UND has recently announced the availability of small grants for international and nationally based scholars during Summer of 2024. Please see https://historyofphilosophy.nd.edu/grants for more details.
Read MoreThe AMA welcomes papers approaching the issue of the promise and peril of democracy from any philosophical perspective that complements and enriches our understanding of the issues. We also invite papers on a secondary theme, honoring the 750th anniversary of the deaths of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure in 1274.
Read MoreThe VII Symposium Thomisticum will be held in Vienna, 6-8 June 2024.
The theme is Aquinas in History.
Papers which relate St Thomas either to one or more of his sources or subsequent influences are welcome.
Details at http://www.symposiumthomisticum.com
The following is the list of intending speakers. Brackets indicate provisional:
(Vivian Boland OP), Janice Breidenbach, Michael Breidenbach, Brian Carl, Thérèse Scarpelli Cory, (John Cottingham), Daniel De Haan, Gregory Doolan, Kevin Flannery SJ, (Simon Francis Gaine OP), Lloyd Gerson, (Harm Goris), (John Haldane), Joshua Hochschild, (Piotr Jaroszynski), Mark Johnson, Gaven Kerr, Gyula Klima, Katja Krause, Reginald Lynch OP, Siobhan Nash-Marshall, Rupert Mayer OP, (John O’Callaghan), Paul O’Grady, Thomas Osborne, Michael Pakaluk, (Eric Perl), Günther Pöltner, Thomas Prügl, Alice Ramos, (Fáinche Ryan), Richard Schenk OP, Michael Sherwin OP, David Twetten, Giovanni Ventimiglia, Jörgen Vijgen, Thomas Joseph White OP, (Rudi Te Velde).
Papers are invited for parallel supplementary sessions on the afternoon of 8 June. Please submit abstractsas soon as possible but no later than 29 February. It may be necessary to limit the number of presentations.
Complete papers should be submitted by 1 May.
Papers will be circulated in advance; summaries will be presented at the symposium: papers will be discussed rather than read.
Registration of €200 euro will include refreshments, buffet dinner on the first evening, and conference dinner on Saturday.
All inquiries to Fran O'Rourke, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin (orourke@ucd.ie).
Dionysius’s Analogous Participation in God: A Hierarchical Tapestry of Being
The notion of “analogous participation in God” plays a fundamental role in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. This thematic session proposes to explore this concept as it appears in the original corpus, in addition to its treatment by later authors, e.g., Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas.
For Dionysius, something exists only to the extent that it participates in God (DN IV.7). Yet participation across creation is not uniform. It is analogous, varying according to the entity’s specific mode of existence (DN II.5.641D; DN IV.1, 693B). Further, Dionysius conceives the being of every entity as the presence or illumination of God (DN I.3, 589C). Thus, in virtue of these “illuminations analogous” (DN I.2, 588CD), which are hierarchically arranged, God’s diverse creation is the universal shining forth of the one God.
This session will explore the following themes:
Hierarchy of Being: Presenters will discuss the relation between analogous participation and Dionysian hierarchy, and how analogous participation informs Dionysius’ metaphysics, especially the vision of being as theophany (DN I.6, 596C; DN VII.3, 872A).
Ecclesiastical Significance: The session will explore how Dionysian analogous participation underpins the church’s sacred power to enact divine mysteries (CH III.2, 165B; CH XIII.3, 301C–304A).
Influence: This will explore the doctrine of analogous participation’s influence on subsequent Christian thought, e.g., John Scythopolis, Maximus the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, etc. We will also consider the treatment of Dionysian analogy in more contemporary scholars, such as Vladimir Lossky, Nikolaos Loudovikos, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Comparative Perspectives: This session encourages comparing either analogy or divine participation in Dionysius with other traditions, notably Aristotle and Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus.
Submissions are made here: https://www.cvent.com/c/abstracts/963e223e- 20f0-4c9e-bc68-825aa24e94a6
Submission Deadline: November 17, 2023 For more information, visit:
By Dr. Therese Cory, John and Jean Oesterle Associate Professor of Thomistic Studies at the University of Notre Dame and director of The Jacques Maritain Center.
