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Symposia

Symposium on Video Essays

While in recent years there has certainly been a shift towards more thoughtful and creative presentations of academic ideas within the various contexts of academic life, academics, mostly still exclusively trained in text-centered methods and deliveries, are still grappling with a contemporary culture dominated by images and digital technology that has profoundly disrupted the standard traditions of academic expression.

Centering Active Nonviolence in Catholic Social Teaching

Tuning in to active nonviolence as a center of gravity in Jesus’ way, we can sense nonviolence as integral to the mission of the Catholic Church. This enables us to have a broader imagination of nonviolent praxis, a sturdier identity as interconnected beings, and an engrained commitment to better persist in active nonviolence even during difficult circumstances.

Animal Studies and Political Theology

Under the multidisciplinary banner ‘Animal Studies’, we may decenter the ‘human’ in this history of capitalist agriculture, and instead attend to the political histories of insect agents. The resulting narrative is intriguingly subversive.

Philip K. Dick’s half-lives

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Anti-Fascism as Constitutive of the Gospel Ethic

By cataloguing an approachable Christian-oriented anti-fascism, we hope to engage audiences not merely in contemplation, prayer for change, or internal spiritual renewal, but in tangible action.

Revivals: Now & Then

If nothing else, the national public attention and copy-cat movements following the Asbury Revival speak to the need for spiritual revival—as in the Great First Awakening, most people are dissatisfied with established religion and are looking for ways to experience a genuine spiritual awakening.

New Theologies of Nature

This symposium brings together three thinkers on the ideas of nature, animals, God, and the relationship between all of them.

The Politics of Atheism

The Politics of Atheism Symposium sheds light on atheism’s emancipatory force. With a commitment to immanence, atheism can provide a counterweight to the pervasive appeals to God or other transcendent ideas used to legitimate systems of domination.

Re-(En)Visioning Liberation: 50 years after Gustavo Gutiérrez’s A Theology of Liberation

Across these six essays, the role of liberation as either a political end or a methodological concept is problematized as means to thinking beyond liberation to a material politics darkly intuited but urgently needed.