The conference was staged in the Wallace All Faiths Chapel on campus, which is a brilliantly designed setting, studded with marvellous craft and artworks all about that contributed a beautiful aesthetic pleasure to add to the high-level sharing during proceedings:
The title of the conference was: "Religious Genderings: The Socio-Spiritual [Dis-]Empowerment of Women
and Men" and I took the opportunity to discuss the multiple possibilities for people seeking meaning that exist outside of the strict confines of the Abrahamic traditions, which tend to be hostile to people who do not fit comfortably within the heteronormative model promulgated there.
My paper, "Who's that, telling my story?" was a discussion of the strategies provided by various forms of life-writing (memoir, autobiography, etc.,) that enable you to take charge of the narrative of your own life, and re-position your identity in a more life-enhancing frame than that provided by toxic, conventional religious stories.
I was also able to incorporate themes raised by my previous book on Christopher Isherwood, Mr Isherwood Changes Trains: Christopher Isherwood and the search for the 'home-self', which came out in 2010.
His life partner, the brilliant portraitist Don Bachardy, provided this portrait for the cover of the book, and the publisher liked it so much he refused to cover it with any print text.
Unfortunately, people ordering through amazon.com, which issues the book as a Print on Demand, don't get that 'cleanskin' version, as amazon refused to allow a cover without text!
A rather poor shot of the interior unfortunately, taken on my allegedly 'smart' phone:
Beautiful artworks within the Chapel include these beautiful lacquerware chairs, with imagery inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope!
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