Msgr. John F. Wippel (photo credit: CUA Philosophy)
On September 11, 2023, Msgr. John F. Wippel, the Theodore Basselin Professor of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, passed away after a brief illness following his nintieth birthday. Born in rural Ohio in 1933, he studied at The Catholic University of America and Louvain, and became known for his field-defining scholarship on Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics and on the later thirteenth-century thinker Godfrey of Fontaines.
His monographs The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Eternal Being (2000) and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (1981) are staples in the field of medieval metaphysics. His numerous articles, many of which are collected in a series of three volumes published through CUA Press in recent years, encompass a wide swath of topics, including the role of separatio in discovering the subject matter of metaphysics, Radical Aristotelianism and the Parisian Condemnations, accidental forms, the separated soul, the virtue of justice, truth, the divine ideas, faith and reason, participation, axioms, creation, and esse—just to name a few. At the time of his death, he had been working on the writings of Siger of Brabant.
A truly great scholar, Wippel was unquestionably one of the most important interpreters of medieval metaphysics of recent decades. But he also shaped the medieval field in other ways, as a founding member and later president of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, as an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and, most importantly, as a decades-long force in the PhD program of the School of Philosophy at CUA—and someone who was absolutely committed to his students, to whom he was always “Fr. Wippel.”
—
When I first met Fr. Wippel, entering the program as a new graduate student in the fall of 2005, he had already been teaching at CUA for over forty years. Eight of those were spent in administration, including as university provost in 1996–97. Arriving on the postwar scholarly scene in a Thomistic environment dominated by thinkers like Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and Bernard Lonergan, Fr. Wippel saw a need to complement these developments by a return to the historical Aquinas. In order to appreciate fully the contributions Aquinas could continue to make today, one must to make the effort to understand more precisely and accurately what Aquinas himself actually said and thought. (One of his frequent admonitions to his students was that “People ask what Aquinas would say about such-and-such. But we do not know what he would say, because we cannot ask him!”)
As Fr. Wippel often emphasized, taking Aquinas seriously as a historical thinker means admitting that Aquinas’s philosophical thinking sometimes developed through his lifetime, in response to the conversations and institutional developments unfolding around him. Fr. Wippel’s Aquinas was not the stone effigy of the maxim Thomas semper loquitur praecisissime, but a human being who figured things out gradually, tried out different framings for different audiences, responded to new ideas, and grew in wisdom. As a result, a striking feature of Fr. Wippel’s work was his procedure of chronological text-comparison, one that his students would come describe informally as “Wippellian.”
Another notable feature of Fr. Wippel’s work is its openness to identifying more markedly Neoplatonic strains in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Coming out of a Neothomistic context that emphasized Aquinas’s Aristotelian commitments and described Neoplatonism as a “dangerous path of mystical introspection,” Fr. Wippel at first did not have much company in this endeavor. But his work was instrumental in a gradual scholarly shift that has allowed a more Neoplatonic Aquinas to be more widely accepted today.
At CUA, Fr. Wippel’s two-course “Metaphysics” sequence was legendary. I never ended up taking those courses, something I will always regret. But one of the best experiences of my coursework was the seminar he taught on Radical Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century, covering the debates around the Condemnations of 1270 and 1277, and putting Aquinas into conversation with Bonaventure, Boethius of Dacia, and Siger of Brabant. Known as a dry and reserved lecturer, he seemed to disappear into the text as he taught, until all that could be seen of him was the methodical stitching-together of the interpretations as they emerged out of ambiguity into the light. Listening to him lecture was an object lesson in textual interpretation. But his students from his smaller seminars know that this lecture style did not prevent him from being a lively interlocutor as well, as evidenced by the intense discussions in those classes.
—
As a thesis director, Fr. Wippel’s reputation preceded him. I can clearly remember the day that I sat on a chair outside his office, damply clutching the first draft of my thesis proposal, waiting to meet with him and hear the axe of judgment fall.
