Free, online: Popular Visual Media and the Bible Conference

The Popular Visual Media and the Bible Conference, hosted by the University of Exeter, will now be run as an online/digital conference, on Mon April 6, 2020, 09:00 – 17:30 BST. Enrol here to view the conference online (no charge).

We will explore the varied relationships between the Bible and contemporary popular visual media (including TV, video games and fantasy literature)

Our conference schedule is as follows (subject to change):

9:30 – welcome

9:40 – 10:30 Panel 1

Siobhan Jolley (University of Manchester)– “I can’t be physical with you” – Reimaging John 20:17 through Fleabag (S2)

Laura Carlson Hasler (Indiana University) – The “Good” Book?: Protestant Television Without the Bible

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 – 12:00 Panel 2

Bea Fones (Durham University) – Daddy Issues: Angelic(Mis)Conceptions and Gender Binaries in the CW’s Supernatural

Mat Collins (University of Chester) – Subversive Screenings: Rethinking Genesis 22 in Popular Visual Media

Rebekah Welton (University of Exeter)- Sibling rivalries and reconciliation in Supernatural: God, the Darkness and Genesis 1:1-5

12-1 Lunch

1:00 – 2:15 Panel 3

Tom de Bruin (Newbold College) – Reception of the Bible in My Little Pony and Christian Apocrypha

Stephanie O’Connor (Dublin City University)– The Batman and the Bible

Zanne Domoney-Lyttle (University of Glasgow)– Wrestling with the Bible: “The Monday Night Messiah”, a “David and Goliath Battle”, and other ways the Bible influences pro-wrestling

2:15 – 2:30 Break

2:30 – 3:30 Panel 4

Tim Hutchings (University of Nottingham)– “My Jesus Would Be Chunky” Visualising Virtue and Vice in a Christian Videogame

David Tollerton (University of Exeter)– Anti-Judaism in English History and the strange moment when Doctor Who appeared to propagate biblical supersessionism

3:30 – 4:30 Keynote

Holly Morse (University of Manchester)– Serpentine Saviours and Woke Women: Twenty-First Century Television Goes Back to the Beginning

Mark Goodacre on Myths of Mary and the Married Jesus

Professor Mark Goodacre delivers the second lecture in the Cadbury Lecture series 2013 at the University of Birmingham, “Myths of Mary and the married Jesus: how popular culture is affecting scholarship” (January 29, 2013).

From Jesus Christ Superstar to the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, from the Last Temptation of Christ to the Da Vinci Code, this generation has seen a radical alteration in our perspectives on key characters in early Christianity. Mary Magdalene has been transformed from a repentant prostitute to the first apostle. Now she is even Jesus’ wife. But is Mary’s rehabilitation rooted in reassessments of the primary texts or is it a product of our own immersion in popular culture? What do we know about her Gospel, her tomb, her family? The real story of Mary’s rejuvenation is so mysterious that it leads us to question the identity of the woman we thought we knew.