Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Budde’s January 2025 inauguration sermon sparked both praise and critique, shining light on the contested role of religious speech in public discourse and its relation to justice and good governance. As Elizabeth Ammons writes in Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet(2010), religious values—and religious speech—have contributed enormously to justice throughout history, including movements for abolition, civil rights, decolonization, and more recently, calls to redress environmental damage as in Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home and Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. However, as Drew Strait notes in Strange Worship (2024), religious speech can also mobilizenationalist movements marked by xenophobia, racism, and militarization. In a pluralist democratic society, in other words, free speech and freedom of religion are foundational tenets that can lead pro-social change, but they are not without risk.  

As MLA members grapple with the role of free speech, institutional governance, and ethico-political commitmentsgiven the Executive Committee’s decision not to bring a pro-BDS resolution to the Delegate Assembly in 2025, the TC Religion and Literature forum invites paper proposals for a guaranteed session at the 2026 MLA Conventionon the role of free religious speech in the struggle for justice. How does religious speech contribute to both oppression and liberation? What particular insights do our methodologies as scholars of languages and literatures bring to these questions?  

We invite papers that consider the United States but also the full range of national, religious, and cultural contexts, literatures, and languages. Papers may explicatepublic religious speech as primary text—sermons, homilies, public addresses, essays, memoirs, poetry—or representations of characters engaging in public religious speech in imaginative literature like novels, plays, and films. 

Please send 250-word proposals and CVs by March 15 to Cynthia Wallace, forum chair: cwallace [at] stmcollege.ca.