03/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Pola - A102

Contact: Ferracci L.

Chair: Ferracci L.

This open panel invites papers on a concrete, ecumenically charged question: which works—texts, corpora, and "schools" of Christian thought and practice—should be preserved and transmitted to future generations of ecumenists, and by what criteria? The title invokes an end-of-the-world horizon in order to make a present difficulty harder to evade: the transmission of ecumenical theological knowledge is under strain, and the places and habits that once sustained it can no longer be taken for granted. Under threats of destruction, churches often struggle to speak and act together.
Part of the difficulty is institutional. Academic theology faces shrinking infrastructures, changing student publics, contested authority, and fragmented formation. At the same time, theology is increasingly displaced into a widened ecosystem—private educational institutes, think tanks, ecclesial initiatives, media platforms, and influencer-driven publics—often with different incentives and measures of credibility. In this setting, ecumenism is especially vulnerable: in many contexts, the generation now assuming leadership is less instinctively committed to ecumenism, less trained to read across confessions, and less formed by the "slow" virtues of dialogue.
This panel asks what it would mean to assemble an Ecumenical Filocalia for the twenty-first century: not a nostalgic canon, and not a default "Western classics" syllabus, but a deliberately ecumenical selection—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostal and charismatic—with a global horizon beyond Europe and North America. We welcome proposals on cross-confessional classics with real reception; key texts and debates in modern ecumenical theology; authors and corpora from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and diasporas; documentary, historiographical, and biographical works shaping ecumenical memory; and monastic and ascetical literature (ancient and modern) as part of the ecumenical archive.