larger shared histories. Her thinking and writing questions the efficacy of emotion that comes from these connections/collisions. Joseph Cardinale focuses on the narrative mode of parable. For Cardinale, parable is too often seen as didactic, as moving toward clarity and easily understood moral lessons. He wants to rethink parable as a genre that transcends didacticism, guiding the reader not toward clarity, but toward a universalizing spiritual apprehension of mystery and un-knowing. Jeffrey DeShell takers seriously the points of coincidence between theology and fiction, as both can be read as language freed toward an unknown and unknowable other. Noy Holland will work within the spaces and interstices between the natural and spiritual realms.

Presentations will include a short theoretical discussion, followed by a reading from the participants’ own writing. Jeffrey DeShell will serve as moderator.