Collegium Institute is a proud cosponsor of this international virtual conference on the stories of how we came to inhabit the modern world.
Genealogies of modernity are broad narrative accounts of the rise and nature of our present cultural condition. Theology nearly always features, in some way or another, in narratives about the formation of modernity, even if its role is just being a discourse and set of practices that was gradually marginalized by the onset of a more secular age. This conference gathers together an international team of scholars to explore genealogies of modernity sympathetically and to evaluate them critically. The contributors will discuss a range of important figures and focused topics, and they will pay special attention to stories that are often, though perhaps unhelpfully, understood as decline narratives—accounts of modernity that do not associate it unambiguously with progress. So-called decline genealogies have significant influence within theology across several confessional traditions, but like any narrative with the massive scope of a genealogy of modernity, making a case for them is necessarily complex. How are “decline” narratives and other accounts constructed? If these stories seek to do something more than just to describe historical processes, how do subtly normative dimensions enter into them? How do genealogical narratives look from the perspective of constituencies that are often marginalized?
Darren Sarisky discusses the conference theme in greater detail in this piece for the Genealogies of Modernity Project.
Dates: Thursday, July 8 – Sunday, July 11
Time: 8:00am to 11:15am EDT each day (13:00-16:15 BST).
Registration: You can sign up for this event at the link below. Please note that this event is limited to 500 attendees on a first-come-first-served basis, so we recommend that you join each session a few minutes early to ensure a spot.