Conference Overview

Plenary Lectures

Ilia Delio: “Toward Healing and Wholeness: Rethinking Reality as a Flow of Consciousness”

Our busy, complex world today, driven by the forces of market capitalism, politics and the speed of technological progress, has given rise to a persistent anxiety and fragmentation. While meditation practices can slow us down, the pressures of the world still weigh upon us. We cannot seem to escape a world spinning out of control. Can a shift in perception make a significant difference? Here we will explore novel ideas on space, time and the primacy of experience, giving rise to a deep flow of being beneath the surface of our restless age. Factors impeding this shift will be discussed and ways of living in co-creative wholeness will explored as integral to the religious dimension of evolution.

Diarmuid O’Murchu: “Ecological Healing after Covid-19″

Covid 19 has marked a major cultural shift in our world, and without the vaccine roll-out millions would have died. However, the vaccines only treat symptoms and leave the underlying causes unaddressed. It is our planetary economic and ecological systems that need healing so that all creatures, and not merely humans, can enjoy that evolutionary fulfillment which God desires for all beings.

Donald Viney: “For the Love of God: An Ecological Aesthetic”

Teilhard de Chardin wrote: “Coextensive with their Within, there is a Without of Things.” The metaphor captures our awareness that we are subjects of experience, but also objects within the world. This idea, which Teilhard extends to other sentient creatures, can help us in overcoming the pernicious and ugly notion that nature exists merely for human use and consumption. A related Teilhardian expression is “the heart of matter,” the divine “fire” that animates cosmogenesis. In this way, Teilhard allows us to speak of the “Within” of the universe itself, and by implication, the cosmos as the body of God.

Achievement Award Lecture

Louis Savary: “Love’s Evolutionary Challenge: The Next Big Step for Humanity”

Teilhard could envision humanity’s next evolutionary leap. It would be humans—individually and as cooperating nations—sharing a unified planetary mind and heart, joined with a single purpose. He described it as “a paroxysm of harmonized complexity.”

He knew from St. Paul and St. John that Jesus had the same vision for our future. The science and technology for the achieving the vision was almost ready on Earth. It still needed a transcendent leader to guide the process.

Teilhard had so much faith in his church—still mired at the time in its medieval mentality—that he still believed it had the necessary basic theological structure to become an evolutionary church of the future, one that could accept love’s evolutionary challenge.

Workshops

Andrew Del Rossi: “Teilhard, Jung, & Berry: Integrating Spirit, Psyche, and Earth”

Teilhard’s mystic vision opened his eyes to the intricately interconnected and interdependent structure of the world and its evolution toward higher consciousness. According to Teilhard, “to be” is to be in relationship…with one’s self, others, the world, and with God. In an age where political division, ideological binaries, and the religiosity of scientism dominate discourse, there is a storehouse of integral wisdom found in the scientific and spiritual teachings of Teilhard de Chardin, within the insights on the psyche as explored through Jungian psychoanalysis, and the ecological wisdom of “geologian” Thomas Berry. This interactive workshop will explore the relationship between spirit, psyche, and Earth and how cultivating deeper, conscious relationships provides hope and inspires a vision of the future aflame with the creativity and potential of Divine Love.

Katie Gordon: “From Wayfinders to Web-Weavers: Exploring the Entropy & Emergence in our Evolving Traditions ”

As institutions and systems are called into question and face collapse, there are new co-evolving experiments and ecologies that are already emerging, and offer signs of hope for a new paradigm of spiritual and religious life. By grounding in the stories and frameworks learned through Nuns & Nones, an intergenerational and interspiritual community of seekers, this session will explore the possibilities for repair, renewal, and re-imagination in our traditions.

Alison McCrary: “Mutual Aid, Restorative Frameworks, and Transformative Justice Approaches to Healing Ourselves, Each Other, and the Earth”

How can the Indigenous-rooted and Gospel-modeled practices of restorative and transformative justice help us repair our relationships with ourselves, each other, the Earth, and creation? How do we refine what is enough for ourselves, our communities, and the planet and live in right relationship and out of a radical, inclusive love? This workshop will explore the importance of cultivating restorative and transformative communities of resistance to create personal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic change and shift our personal and collective consciousness. It will examine the roots of mutual aid and how it is modeled in present-day communities of color, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in the aftermath of climate crisis disasters such as Hurricane Ida. We will evolve the concept of mutual aid beyond our relationship to other humans and into our relationship with the land, soil, waters, plants, and animals to heal the face of the Earth. We will explore how if we protect non-human creation, it will protect us and how we can move from systems of extraction to ones of regeneration and fair distribution.

Rhonda Miska: “Embodying Love in a World on Fire: Developing a Somatic Spirituality for Healing”

In this experiential session, we will explore together the ways that the interlocking threats to human and planetary flourishing and the ongoing traumas of our time impact us in our bodies. Rather than “thinking ourselves into a new way of being,” this session content will focus on the reality that we are incarnated beings that experience the world through our five senses. Informed by the work of theologians as well as the work of Resma Menakem, Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk and others who work around the intersections of personal healing, social healing, trauma, and the body, Through embodied practiced involving breath, chant, and simple movement, we will explore how practices for keeping a big, open, compassionate heart when the body pulls us towards fight, flight, or freeze.

Mark Wallace: “Worship the Ground You Walk On”

Monotheistic religious traditions argue against earth-based worship as a form of paganism. But reverence for particular land masses, bodies of water, trees and plants, and all types of animals as sacred beings dot the landscape of the western religious imaginary. In the Bible, e.g., the Jordan river is a source of physical healing and spiritual salvation, and the dove is pictured as the literal embodiment of God in the form of the Holy Spirit. In this workshop we will explore these and other intimations of the landed sacred and ask, correspondingly, what liturgical practice, even worship, might look like from an earth-centered perspective. And we will ask whether such practices – case studies for encountering everyday divinity – could be the ground tone for our renewed care and love of our planet home.