“Don’t be nervous,” said the administrative assistant kindly. “I used to be scared of Fr. Wippel. But eventually I figured him out: He’s prickly all over on the outside, but inside he’s just a giant teddy bear.”
This was generously meant, and in non-philosophical human dealings, she may well have been right. But when it came to philosophy, there was nothing of the teddy bear in Fr. Wippel. As a director, he was more like a bulldog, refusing to let go of any imprecision or ambiguity until it was corrected, and absolutely exacting in every detail.
The director of Fr. Wippel’s own maître agrégé at Louvain-la-neuve, the legendary Ferdinand Steenberghen, had assigned him a thesis topic, spent several hours talking over the topic with him—and then never met with him again until Fr. Wippel submitted his complete thesis, which became The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines.
To his own students, Fr. Wippel was the opposite kind of director, operating with an exacting and single-minded generosity that could be—usually was—terrifying. When he agreed to take on my master’s thesis on self-knowledge in Aquinas, and then later a dissertation on the same topic, he warned me, “I don’t know much about Aquinas’s theory of knowledge.”
Whatever this meant, it had nothing to do with the ordinary meaning of “knowing much.” No matter what topic a student was working on, Fr. Wippel always knew where to find the texts, and which secondary literature to read. Each submitted chapter was marked up in detail, by hand. He would photocopy the comments, and give the student a copy, and meet for hours to go over every single comment, in order, from beginning to end, as his pen ran methodically down the margin of the page.
Occasionally, a check mark of approval would appear on the page. But one would never hear from him any positive comment about how things were progressing. If there was a typo in the Latin, he would find it. If one failed to cite a key text, or if there was a text that undermined your interpretation, he would know. If one so much as mentioned any topic in Aquinas, one had better have surveyed the literature on that topic. Otherwise, Fr. Wippel would bestow his look of disappointment—though always accompanied, mercifully, by four or five bibliographical entries to get the research started.
Fr. Wippel, in short, was a true Doktorvater, uncompromising in teaching what it took to do the work well. I know I am not the only one of his students for whom he remains, to this very day, the audience reading over my shoulder whatever I write.
One of his lessons in particular is seared into my memory. Toward the end of my dissertation, in a fit of exuberance, I had dismissed a scholar’s opposing interpretation, in a footnote, as “absurd.” Fr. Wippel’s pen ran ominously down the page and stopped at the word, which he had underlined.
There was a horrible silence. Then he said drily, “I believe you will want to find another formulation.” Embarrassed, I promised to do so.
He added, “You wouldn’t want him to read a sentence like that.” That was how I learned that the scholarly literature is composed of real human beings, not abstractions for combat.
—
Indeed, in Fr. Wippel’s own writing, there was never any showmanship—just plain, unadulterated scholarship driving home the thesis with the force of its own clarity and thoroughness.
This was, after all, someone who gave both his monographs titles starting with “The Metaphysical Thought of …” and then collected his articles in volumes titled Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas I, II, and III. I always suspected, though, that he took some kind of humorous pleasure in this titular sparsity, given the gleam of private amusement with which he would repeat, “not ‘Metaphysical Thought’—‘Metaphysical Themes.’”
(Incidentally, a similar gleam would appear when he talked about one of his later projects, on Godfrey of Fontaine’s Quodlibetal disputations on the mos teutonicus or mos gallicus, that is, the practice of boiling or carving up the bodies of nobility who died far from home, in order to yield parts which could be brought home for burial in the family plot. The resulting article contains the sentence: “By the time Henry [of Ghent] was asked to determine this question (Lent, 1286), a few months had passed since the burial of the king’s bones and the separate burial of his heart; but the controversy surrounding this issue was still very much alive.”)
Despite eschewing all flashiness, Fr. Wippel’s opinions about how to interpret medieval texts were ironclad. In the heartless manner of students, we used to wait gleefully for him to voice a disagreement with visiting speakers in the Q&A. He had a way of crushing interpretations by piling up texts against them, but always with no fuss at all, in a completely dispassionate monotone, which gave the impression of being rolled over by a tank.
