11/07/2025 15:15
- 17:30
HALL: Elise Richter Hall
Chair:
Mccosker P.
Proponent:
Van Erp S.,
Wolfe J.
Speaker:
Baczyk P.,
Dias D.,
Hewitt S.,
Ryan G.,
Van Erp S.,
Wolfe J.
After extensive focus on universals of various kinds during modernity, and the revelling in diversity within postmodernity, we seek better ways of thinking and acting which give due agency to, and creatively think together, both the distinguishing particularities of humanity and cosmos and what is common, shared or universal. Hegemonic, totalising, top-down ways (law, reason, positivism etc) fail to do justice to the dynamic and complex particularities of life, just as uncoordinated, atomistic, horizontal, ever-narrowing emphases on particularities (e.g. ever more particular identity politics, hardened nationalisms etc) reduce our ability to have shared discourse and flourishing life in our common cosmos. This task is urgent given the increasing environmental, political, and religious predicaments we find ourselves in.
It is our conjecture that the religious concept of 'catholicity' (kath'holou, towards/according to the whole) may—historically nuanced, suitably critiqued and creatively extended—offer resources to help deal better with these issues. Most Christians profess a belief in catholicity, a concept which seems to conjugate particularity and universality, diversity and unity, the individual and collective. But fascinatingly, through history and in the contemporary world, theological ways of understanding catholicity are entangled—positively, negatively, and indifferently—with other ways of thinking about or locating the 'whole': non-religious universalisms, whether cultural, sociological, political or otherwise.
Within the context of a 5-year international research project based at the ACU, this panel invites papers which consider secular analogues of catholicity, or non-theological ways of conjugating particular with universal, local with global, micro with macro. It is particularly interested in proposals which relate to the arts, history, politics, and the sciences.