This project explores a crossroads between rare books librarianship, postwar counterculture, and the religious experience of flying saucer contactees. My own presentation concerned a project I began working on before coming to ISAW: a bibliography of the West Virginia-based UFO book publisher Saucerian Publications and the biography of its eccentric founder, Gray Barker. I attended presentations by Davis Hankins (Appalachian State University), who spoke on the origins of Israelite religion in the larger context of the Ancient Near East Daniel Miller (Landmark College), who offered a new reading of the Gospel dictate to “render unto Caesar” in the context of the political and economic climate of Roman Judaea and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (Syracuse University), who compared the content and context of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations to the modern day “stoic revival” of self-help books like Stoicism and the Art of Happiness. Though many of the presentations concerned modern and medieval literature, ancient texts were very much in the air as well. The conference covered a broad range of topics, centered around the terms “secular” and “sacred,” not as non-overlapping realms in opposition to each other, but as intersecting and interrelated concepts whose meaning is in a state of flux.

Earlier this month, I traveled to Syracuse, New York to attend the conference “Sacred Literature, Secular Religion,” hosted by the Le Moyne College Religion and Literature Forum.

Abdul alhazred necronomicon