Call for Papers – OBSOLESCENT. MANAGING DIVINE INEFFICIENCY, COPING WITH RITUAL OBLIVION AND NEGLIGENCE (Madrid, 4-6 November 2026 / 12-14 May 2027)
The OMICRON project – Obsolescent. Managing Divine Inefficiency, Coping with Ritual Oblivion and Negligence– will host two international conferences in Madrid. The first (OMICRON 1), held from 4 to 6 November 2026, is open to a public Call for Papers and will bring together scholars working on concrete cases of religious “failure” across the Greco-Roman world. The second (OMICRON 2), held from 12 to 14 May 2027, will build upon the first and move toward theoretical and comparative synthesis; it will involve invited speakers only.
We invite contributions that examine moments when the religious system did not perform as expected. This may mean gods who did not know, could not see, or could not act; rituals that miscarried or were invalidated; or humans who failed to believe, to obey, or to communicate with the divine. Some failures emerged from the gods themselves, whose omniscience and omnipotence were often challenged by myth, narrative, and lived experience. Gods could be deceived, outwitted, or emotionally overwhelmed. They could misunderstand what was happening, or choose not to intervene when mortals most desperately needed them. In other cases, failure arose in communication, when oracles spoke in riddles, signs were ambiguous, or divine messages were fatally misinterpreted, producing catastrophe rather than guidance. Yet, failure was just as often human. People doubted the gods, denied their existence, or redefined them as merely deified mortals. Others converted to new religious systems when the old ones no longer made sense. Even those who remained faithful frequently found themselves trapped in religious obligations they no longer experienced as meaningful. Rituals were performed out of fear, coercion, or habit rather than conviction. Gods could compel obedience, punish hesitation, and force humans into acts that violated their own moral or emotional dispositions. And when prayers and vows failed – when suffering continued despite sacrifice – devotees had to find ways to live with divine silence. OMICRON welcomes papers from any disciplinary perspective, including ancient history, classics, religious studies, archaeology, epigraphy, papyrology, biblical studies, late antique studies, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and cognitive approaches to religion. We are especially interested in work that crosses the conventional boundaries between polytheism and monotheism.
Contributions are expected to engage with one or more of the following six thematic axes: 1) divine ignorance, deception, emotional instability, and the limits of omniscience, omnipotence, and moral authority; 2) divine absence, silence, delay, ineffective or harmful interventions, and the unintended consequences of divine action; 3) misleading oracles, ambiguous signs, failed epiphanies, misinterpreted dreams and prophecies, and the breakdown of divine messaging; 4) religious doubt, skepticism, euhemerism, unbelief, conversion, and the fragility of human religious commitment; 5) coerced human obedience, loss of religious motivation, excess of religious concern, ritual performed without conviction, moral conflict; 6) unanswered prayers and requests for healing, ineffective vows, ritual (e.g., sacrificial) error and impurity, neglected cults, and institutional responses to breakdown (priests, sanctuaries, law, theology), as well as strategies of repair and reinterpretation.
Proposals including a title and an abstract of ca. 500 words should be sent to Valentino Gasparini at vgaspari@hum.uc3m.es by 1 March 2026. Papers may be submitted in English or French. Contributors are kindly asked to indicate the thematic axis (or axes) to which their proposal primarily relates.
All travel costs (up to 250 euros), as well as food and accommodation, will be covered by the organization. Participants will be hosted for two nights at the Hotel Puerta de Toledo at Madrid, located directly in front of the UC3M campus where the conference will take place. Nevertheless, participants are encouraged to draw on their own funding resources if these are available.
The submission of a proposal implies not only the presentation of an original paper, but also a firm commitment to submit the corresponding written contribution for inclusion in the collective volume gathering the proceedings of both conferences, provisionally planned for the RGRW (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World) series at Brill. While final acceptance depends on both the editors’ and the publisher’s evaluation, authors are expected to engage with the full publication process.
OMICRON is directed by Valentino Gasparini and funded by the National Plan for Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research (PEICTI) 2024–2027, Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spain (PID2024-161385NB-I00).
The first conference is organized by Jaime Alvar Ezquerra (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), Ginevra Benedetti (Università degli Studi di Siena), Valentino Gasparini (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), Beatriz Pañeda Murcia (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid), and Ramón Soneira Martínez (Austrian Archaeological Institute).
The second conference is organized by Stefano Caneva (Università degli Studi di Padova), Valentino Gasparini (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid), Georgia Petridou (University of Liverpool), Fabio Pil Porzia (Consiglio Nazionale della Ricerca, Rome), and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli (Università degli Studi di Bologna).
