Around the time of the Tolstoy Conference, Morrow’s dark theological comedy "Blameless in Abaddon" (1996) came to the attention of Bernard Schweizer, a professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn, who invited the novelist to join him and NYU’s Gregory T. Erickson in establishing an organization dedicated to celebrating the heretical, blasphemous, and religiously unorthodox dimensions of literature and art. On May 3, 2013, the International Society for Heresy Studies was inaugurated at the Torch Club of New York University. Beyond Schweizer, Erickson, and Morrow, the founders included philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and literary critic and novelist James Wood.