Call for Papers: “Scripture and the Arts in Clement of Alexandria”

While in Oxford this summer, I spent a bit of time at the White Rabbit with my friend Ed Creedy, a newly minted PhD who wrote on Clement of Alexandria. We began talking through some new horizons waiting to be traversed in Clementine studies, and one that stuck is the topic of Clement and the arts. Clement, a cultural savant, often alludes to, references, or builds arguments around artistic imagery throughout his work—and, yet, there remains a noticeable gap in the scholarship on the topic.

One of the fruits of our conversation is a thematic open session for the 2025 NAPS Annual Meeting on the theme of “Scripture and the Arts in Clement of Alexandria.” Beyond this, we anticipate organizing the conference papers alongside other contributions, resulting in an edited volume that helps the field locate the use of the arts in Clement’s writings and explores how he engages them with Christian scripture. (And, on that front, we have already begun conversations with a series we are very excited about the prospect of being part of.) While we have a handful of authors we hope to participate, we also wanted to extend the invitation to interested scholars of patristics, early Christian studies, art, material culture, cultural production, ancient philosophy, and beyond.

Here is the full call for papers:

Clement of Alexandria displayed an intense and often encyclopaedic interest in ‘the arts’, and his extant writings draw extensively on the fruit of human creativity. Clement often brings music, drama, poetry, sculpture and architecture into his vision of the Christian faith, weaving these unlikely elements into his complex (and often cryptic) theological expression and his exposition of the apostolic teachings. From theatrical descriptions of the divine, to musical presentations of the gathered church, to sculptural critiques of the surrounding culture, Clement’s artistic thoughts are often arrayed towards a greater end of harmonising human artistic expression with divine truths.

This workshop on the theme “Scripture and the Arts in Clement of Alexandria” invites participants to engage with any element of Clement’s interaction with ‘the Arts’, broadly defined as the varied fruits of human creativity. The organisers particularly invite papers which explore ways that Clement’s consideration of artistic expression engages scriptural texts, facilitates his investigation of theological principles, or reflects the relationship he sees between Christian theology and artistic expression. This workshop hopes to bring together a range of scholars and approaches that explore not merely ‘Clement of Alexandria and the Arts’ but also how Clement’s unique enthusiasm for the diversity of human creativity shapes his posture, interaction with, and interpretation of Christian scripture.

If you feel you have a contribution to make, we warmly invite you to submit an abstract for the session. You may access the submission form here, facilitated by NAPS. These submissions will get soon get forwarded to Ed and I to parse through as we arrange the session.

Additionally, if you are interested in the theme and topic but unable to participate in the session, please do reach out to one of us. We may seek out additional contributions when it comes time to publish the volume, and it would be good to be aware of your interest as we organize the volume.

I’m looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to a broader uptick in interest in Clement, and I hope we can use recent conclusions about Clement’s corpus to cast a more compelling vision of the prolific, second-century virtuoso that is Clement of Alexandria.