“AJR is happy to host the the review panel on Dr. Ellen Muehlberger’s recent publication, Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity. This panel, co-organized by SBL’s “Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity” Unit and the AAR Unit, “Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence,” met in San Diego at the 2019 annual meeting.”
— AJR Editors
AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Moment of Reckoning
For the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, the SBL’s “Violence and Representations of Violence in Antiquity” Unit and the AAR Unit, “Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence,” co-organized a review panel for Ellen Muehlberger’s Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity (2019). The steering committees sought to invite a range of panelists, from those who could speak to the ancient contexts and the historiographical scholarship Muehlberger engaged to others who could extend Muehlberger’s work on a broader historical trajectory and draw in traditions beyond Christianity. In cooperation with the editorial team at AJR, we are pleased to bring this panel to a larger audience.
AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Reckoning with Death: A Cross-Disciplinary Engagement
Muehlberger contributions start with her introduction, which gives us a grand scope, even bringing in data from post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Civil War America to challenge the reader to ask: What do the dead do? What do we do with the dead? How does society organize around the dead? Moment of Reckoning is interested in the anticipation of death, and what this does to a culture.
AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Imagined Black Death
I see a connection between Muehlberger’s notion of the “postmortal” and Black reflection on imagined Black death. Muehlberger is asking about the late antique period and how a “moment of reckoning” affected Christian notions of death and the afterlife and therefore Christian ethics. I am puzzling over how and why I see Black people imagining their death, particularly via social media.
AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | Speaking of Death: Rhetoric and the Postmortal
So what does all this have to do with Ellen’s argument? Moment of Reckoning is full of bold and compelling arguments. But to my mind the most intriguing, if subtle, concerns the relationship between rhetoric and identity. How do words define people? How might personhood be conjured, and changed, by language? These questions are at the heart of Ellen’s project, even if they seem unremarkable when compared to the drama of what Ellen persuasively reveals to be late antiquity’s new attitude toward death and the alarmingly consequential link between this attitude and Christianity’s embrace of a culture of compulsion.
AAR/SBL 2019 Review Panel | More Reckoning: A Response
The primary portable argument of my book is that the specific things we anticipate in the future, for ourselves and for others, shape the way we act, for ourselves and for others.