Perhaps this tank-like disposition was related to his advice about conference presentations: “Don’t start presenting papers until you have something to say.” The academic landscape has shifted, and for graduate students today, some presentations on the CV are a necessity. But mutatis mutandis, the advice remains fundamentally sound as a principle of philosophical life. Amidst the avalanche of triviality, if one speaks, let it be for the sake of something genuinely worth hearing.
As far as teaching went, I only ever heard one piece of teaching advice from Fr. Wippel. During the election cycle of 2008—this being Washington DC—one of his students had asked him who he had voted for. “I told him that this is a philosophy class, and in a philosophy class, we discuss . . . philosophy.”
—
If “teddy bear” was utterly the wrong description, it was certainly true that Fr. Wippel had a kind heart for his students under the intimidating exterior. Some of my favorite memories of dissertation direction were his occasional lapses into storytelling. He had grown up on a farm in Ohio and been taught in a two-room schoolhouse. As a young man, he had played pitcher and outfielder for a minor league baseball team and worked in a Jeep factory. Sometimes, too, he told academic stories. He had attended one of the last lectures given by Gilson, and he would always follow up that story in the manner of Cato pronouncing on Carthage, by repeating that Gilson had been wrong to insist on the essentially theological character of Aquinas’s philosophy, and wrong about the interpretive value of Aquinas’s Aristotle commentaries.
An inveterate night owl who never taught a class before late afternoon, Fr. Wippel was known among his students for answering emails at all hours of the night. One could write him with a despair-inducing text at 11pm and have comments by 2am. Years later, as a director in my own right, when I began receiving concerned reminders from my students about queries that had vanished into the Heraclitean flux of my inbox weeks before, it finally dawned on me how rare—even heroic—Fr. Wippel’s responsiveness was.
When I remember Fr. Wippel’s generosity toward his students, though, two moments stand out in my memory as particularly reflecting the kind of Doktorvater he was.
One of these occurred a few years ago, while my husband and I were living in Würzburg, Germany, during a fellowship year. One day, I was shocked to receive a note from one of my former professors, alerting me that Fr. Wippel had been diagnosed with an aneurysm and scheduled for surgery.
When I reached Fr. Wippel by phone, it was late at night already in the US, the day before the surgery. But there was only one thing on his mind: His most recent student, Brian Carl, had just finished submitting revisions on the final draft of his dissertation. For Fr. Wippel, preparing for a potentially life-altering surgery just hours away, the top item on his list was to approve those revisions, so that in case he didn’t make it out of surgery, Brian could still graduate without delay.
Obviously, it was out of the question for him to approve the revisions without reading them properly! So, since receiving the news from his doctor, he had spent all his time reading through Brian’s final draft in his usual way. Having issued his approval, he was broadcasting to everyone with whom he spoke that Brian’s dissertation had been approved, just in case the surgery went south and the paperwork got lost. That was Fr. Wippel in a nutshell. (Next on his list of worries was his “Metaphysics” course: He had, he said, worked out a scheme to combine the surgery with the semester break and recover in the minimum amount of time, thus requiring his colleagues to cover the least humanly possible number of classes before he would return to the lectern.)
And then there was the time that I called him to report getting my first academic job. I had turned down my first-ever job offer in the fall of 2008 to finish my dissertation—right before the bottom fell out of the academic job market. A postdoc at Georgetown got us through one more year, and then things started looking grim. But one could hardly have asked for more support from a director on a brutal job market. I consulted Fr. Wippel about every application, and he wrote letter after letter. When the offer came through from Seattle University, Fr. Wippel was the first person I called. After the usual congratulations, and his usual admonition to keep writing no matter what, he added, “When did you get the news?”
“Around noon,” I said.
“Ah,” he answered, in his usual way, without any fuss. “I thought it might be. I was saying Mass for you.”
