Call for Proposals: “Living Theology: Reclaiming the Pastor as Theologian”

I am hosting a conference at my church in Dallastown, Pennsylvania, for UCC clergy, sponsored by the UCC’s 2030 Clergy Network and the UCC’s Local Church Ministries.  Jeff Robbins will be our guest facilitator.  The idea will be to have a new writer’s group emerge from this confernece for future gatherings and publications.  Please distribute to those that you know who might be interested?  (The Altizer quote with which I open is from the afterword for my forthcoming book, Too Good to Be True, more information on that will come soon…)

Description / Rationale:  Theologian Thomas Altizer asks the progressive church, “Is a Jonathan Edwards possible in the church today?” This question is especially stunning, provocative, and condemning for mainline churches, especially the United Church of Christ, who claims Edwards as one of our own.  In the UCC, we may ask:  Where are our theological voices today?  Who validates or invalidates them?  Who promotes them?  Who is their audience?  Do they reflect the “ground” of the church?

Ironically, The UCC @ 50, the official publication of denomination’s golden anniversary, while proclaiming that “theology is alive” in the United Church of Christ, omits our most enduring and broadly influential theologian, Paul Tillich, from its overview of our theological history—is the absence of Tillich indicative of a lack of focus or lack of knowledge of our own recent history and traditions?  Is theology or theological practice possible today in the United Church of Christ?  Do we think of ourselves as too diverse to have a unified theology that theology has now become marginalized or even forbidden? If “theology is alive” in the UCC, who are our theologians? Who publishes them? Who is their audience?

Call for Papers, Philosophy and the Outside II: Materiality/Immateriality

The annual graduate conference at Kingston’s CRMEP has just posted their CFP. It is reproduced below for your convenience, but the link takes you to the website for the conference itself. It is my understanding that they are especially keen for female postgrads to submit.

Philosophy and Religious Practice CFP

 CALL FOR PAPERS

The Humanities and Lived Religion: Philosophy, Religious Studies and the Impact Agenda

A One-Day Workshop at the University of Liverpool

Thursday 9^th May 2013
philosophyreligion.wordpress.com

Call for Papers: The 18th annual Villanova Philosophy Conference

Apocalyptic Politics: Framing the Present

Villanova University, Friday April 12-Saturday April 13, 2013

Confirmed Speakers:  Mladen Dolar  |  Slavoj Žižek  |  Alenka Zupančič

 

The present is often characterized as a critical moment that totters between possibilities of irresolvable catastrophe and redemptive restoration. Such claims involve prophecies of an end. Whether consisting in theological predictions of a messianic end, political predictions of a revolutionary end, or historical predictions of an epochal end, claims on the future charge the present with immediate significance through the ethical and political demands they place on it. This is to say, an anticipated end, which in a way is not-yet, is also always enacted in the present.  Apocalyptic futures clearly enter into the structure of contemporary subjects – of their desires and drives, on the planes of fantasy and of theory – but these relations call for clarification. The multiplicity of ways in which prophecy can be received, for instance – whether the foretold end is interpreted as already-accomplished, imminent, or in the indeterminate future, whether the end is met with a spirit of fear or hopeful anticipation, or whether it is understood as necessary and irrevocable or as contingent and preventable, etc. – invites fundamental inquiry into the conscious and unconscious relations of the subject to history and its ruptures.

 

Possible topics may include but are not limited to the following: the end/temporality of history (Hegel, Marx, Kojeve); political theology and the Messianic: the legacy of Paul in political theology, kariological temporality and klesis (Agamben, Derrida, Benjamin, Bloch); early modern political philosophy: the role of prophecy in shaping societal affects (Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza); phenomenological relationality to the future; revolutionary politics; apocalyptic cinema, science fiction, and art.

 

The Philosophy Graduate Student Union at Villanova University welcomes high quality submissions from graduate students and faculty.  Abstracts and papers are welcome for review; papers should not exceed 3500 words.

 

Submission Deadline: February 1st, 2013

Please send submissions formatted for blind review to

Rachel Aumiller and Chris Drain at villanovaphilosophy@gmail.com

 

We strongly encourage submissions from women and other under-represented groups.

CFP: “The End of the World as we Know It?” A Graduate Theology Conference

[Unfortunately, I don't know if I will be able to make this, but I promised my friend Adam Wallis that I would spread the word here at AUFS.]

EXTENDED DEADLINE — January 20th

The Boston University School of Theology Doctoral Student Association invites submissions to a graduate student conference titled “The End of the World as We Know It? Religious Scholarship on Apocalyptic Themes.” The conference will be held the weekend of March 23, 2012 at Boston University. The keynote speaker will be Professor John Collins, Holmes Professor of Old Testament, Yale Divinity School.

Apocalyptic themes fill popular media – in movies such as 2012, Know1ng, and The Road, in television series like The Walking Dead, and in the news coverage of religious groups claiming the end of the world is nigh.

Laruelle in New York and JCRT CFP: A Weekend Quasi-Link Post

François Laruelle will be speaking in New York City April 7th at the Miguel Abreu Gallery. This will culminate a three-day event hosted at the gallery to celebrate the release of a new book The Concept of Non-Photography which Urbanomic is publishing in association with Sequence Press. Sadly, though I will be in New York at the time, I will be a few hours North for the first day of the Syracuse University Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion conference. But I will be speaking at the Abreu Gallery with others, including Alexander Galloway, on the 6th for a panel that aims to introduce Laruelle’s work (yet again, I’m looking forward to when the man is introduce and we can start having deeper conversations about his work). I’m a bit type cast as the “theology guy” in the speculative philosophy world and I won’t be helping matters here since I’ll be speaking on the place of religion in Laruelle’s non-philosophy. You can find more information, including directions, at the Urbanomic website. If you’re planning to go and you’re a reader of the blog please do say hello to me.

T. Wilson Dickinson has also sent us the CFP for a special issue of The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory on “Pedagogical Exercises and Theories of Practice”. More information about the issue is below the fold, but the deadline for submission is December 31st 2011 and papers should be submitted to Dickinson  (twdickin@syr.edu).