John Arnold wrote:
| with apologies to Alistair, i have to say that the conference at York on
| confession was not really the forum to address these kinds of questions.
| There were some empirically rich papers, and a solid discussion of
| gender and confession from Jacqueline Murray [in some ways similar to her
| paper published in *Women, the Godly and the Book*], and quite a lot of
| ridiculous sectarian infighting [in my opinion :)] ... the theme of
| "social control" raised its head in a desultory fashion every once in a
| while, but didn't seem to have progressed conceptually past the solid
| but somewhat basic analysis of Thomas Tentler [in "Sin and Confession
| ..."]; and in any case, was largely raised in order to be dismissed.
|
| But - ask Jim Ginther or Torfi [sorry, i've forgotten your surname!] for
| alternative opinions!
Alternative opinion: I thought the conference was very good, and I
think the ensuing publication of the papers will be an excellent
contribution to the various approaches to Confession (which ranged
from the textual to the literary to the historical, and even some
theology -- fancy that!).
John was correct to say that few participants were interested in discussing
the theoretical underpinnings of their work (mind you, the signifiers
of each person's theoretical commitments emerged in such interesting
ways -- medievalists can be so unconsciously personal!); but I don't
think that this necessarily detracted from the success of the
sessions. A number of the papers dealt with some of the real meat
and potatoes (pace vegetarians) of research on confession -- and
perhaps when all that is said and done, we can begin to reexamine
Tentler's thesis in a more substantive manner.
On a related notion to the psychology of confession:
I have been thinking lately in a non serious way, that I have yet to
encounter any systematic treatment of memory and confession. No
doubt I have missed something -- any suggestions?
Cheers
Jim
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James R. Ginther
Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
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E-mail: Phone: +44.113.233.6749
[log in to unmask] Fax: +44.113.233.3654
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http://www.leeds.ac.uk/trs/trs.html
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