Fr. Wippel: not just a Doktorvater, but also a priestly father.
It is impossible to express how much he will be missed, and how much the field has lost by his passing.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua lucet ei.
Requiescas in pace, Fr. Wippel.
The College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame announces a conference in honor of the 800th anniversary of the birth of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Aquinas at 800: Ad multos annos”. The CFP is below.
We invite submissions of paper proposals for the international conference “Aquinas at 800: Ad multos annos,” to be held September 22-25, 2024, at the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, IN, USA). This conference celebrates the 800th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Aquinas, exploring the ongoing importance of his thought to contemporary cultural, philosophical, and theological discussions.
The conference features four keynote speakers:
Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Rome)
Dr. Jean Porter, University of Notre Dame (South Bend)
Dr. Rudi te Velde, Tilburg School of Catholic Theology (Utrecht)
Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Pontifical University of St. Thomas (Rome)
More than thirty other invited speakers from around the globe have committed to presenting semi-plenary papers.
There are openings in the schedule for more than thirty additional papers to be selected from submitted proposals. We anticipate publishing a selection of submitted papers soon after the conference.
We welcome proposals focusing on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, from a variety of disciplines, on topics such as: Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Anthropology, Political Theory, Christology, Trinitarian Theology, Sacramental Theology and Ecclesiology. Proposals should contain a title and abstract of 200 words or less.
Submissions should be made on line using this form. The deadline for full consideration is November 1, 2023.
Speakers who wish to have their essays considered for publication should plan to submit the finished text upon arrival at the conference. Though essays considered for publication should be in the 6000-8000 word range, presentation time will be limited to roughly twenty minutes (with additional time for discussion).
We invite you to share this CFP poster with any colleagues who might be interested in participating!
For questions, email aquinas@nd.edu.
Thomistica is pleased to announce the 2024 Conference of The Sacra Doctrina Project: “All Things That Were Made: On Creation, Creatures, and Their Creator,” to take place in St. Paul, Minnesota June 6–8, 2024. It is co-sponsored by the Institute for Catholic Theological Formation at The Saint Paul Seminary, University of St. Thomas (MN).
For more details about the theme, invited speakers, and to submit a paper proposal, please visit the conference website: https://www.sacradoctrinaproject.org/conference.
For those readers interested—or who know those who might be—Aquinas’s works are being translated into Polish.
More information here (in Polish):
Complete Works, Vol. 64, Exposition of the Letters of St. Paul: Letter to the Romans
Dear Readers,
We are pleased to announce the pre-sale of the next volume of our historical project "The Complete Works of Thomas Aquinas" - Lecture of St. Paul: Romans , Vol. 64.
Translation by Fr. prof. Jacek Salij OP, which we present, was first published in the 1980s.
Use your discount-use the coupon code in the cart: T64 and you will receive a 25% discount .
Explaining the Scriptures was one of the primary tasks of the theologian in the medieval university. Although the texts of biblical commentaries constitute only about 13% of the works of St. Thomas, it is the Bible—as Fr. Prof. Piotr Roszak—that plays a key role in determining the articles of faith, which, according to Tomasz's method of practicing theology, constitute its principles and are the starting point for further reflection.
For St. Thomas, the entire Sacred Scripture reveals the mysteries of the heart of Christ. At the same time, in the prologue to his Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans, St. Thomas attributes a special theological significance to this work and to the Psalms, stating that "in both writings almost all the doctrine about God is contained."
In the same prologue, Aquinas tries to show the place of the Letter to the Romans among the other writings of St. Paul. He says that all the teachings of St. Paul "comes by the grace of Christ," and the various Pauline epistles approach this grace from different perspectives. The letter to the Romans "looks at the grace of Christ in itself" and "thus glorifies it."
The project is carried out in close cooperation with the Pro Futuro Theologiae Foundation, Wydawnictwo Wdrożą and the Thomistic Institute.
There is a publishing plan on the aquinata.net website
We wish you a good reading!
