As my father was in the US diplomatic corps, we moved to a new post in a different courtry every 2-3 years when I was growing up. I lived mostly in West Africa and Eastern Europe as a child, and also in Italy, where my mother was from and I was born...More
As my father was in the US diplomatic corps, we moved to a new post in a different courtry every 2-3 years when I was growing up. I lived mostly in West Africa and Eastern Europe as a child, and also in Italy, where my mother was from and I was born. I was thus exposed very closely to many religious traditions and experiences and was brought up in a sort of child-version of a 'comparative religion' household. This, along with my mother's eight-year struggle with cancer when I was a teenager, has driven my studies to this day. I seek to understand how people live out not faith, but the struggle for faith, in an increasingly chaotic and individualistic world, especially in the West. I do this via literature, which I believe gives a unique voice to individual experience, but I relate it to both modern theology, and modern history, both of which provide key contexts. The paper I am proposing, on self-sacrifice in Graham Greene, is part of a larger project on near-death experiences, in which I seek to go beyond the media hype of "Proof of Heaven" or "the tunnel and the light" imagery, to investigate how a close encounter with death can become a key turning point in someone's life, and why this is so much more the case for some individuals than others (community, shared languages of faith, ability to process trauma via artistic or aesthetic practices are all emerging as important here). Though I am not in the field of religuous studies, in my work I engage with scholars in that field extenstively, and so I would welcome a chance to attend and speak at a conference with scholars in religious studies.
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Religion in Society
