It is a really good feeling to have last week behind me. The conference in itself wasn’t that great. There was a mess up on housing. Some people arrived at the hotel, paid the hotel prices, and were informed that they’d be staying in a dormitory 30 minutes away from the conference. One of the selling points of the conference was that Zizek would be there. He was a no show. The other selling point was the audience with the pope. Out of the 250 people at the conference, only 75 were elected to go. I wasn’t one of them.

All that said, the conference was a really great opportunity to connect with lots of
different people and to come to the realization that you’re not crazy. There were several memorable papers. Ben Myers had a very strong paper on Rowan Williams and Orthodoxy that led me and a few others into an hour and a half discussion afterwards. Victoria Harrison presented a strong paper on using embodied values of the saints in Christian-Muslim dialogue. Peter Admirand’s paper gave a glimmer of hope in constructing a theology after Auschweiz. Nate Kerr gave us a foretaste of his upcoming book which I am eager to read. Matheson Russell gave a really good paper on Habermas and procedural reasoning.

There were some big guns at this conference as well, of which honestly, I wasn’t entirely impressed with. There was an interesting session with John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, and Oliver O’Donovan. I say interesting because they were all theological rock stars, but there was not much interaction between them. Milbank’s was the hardest to follow and stay awake for. Sometimes I got the impression from these big shots that there was a loss of the sense of an audience.

For me, the best part of this conference was the conversations between papers. I gained a lot more out of these moments because I was able to get a sense of the person in context of their work. What struck me the most about the papers that I described above was probably the humility with which they approached this task. Out of these conversations came the start of some great friendships. Besides the names I’ve already mentioned, I would recommend checking out Byron Smith’s blog. I also had many great conversations with David Newheiser who was very encouraging to me.

As far as how my paper went, it went extremely well. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, but was still pleased with the experience. It was on a theology of the table. I had a few questions/responses afterwards which I was able to more or less address. One came from a lady in the back who I later discovered was John Milbank’s wife. Fun times… If you’d like a copy of the paper, email me and I’d be glad to send it to you.