IRCHSS postdoctoral fellowships

The IRCHSS has just announced its annual competition for postdoctoral fellowships. Please contact Crawford Gribben as soon as possible if you are interested in applying for a postdoctoral fellowship in connection with the Millennialism Project.

Welcoming Benjamin Wold

The Trinity Millennialism Project is delighted to announce that Benjamin Wold has been appointed as co-director. Professor Wold teaches New Testament Studies in the School of Religions and Theology at Trinity College, Dublin. His research  focuses on apocalyptic thought in early Judaism and Christianity. His book, Women, Men and Angels (Mohr Siebeck) is concerned with how apocalypticism influenced perceptions of gender in one of the scrolls from the Dead Sea. He is currently writing a monograph on traditions that influenced the portrayal of end-time plagues in the book of Revelation. He is interested in exploring the relationship of ancient apocalypticism with later millennialism.

“Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000″ now published

Palgrave Macmillan has published Evangelical Millennialism in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-2000, by Crawford Gribben, director of the Trinity Millennialism Project.

This book offers the first complete overview of the intellectual history of one of the most significant contemporary cultural trends. In the early seventeenth century, European evangelicals recovered those expectations of an earthly golden age that had been deemed heretical by medieval and reformation theologians. Throughout early modernity, and across the spectrum of evangelical belief, these millennial expectations were deployed to mount a series of radical critiques of church and wider culture. In modernity, these expectations were appropriated by religious and cultural conservatives, who found in millennial theology the framework of their hostility to an unbelieving world and a rationale for their critical engagement with it – a critical engagement that ranged from an attempt at the wholesale reconstruction of a Christian society to an expectation of its imminent and catastrophic demise. This account guides readers into the origins, evolution, and revolutionary potential of evangelical millennialism in the trans-Atlantic world.

A sample chapter can be downloaded here.

Welcoming Andrew Crome

Congratulations to Andrew Crome, lecturer in theology at the University of Manchester, who is about to begin a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, working on the history of Christian Zionism.

Crawford Gribben, the director of the Project, would be glad to hear from others interested in doctoral or postdoctoral work within millennial studies.

“Left Behind and the Evangelical Imagination” is published

Sheffield Phoenix Press has just published “Left Behind and the Evangelical Imagination,” a collection of essays on the Left Behind phenomenon edited by Crawford Gribben and Mark S. Sweetnam, both of the Trinity Millennialism Project.

Left Behind – twelve novels that dramatize one evangelical perspective on the end of the world – is now established as the best-selling fictional series in American literary history. But it has been met with a range of critical receptions. This volume gathers essays by new and established critics of the series to interrogate the series’ significance and its cultural and commercial success, and includes, for the first time, a response to these criticisms written on behalf of one of the series’ authors.

Mark S. Sweetnam considers the challenge that the organically theological nature of Left Behind has posed for cultural scholars. Amy Frykholm situates the novels’ discussion of gender within wider traditions of sentimental and domestic fiction. Jennie Chapman nuances the general assumption that the series’ conspiracy plots have been poached from secular accounts of subversion that emerged from the radical Right. Crawford Gribben contextualizes the treatment of Jews and Muslims in the rapture fiction tradition. Jarlath Killeen identifies a profoundly ambiguous attitude to Catholicism in the novels, accounted for by the emergence of lobbying and campaigning alliances between evangelicals and Catholics on a range of social issues. John Walliss outlines the manner in which rapture films speak to an evangelical audience, and addresses the failure of these films to gain significant crossover appeal. Katie Sturm interrogates the series’ ecumenical reflections. Marisa Ronan traces the role of Christian fiction in the shaping of evangelical identity. Thomas Ice addresses the theological background of the novels. Writing on behalf of Jerry B. Jenkins, Kevin Zuber responds to the criticisms provided by the volume’s contributors.

Scholars can purchase the book at a discount from the publisher here.

J.N. Darby’s Greek New Testament is now online

The Project is delighted to announce that the digitized images of J.N. Darby’s interleaved Greek New Testament are now freely available online here. The Project would like to thank the funders who have made this possible – the Panacea Society and the Trinity Start-Up Fund – as well as Professor Terence Brown, School of English, Trinity College Dublin, its special adviser, and Dr Graham Johnson of the Christian Brethren Archive, the John Rylands University Library, Manchester.

Postdoctoral funding

The IRCHSS has just announced its new programme of postdoctoral funding. Get in touch with Crawford Gribben for further information on how you could be involved with postdoctoral research in the Trinity Millennialism Project.

“The future of millennial studies”

We were delighted with the success of our recent conference on the future of millennial studies. Papers delivered by a range of scholars discussed the important challenges and opportunities arising in the study of millennial expectation.

Dr Timothy Stunt’s keynote paper can be downloaded here. Dr Mark Sweetnam’s presentation on the Trinity Millennialism Project’s digitisation of J.N. Darby’s Greek New Testament can be downloaded here, and the accompanying slide show is available here.

For recordings of the other papers please email sweetnam [at] tcd.ie.

Conference – “The future of millennial studies”

Trinity College Dublin, 2-3 September 2010.

For full details, please see the conference handout.

Andrew Fuller’s commentary on Revelation

Colleagues from the Trinity Millennialism Project are beginning work on a scholarly edition of the commentary on Revelation written by the Particular Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller (1815). Crawford Gribben and his research assistant, Rory Loughnane, have been granted funding by the Panacea Society.