Alana Vincent

The twentieth century has been called a "century of horror." Proof of that designation can be found in the vast and ever-increasing volume of scholarly work on violence, trauma, memory, and history across diverse academic disciplines. This book demonstrates not only the ways in which the wars of the twentieth century have altered theological engagement and religious practice, but also the degree to which religious ways of thinking have shaped the way we construct historical narratives. Drawing on diverse sources—from the Hebrew Bible to Commonwealth War Graves, from Greek tragedy to post-Holocaust theology—Alana Vincent probes the intersections between past and present, memory and identity, religion and nationality. The result is a book that defies categorization and offers no easy answers, but instead pursues an agenda of theological realism, holding out continued hope for the restoration of the world.

Recent scholarship on Tolkien has been especially attentive not only to the importance of religion in his personal life, but also to the wider theological implications which may be drawn from his works. In this study, Alana Vincent argues that the cultural influence of "The Lord of the Rings" provides an excellent model for understanding the mutually transformative relationship between religion and culture, and in so doing also provides an important and unexplored pathway for inter-religious exchange.

This volume sheds twenty-first-century light on the charged interactions between memory, mourning and landscape. A century after Freud, our understanding of how memory and mourning function continues to be challenged, revised and refined. Increasingly, scholarly attention is paid to the role of situation in memorialising, whether in commemorations of individuals or in marking the mass deaths of late modern warfare and disasters. Memory, Mourning, Landscape offers the nuanced insights provided by interdisciplinarity in nine essays by leading and up-and-coming academics from the fields of history, museum studies, literature, anthropology, architecture, law, geography, theology and archaeology. The vital visual element is reinforced with an illustrated coda by a practising artist. The result is a unique symbiotic dialogue which will speak to scholars from a range of disciplines.

The mobilisation of theological concepts within the political sphere is increasingly dependent upon the capacity of those concepts to bear the weight of a discourse of universalism; this universalization becomes problematic when such theo-political concepts are then taken up as terms of commonality in inter-religious dialogue. This paper will focus on one such concept, redemption, as a case study, uncovering the ways that assumptions of universalism might betray the mutual understanding towards which dialogue aims.

The Second Commandment, prohibiting both the worship and manufacture of graven images, is often employed as a mechanism for explaining a perceived absence of Jewish participation in the visual arts, in spite of a well recorded history of Jewish participation in the manufacture of graven images which are typically classed as craft objects. This article aims to introduce to theology the scepticism towards hierarchical distinctions between art and craft which is already familiar in the world of art theory, and by so doing prompt a dislocation of theological reflection on works of art from the point of visual engagement to the point of manufacture. It suggests that attentiveness to Jewish discourses about material production opens up interesting and potentially generative possibilities for work in theology and the arts beyond the consideration of specifically Jewish art.

In the following chapter, Alana Vincent shifts the focus from “thinking the revolution” to the material actualization of revolutionary thought, examining the way that visions of political utopias were expressed in Jewish art movements in the early twentieth century. Vincent presents two competing Jewish utopias: the Zionist vision of the early Bezalel School, and the European integration of the Vitebsk School. By means of contrasting the two visions articulated by Boris Schatz and Marc Chagall, she elaborates on the fascinating dialectics of the political and artistic dimensions of utopia and revolution. In order to understand this dialectics, Vincent pays special attention to the use of space––both real and imaginary––in the work of these two artists and these two schools.

This paper pursues a reading of Melissa Raphael’s book, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, from a liturgical perspective, in the context of previous feminist theological scholarship, seeking to uncover the precise implications the protection of God’s presence has for contemporary Jewish worship. By reading Raphael in conversation with both the heritage of Jewish feminist liturgical innovation and the heritage of post-Holocaust theological discourse, the paper uncovers both the disruption the Holocaust brings to Jewish practice, and the constructive potential of feminist post-Holocaust theology.

How can studying literature help us to study religion? And what the question even mean? In this interview, Alana Vincent, Lecturer in Jewish Studies at the University of Chester, sets out some of the interesting intersections of these two fields. We can glean ethnographic or historical detail from literary works, and sometimes read particular insider discourses in their pages. We can read literature as a “sacred text” – or indeed, “sacred text” as literature”. Does literature, as a form where imagination is allowed free reign, provide a space for authors and readers to explore ‘matters of ultimate concern’, within or without religious institutions?

This interview was recorded LIVE! at the University of Chester on the 15th of October, 2014.