Catholic Re-Visions Call for Content

The Center for Political Theology at Villanova University invites proposals for symposia of 3-6 contributors to be featured on its blog, Catholic Re-Visions, hosted on politicaltheology.com. Catholic Re-Visions will publish essays of 1500-2000 words that critically engage the Catholic tradition and Catholic-adjacent questions and movements using a variety of approaches, re-(en)visioning what Catholicism is, implies, and does. We also welcome proposals for content in other forms, such as interviews with authors of recent and relevant books, reports from the ground, and creative or interactive projects.

Animated by a concern for justice, this blog spotlights stories, practices, images, concepts, and scholarly debates that enrich our understanding of Catholicism (broadly understood) and politics (broadly understood). Drawing contributors from within and beyond the academy and from within and beyond the Catholic church, we anticipate that authors will bring a critical edge to their contributions, bringing local Catholicism to a global audience, troubling readers’ understandings of the Catholic tradition’s past and present, and offering new visions for its future.

We envision proposals asking questions about grassroots social movements, about gender, race, and class, about colonialism and its legacies, about the connections between the personal and the political, and about the unspoken foundations of Catholic thought and political thought. Instead of focusing on the categories of moral theology or the landscape of electoral politics, this blog invites a variety of tools to open the space where the ethical, the social, the political, and the religious touch and tangle, provoke and perplex. 

This cycle, we are especially interested in proposals that touch upon the following themes:

• Grassroots struggles of Catholics and Catholic-adjacent political agents against social injustices from a global perspective, especially climate activism and strike action
• The relationship between liberation and decolonizing frameworks
• Examinations of the material foundations of Catholicism, analyzing land holdings, financial and banking transactions, slave holdings, conquests, etc.
• New ways of approaching synodality, critically interrogating questions of power within the institutional church
• Artificial Intelligence and its implications for all things Catholic
• Gender, bodily autonomy, family planning, and politics
• Your own idea!

We are accepting rolling proposals for symposia. In a document of about 400-500 words: 

• Describe the format of your piece(s): the more traditional symposium format, interviews with authors, reports from the ground, and pertinent creative or interactive projects.
• outline what concept(s) or practice(s) your piece(s) seek(s) to re-vision 
• discuss what possible approaches you and/or your contributors will employ to provide (several) re-visions 
• explain why you (and/or the group of people in the symposium) are positioned to shed light on your topic
• list the possible best dates for your symposium to run between January 2024 and July 2025 
• provide link(s) to one or two online writing samples from any member(s) of your symposium. 

We will value proposals that include a diverse range of authors from different career stages, a gender balance among authors, authors from the Global South, as well as activists from social movements (faith-based or secular) or non-academics.

Questions and proposals can be sent to the co-conveners of Catholic Re-Visions, Mary Kate Holman, Jacques Linder, and James Padilioni, Jr, at [email protected]. Proposals will be evaluated by an Academic Advisory Board (listed below).

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Catholic Re-Visions Academic Advisory Board: 

Kevin Ahern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Manhattan College

Sharon A. Bong, Associate Professor of Gender and Religious Studies, Monash University Malaysia

Dean Dettloff, Central Ontario Animator, Development and Peace

Nichole Flores, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia 

Judith Gruber, Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Leo Guardado, Assistant Professor of Theology, Fordham University

Hille Haker, Richard A. McCormick, S.J., Chair of Catholic Moral Theology, Loyola University Chicago

Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Anna Rowlands, St Hilda Associate Professor of Catholic Social Thought & Practice, Durham University

Matthew Shadle, Independent Scholar

Sarah Shortall, Assistant Professor of History, University of Notre Dame

Stephan Steiner, Head of Philosophy & Co-Founder Center for Intellectual Diaspora, Catholic Academy of Berlin

Nicole Symmonds, Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Columbia Theological Seminary

Cristina Traina, Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, Chair of Catholic Theology, Fordham University