Call for Papers: Political Theology Network Conference 2025

All papers should be submitted for inclusion in one of six thematic conference streams. Please send proposals to the co-conveners of your preferred stream (listed below). Include your paper title, a 250-300 word paper abstract + bibliography, and a brief bio. All proposals are due by May 23, 2025.

Up/Rootedness: Practices, Ontologies, and Metaphors of Place and Migration

Facilitators: Candace Lukasik and Christopher Sheklian

Around the world, discourses of ancient roots and national origins inform a wide range of political and social movements, and everyday senses of belonging that can be generative both of more equitable futures and violent exclusions. This stream thinks through the root and processes of up/rooting, considering not only metaphorical political discourse, but various indigenous ontologies that connect people and land, as well as religious practices that sanctify space and locate people in a landscape. By discussing Christian liturgical practices in the Middle East alongside ontologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the stream hopes to contribute to ongoing conversations about indigeneity, migration, and the politics of place and belonging. We welcome proposals that explore the connection between ontologies and theologies of up/rootedness from across traditions and contexts with the full range of political possibility that arises from such grounded and botanical worlds. 

Submit proposals to: [email protected] and [email protected] 

Discordant and Dissident Affects

Facilitators: Eleanor Craig and Kris Trujillo

Killing joy (Ahmed 2023) may seem like unnecessary rebellion amid constant narrations of crisis and doom. Still, normative regimes of affect and normative expectations for affective response continue to draw lines around acceptable subjectivity, desirable political strategy, and discursive propriety. We propose to design a seminar that focuses on affects that are out of time or out of place, seemingly unsuited to the political projects or conditions with which they are associated.

We welcome proposals that address 1) how religious and spiritual practices and communities provide ways of cultivating affect that does not fully depend on social and political circumstances, 2) the spiritual and religious dimensions of claims about the need to cultivate joy and levity in spaces of resistance to oppression, and 3) how literature and practices aimed at shaping devotion, desire, or reverence generate affects and relationalities that can have unpredictable and varied political effects.

Submit proposals to [email protected] and [email protected]

Impossible Animals: Origin, History, Myth
Facilitators: Sara-Maria Sorentino and Sean Capener

This seminar stream invites participants to grapple with the significance of questions of origin– arché, Ursprung, and Entstehung, as well as their many cognates. We especially invite papers that reflect on the problem of origin in relation to terms and concepts that resist, rather than invite periodization–terms like money, slavery, gender, race, and law.

Submit proposals to [email protected] and [email protected] 

Empire and the Afterlives of Orthodoxy
Facilitators: Cyril Hovorun and Samuel Pomeroy

This seminar stream invites contributions exploring the complex relationship between religious and political orthodoxies around the globe. In what ways does the category of “right belief” illuminate features of the secular? How do religio-political movements (Hindutva, American Christian nationalism, European neoromanticism, Neo-Ottomanism, etc.) draw on concepts of the “heretic(al)” to advance notions of sovereignty? How do discourses adapting theological ideas to authoritarian modes of power (“American sovereignty”, “Moscow the third Rome”) implicate religious communities either as standing within or without the boundaries of legitimate belief? By focusing on the concept of orthodoxy, this stream seeks to reinvigorate fundamental aspects of the discipline of political theology: orthodoxy assesses the moment of existential threat in a polity. In apt timing for the 1700-year anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, the first historical intervention of the Roman emperor in ecclesiastical affairs, this stream seeks to collect diverse critical practices which thereby expose the link between theological tradition and utilitarian misappropriation of sovereignty.

Submit proposals to  [email protected] and [email protected]

Beyond Catholic Social Teaching? Resources for a Catholic Political Theology 

Facilitators: Samuel Huard, James Padilioni Jr., and Jacques Linder

This stream seeks to expand the horizons of catholic political engagement by centering interventions that are interdisciplinary, that draw on marginal movements, and that engage often-overlooked practices. Roman Catholic political engagement has often drawn on the themes and principles of a top-down version of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), even as it extols the wisdom of the grassroots. How might we radically reimagine the contours of this discourse? What would it mean to start with small-c catholic attention to mystics, visionaries, artists, and community organizers? What would it mean to bracket the ethical and political discourse of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, reimagining what counts as deeply, faithfully catholic? 

We invite papers exploring political catholicity from diverse denominational, religious, and spiritual perspectives, using unexpected and overlooked sources and methods. We also invite papers that stage conversations between catholic politics and anthropology, sociology, history, critical theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, gender/sexuality studies, and the environmental humanities. Finally, we invite papers that reflect on the lives and afterlives of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), with an emphasis on what alternative systems of political engagement may emerge in its interstices, shadows, and futures. We hope that this engagement creates critical resources for ethical reflection and engagement for Catholics and non-Catholics alike – and expands the resonance of “catholic” as a critical term in political theology.

Submit proposals to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] 

Political Theologies of Care

Facilitators: Emma Kennedy and Dana Lloyd

This stream invites explorations of care ethics as methodological and theoretical sources for religious studies scholars and theologians, in their fieldwork, in their textual analyses, in the archive, or in their pedagogy. The ethics of care emerged in the 1980s, from the fields of psychology, education, legal studies, and philosophy, as a vitally important field of study that explored the neglected role of care in the domain of ethics and morality. Notably, religious studies scholars and theologians have rarely joined wider interdisciplinary critical conversations on care. How do religious and spiritual sensibilities inform notions of “collective care” that operate outside of or beyond explicitly religious communities? What kind of care do we owe the people about or for whom we write, and what kind of care do they offer us? How might our relationships with people, texts, and places change if care were at the center of our engagement with them? 

Submit proposals to [email protected] and Dana Lloyd [email protected]

For general inquiries about the conference, email [email protected].