Just a reminder that the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature will be meeting 7-11.7.2013 at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland; paper proposals are due on 1.2.2013 (the end of this week!). Some might be particularly interested in the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism Program Unit, which asks for papers on the following:

“Paper proposals are welcome on all topics appropriate for the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism section, but we especially encourage the submission of paper proposals on the topic of “Views on Man and the Cosmos in Nag Hammadi Writings and Related Texts”. The scholarly effort of the last 30 years has made sufficiently clear that the Nag Hammadi Library is far from offering a monolithic worldview. In fact it includes a wide spectrum of views and positions regarding almost every single aspect of human being’s reality: the relation of humankind to God and the divine realm, its present condition in the cosmic world, its future salvation and the means to achieve this, among other things, are dealt with in a variety of ways. What are the views on man in this corpus? Are the bipartite and tripartite anthropological patterns the only traceable frameworks? Or can we find other thought patterns as well? What can we say about the provenance of the relevant anthropological views and how did they develop? And what about the views on the cosmos? Do we find the same bipartite and tripartite patterns, or are there also other views? What is the relationship of the worldviews in these documents and the cosmological and astrological views current in the ancient world, more specifically in late antiquity? Do the texts present a consistent view of man and the cosmos, e.g. in interrelating man and the cosmos as micro- and macro-cosmos?”

Click on the link to the unit for instructions on submitting a paper proposal.