Writing and Scripture

Event in French

Labor et Fides is celebrating its centenary. Geneva-based Labor et Fides, the leading French-language Protestant publishing house, celebrates its centenary in 2024. In the space of a hundred years, it has built up an essential fund for making religion intelligible and intelligent, thinking about religion so that it does not think in our place.
What difference does a hundred years make? It puts a heritage into perspective, indicating an anchorage and a horizon that requires us to keep moving in order to approach it.
It is from this angle of the fertile relationship between tradition and creation that Marion Muller-Colard, director of the publishing house, is pleased to offer a dialogue between two great women of letters, both of whom, in different and original ways, are aware of the influence of the great heritage texts on the writers who make up the literature of French-speaking Switzerland and France.
In Au commencement était le verbe, Sylviane Dupuis regales us with her intimate knowledge of French-speaking authors and their unique negotiations with the biblical heritage that weaves its way between their lines.
An impertinent recognition, a ‘creative fidelity’ (Ricoeur), a deferential infidelity: Will Sylvie Germain, a major writer of contemporary French literature whose work is imbued with biblical sonorities, recognise herself in these fertile rubbings to which we owe a large part of the literature of French-speaking Switzerland?