Assessing the Divine: Religious Sources of Resilience in an Age of Political Turmoil
5th Annual Graduate Student Conference - Hybrid
Co-Hosted with The Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium
Date: Saturday, April 5, 2025
Time: TBA
Location: TBA
The Accessing the Divine conference took shape in 2021 under the leadership of students in the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium. The conference was initially conceived as a disability theology conference, and its first two iterations explored themes related to disability, building joyful futures, relationality, and interdependence. This year’s conference, which will be co-sponsored by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, hopes to expand the definition of its questions about access to include questions of resilience, sustainability, connection, and hope amidst political turmoil, activist and academic burnout, and social division. We hope to explore sources of resilience in religious and spiritual traditions (e.g. their rituals, practices, histories, major figures) in order to inform and energize exercises of resilience in our contemporary political era.
We invite proposals on questions/themes including, but not limited to:
The nature and definition of resilience
Intersectionality and resilience
Religious exemplars of political resilience
Comparative theologies of resilience
Rituals of resilience
Vocabulary expansion as a form of resilience
Resilience across division
Case studies on practices of resilience
Disability theology and resilience
Political organizing and resilience
Resilience in the virtual age
Black theology and resilience
Resilience amidst the “loneliness epidemic”
Post-traumatic growth
Mental health and the nature of resilience
Resilience amidst global conflicts
Resilience in activism
Resilience in an age of climate change