IGTM-Sessions at IMC Leeds 2024: Call for Papers
From Crisis to Crisis Management – Perspectives in Medieval Theology and Spirituality
Since the 16th century up to the 20th century, e.g. in Johan Huizinga's influential study on the The Harvest of Medieval Theology, the 14th and 15th centuries were condemned to decay and rigidity. Research in the history of theology since the middle of the 20th century, on the other hand, has concentrated on renewal phenomena of the late Middle Ages and suggested overcoming a sharp dichotomy of decay/reform in transformation thinking. However, the tension between decay/reform always presupposes that in the late Middle Ages—and also in the centuries before—there were generally recognized crisis phenomena and a crisis consciousness that led to renewal movements, e.g. in the attempts at church reform at the Councils of Constance and Basel, in the observance movements of the religious orders or in new forms of piety such as the Devotio Moderna.
With our theme “From Crisis to Crisis Management - Perspectives in Medieval Theology and Spirituality” we would like to go back a step behind the scheme of decay and reform and ask anew about the perception and processing of crises in theology and spirituality.
Themes to be addressed may include, but are not limited to:
What is a crisis in theology? How is it expressed, also linguistically, who states it and what strategies can be found to overcome it? To what extent were these crises genuinely theological or to what extent did theology only attempt to respond and react to crises?
What forms of crises and crisis management can be found in medieval theology and how are these reflected theologically and dealt with in literature?
Was there, for example, a crisis of scholasticism, a crisis of biblical interpretation, a crisis of clerus?
How are (extra-theological) crisis phenomena and theological and spiritual coping strategies connected? (To what extent) are such crises interpreted in historical-theological terms?
Which spiritual resources are activated to process (perceived) crises? Are new forms of spirituality emerging to deal with crises?
How do theological crises find expression in the art and literature of the time?
Practical Matters
The organizers welcome paper proposals submitted in English. Abstracts should be kept as close to 100 words as possible. (Each paper should last 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.)
Please provide the following details: Title, abstract of no more than 100 words, if
wished: index terms for your paper; your name, institutional affiliation, email, and postal address.
Papers will probably be published (in an Archa Verbi – Subsidia volume).
Please note: The congress will take place in person in Leeds. Travel and accommodation of speakers cannot be covered.
Paper proposals must be submitted by 12 September 2023 to
Jonathan Reinert jonathan.reinert@th-reutlingen.de
and
Ulrike Treusch treusch@fthgiessen.de
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Treusch
Lehrstuhl für Historische Theologie Freie Theologische Hochschule Gießen
Germany
Prof. Dr. Jonathan Reinert
Lehrstuhl für Kirchengeschichte und Ökumenik Theologische Hochschule Reutlingen
Germany
CENTER FOR THOMISTIC STUDIES (Houston, TX)
THOMAS AQUINAS SOCIETY (Providence, RI)
Call for papers on the thought of
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
59th INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan
9—11 May 2024
A total of 6 sessions will be devoted to Medieval philosophical and theological thought, especially that of Aquinas. One session in particular will be devoted to Aquinas’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. The sessions are sponsored by:
The Center for Thomistic Studies (University of St. Thomas, Houston, Texas), Steven J. Jensen (jensensj@stthom.edu). Three sessions will be devoted to any topic about the philosophy of Aquinas, his sources, or contemporary applications of his thought.
The Thomas Aquinas Society (Providence College), Robert Barry (rbarry@providence.edu). For these sessions, proposals on any topic dealing with Aquinas are welcome, with one session devoted to the Commentary on the Gospel of St. John.
All papers will be delivered face-to-face; online format is unavailable.
Papers are 20 minutes in length. Paper submissions must include a 300 word abstract, and a short description (50 words) for public view on the meeting site, should the proposal be accepted.
