Keynote Speaker

The conference will begin with a keynote address by Dr. Olivia Stewart Lester of Loyola University Chicago. This event is open to the public. Dr. Stewart Lester’s talk is titled:

 "The Sibylline Voice: Examining Religion and Identity Through an Ancient Woman Prophet"

This lecture analyzes the ways religion and identity unite in the persistent voice of a woman, who brings her audiences again and again back to the urgency of the present moment. Found within an obscure collection of prophetic oracles, the voice of the prophet—a sibyl—becomes a mouthpiece for ancient Jews and Christians to make sense of their world and their location in it over nine hundred years (200 BCE–700 CE). Sibylline Oracles approach the past, present, and future in a variety of ways. Using book 7 as a case study, this lecture argues that despite the Oracles’ frequent preoccupation with the future, the focus that emerges most clearly is an urgent present, emphasized by the continuity of a sibylline voice. Book 7 draws together many of the end times themes of other oracles—environmental cataclysm, final destruction by fire, devastating judgment against various nations—and pairs them with distinctive instructions about ritual and ethics. But across all of these different themes, Sib. Or. 7, like all of the oracles, is united by the sibylline voice. In book 7, the sibyl is an authority whose future existence is as precarious as her current voice is forceful. In this way the contested futures and varying contents of the collection are counterbalanced by the stability of the sibylline voice, which again and again locates her audiences in an urgent present moment.

Dr. Olivia Stewart Lester is Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Loyola University Chicago. She received a PhD in Religious Studies (New Testament) from Yale University (2017). Before arriving at Loyola, she was a John Fell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Bible and the Humanities Project at Oriel College, University of Oxford, and a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (2017–18). Her research focuses on prophecy in Hellenistic Judaism, early Christianity, and the larger ancient Mediterranean. She is currently working on a monograph on the Sibylline Oracles, a rare ancient example of collected prophecies written in the voice of a woman. Related to this book project, her recent publications and ongoing research examine the relationship between the Sibylline Oracles and pseudepigraphy, apocalyptic historiography, Jewish and Christian iconography, and ancient and modern anti-Judaism. She also works on Paul and is writing a commentary on 1 and 2 Thessalonians for the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, under contract).