Project events

10th-16th August 2023 – Summer Seminars in Phenomenology and Revelation

Summer seminars for junior scholars (advanced Ph.D. students and recent Ph.D.s), taught by Jeffrey Bloechl, Tamsin Jones, and Neal deRoo. Discussion of papers by seminar participants in the afternoons.

Host: Immaculate Conception Retreat and Conference Center, USA

Main contacts: Christina M. Gschwandtner & Thomas Schaertl-Trendel ([email protected], [email protected])

This is a closed event.

The aim of the conference is to add a speculative dimension to the famous debate on secularisation, which began in the 50’s around Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History. Its participants usually present modernity as the age of more or less ‘illegitimate’ worldly transformation of the premodern religious patterns (Löwith, Weber, Schmitt, Taylor, Milbank) which eventually leads towards full atheisation (Blumenberg, Marquard, Lyotard, Lefebvre, Gauchet, Žižek, Nancy), but never as an epoch which created its own form of religious belief. The latter claim – that secularisation created its own form of ‘the religion of modern times’ (die Religion der neuen Zeiten) – derives originally from Hegel, but found a strong support in Gershom Scholem, who described the ‘modern religious sentiment’ in paradoxical terms of ‘pious atheism’ and ‘non-secular secularity’: a new attitude in which immanence replaces transcendence as a new object of religious interest. The Scholemian apparent oxymoron indicates that the ‘pious atheism’ cannot be reduced to a simple atheism: while the latter is a non-belief in the presence of God, the former is a belief in the absence of God, understood as the necessary condition for the creation of the world (tsimtsum). The Scholemian approach to secularity/ worldliness constitutes a part and parcel of the secularisation debate, but it has not yet been interpreted as such: the aim of the conference will be to include this unique Jewish voice on the theological status of the world (saeculum) into the current debates on the meaning of modern secularity.  

            Scholem’s paradoxical formula of sacred secularity suggests a completely new vision of the secular age in which Verweltlichung is not to be understood as the time of the demise of religion and theology, but as the period of transition, in which theological focus shifts from God conceived as the Absolute to the World as the creaturely realm, or, in other words, “the sacred wanders into the profane” (Adorno). The purpose of the conference will be to offer a stage of encounter between those strains of Jewish and Christian thought which contributed to what Hegel, following Duns Scotus, designated as the major event defining the climate of ‘the religion of modern times’: the turn toward the worldly. While open to the modern contamination of theological discourses, the conference will nonetheless focus on the Jewish voice in the debate on secularisation. Whereas Christianity and Islam originally developed under the auspices of ‘theological absolutism’ and the resulting Entweltilichung or ‘de-worlding’ (Blumenberg), Judaism chose a different path of a ‘decentred theism’ (Rosenzweig, Derrida) which always put the World and the worldly creatures in the centre of its theological interest as related to God-Creator only in a mediated manner. The fact that modernity begins with the process of secularisation – here understood as Verweltlichung, ‘the recovery of the world’ or the Scotist ‘turn to the worldly’ – could thus be conceived not as a process of atheisation, but as an elaboration of a new theology which, as already Hegel admitted, has its roots in the procosmic tendencies of the Judaic thought, both orthodox/ rabbinic and heterodox/ kabbalistic. Such thinkers as Rosenzweig, Arendt, and Jonas saw modern Jewish influence as a rich source of a procosmic antidote or, paraphrasing Taubes, ‘a spiritual investment in the world,’ capable to resist strong acosmic strains of Christianity, always endangered by the Neoplatonic-Gnostic denigration of the material being. Unlike acosmism or anti-cosmism, however, procosmism has not yet been properly treated speculatively within the philosophico-theological context: the conference will aim at filling this lack, by offering a reflection on the theological genealogies and interpretations of secularity, with special attention paid to the Jewish contribution, from Isaac Luria to Jacques Derrida. 

Host: University of Nottingham, UK

Main contact: Agata Bielik-Robson ([email protected])

This event is open to the public.

28th-29th April 2023 – ‘Analogy, Desire, and Imitation’ workshop

The event will bring together analogical metaphysicians and theologians with experts in mimetic theory. The purpose of the event is to open a constructive conversation between the world-view presented in analogical metaphysics with the worldview presented in an anthropology based in mimetic desire. Participants: Philip Gonzales (St. Patrick’s), Grant Kaplan (SLU), Wolfgang Palaver (Innsbruck), John Milbank (Nottingham), John Betz (ND), William Desmond (Villanova/KU Leuven), and Cyril O’Regan (ND).

Host: St Patrick’s Pontifical University Maynooth, Ireland

Main contact: Dr Philip Gonzales ([email protected])

For more information including how to register

This event is open to the public.

18th-23rd April 2023 – Third writing retreat 

Our final retreat for mature scholars in the field. We will continue to explore the “ressourcement of practices” and draw out the experiential reflection on their writing practice of a number of colleagues. 

Location: Douai Abbey, UK 

Main contacts: Claire Carlisle & Karen Kilby ([email protected],  [email protected]) 

This is a closed event.

22nd-24th March 2023 – ‘The Metaphysics of Contemplation’ 

This expert seminar is an opportunity for constructive dialogue between philosophers and theologians with an interest in Christian contemplation. The participants will ask whether a retrieval of contemplative practices in the religious schools can stimulate new paradigms for theological and philosophical activity in the twenty-first century—focusing on issues related to metaphysics, phenomenology, and ressourcement theology. The seminar will be attended by a small number of international scholars: Edward Baring (Princeton University), Jeffrey Bloechl (Boston College), Ilia Delio OSF (Villanova University), Tamsin Jones (Trinity College), Alison More (University of Toronto), Daniel Pilario CM (Adamson University), Jacob Sherman (California Institute of Integral Studies), Joseph Rivera (Dublin City University), Jennifer Newsome Martin (Notre Dame University), Jacob Benjamins (University of Toronto), Inigo Bocken (KU Leuven), Darren Dias OP (Toronto School of Theology), Stephan van Erp (KU Leuven). 

Location: Toronto, Ontario 

Main contacts: Stephan van Erp & Darren Dias ([email protected],  [email protected]) 

This is a closed event.