Deadline for submissions: 15 Sep 2023
Papers must be submitted through the Western Michigan University website. Please go to https://icms.confex.com/icms/2024/cfp.cgi Once on this webpage, you must go to “Session Selection” and then click on “Sponsored and Special Sessions of Papers.” From the drop-down menu, you must select one of the following three possibilities: “Thomas Aquinas (1): Commentary on the Gospel of St. John”; “Thomas Aquinas (2) and (3)”; or “Thomistic Philosophy (1), (2), and (3).” From the new drop-down, click “Begin a Submission,” and then follow instructions.
The Kalamazoo conference is the largest congress for Medieval Studies in the world.
The Christendom College Graduate School of Theology is pleased to announce its first academic symposium on the Most Blessed Trinity, presented as the foundational mystery of Christian life. With a specifically interdisciplinary emphasis, the event will bring together academic scholars and professionals to explore the relevance of Trinitarian faith to every academic discipline and its intersection with every aspect of human life.
The Trinity Symposium will to take place Friday evening through Sunday morning, April 12-14, 2024. Papers should address the relevance of specifically Trinitarian doctrine to any of the academic or professional areas listed below. Outstanding papers will be selected for publication in a book on the topic through Christendom Press.
Proposals should be submitted to Olivia Colleville (olivia.colville@christendom.edu) and Stephen A. Hipp (stephen.hipp@christendom.edu). They should include the paper title, a 300-350 word abstract, and a brief bio. Proposals are due by September 15, 2023.
Subject areas: Art, Astronomy, Biology, Economics, Geology, History, Law, Mathematics, Medicine, Music (History; Composition; Theory), Philosophy (Transcendentals; Causality; Immanence & Transcendence; etc.), Physics, Preaching the Trinity, Psychology, Theology (Creation; Ecclesiology; Mary; Moral Theology; Spirituality, et al.)
The Trinity Symposium aims to respond to the recent Magisterium’s call to transform culture through the revival of Christian faith.
Theologians, within the requirements and methods proper to theology, are invited to seek continually for more suitable ways of communicating doctrine to the men of their times; for the deposit of faith or the truths are one thing and the manner in which they are enunciated, in the same meaning and understanding, is another. ... Let those who teach theology in seminaries and universities strive to collaborate with men versed in the other sciences through a sharing of their resources and points of view. ... This common effort will greatly aid... to present to our contemporaries the doctrine of the Church concerning God, man and the world, in a manner more adapted to them so that they may receive it more willingly. (Gaudium et spes, 62)
While fundamentally academic, presentations will illustrate the intersection of Trinitarian faith or doctrine with other areas of research and practice, in such a way as to highlight its concrete significance for thought and action and its manifold expressions beyond customary Trinitarian theological categories.
How, for example, can mathematics lead one to contemplate the Trinity? What in mathematics expresses or reflects some aspect of the Trinitarian mystery? How might mathematics illustrate or offer analogies for Trinitarian doctrines? What of the divine processions is manifested in the biological phenomenon of cellular reproduction? How does God’s immanence to and radical otherness from the creature correspond to unity and distinction in the Trinity? How are the transcendental properties of being as such Trinitarian? How is Mary a living commentary on the distinctive character of each divine person and on their interrelations? How does she inspire us to relate to the divine persons as such? And so on...
With the goal of deepening understanding of and igniting a greater love for the Trinity, it is our intention that papers stimulate an interest in and admiration for the Trinity beyond the confines of the Symposium itself. To this end, we would like to solicit various elements of the proceedings for use in a broader, ongoing project at the service of the “New Evangelization” (all permissions, academic acknowledgments, and any royalties, will be carefully respected). This involves two components:
The gathering of papers for publication in a volume produced by Christendom Press. To be considered for publication, completed papers must by submitted by February 15, 2024.
A promotional “snapshot” of each paper/presentation that can be used in anticipation of the Symposium. All presenters are asked to submit a brief statement, or short excerpt from their paper, or an image, or similarly representative element, to be used (approximately two months prior to the Symposium) in an artistically organized multimedia format to advertise the event. The content of this component should explain in simple, layman’s terms the basic link being made between the respective discipline and the Trinity and why the paper topic is meaningful for Christians.
For more information or to submit an abstract, follow this link.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
