This past Saturday was Day One of the online conference that I had been co-organizing with some of my officemates from St Andrews. It was both exhausting and exhilarating. Because it was designed to be an international conference, my day began at 6am local time in California and ended at 4pm local time. During this time period I heard papers presented live from South Korea, Australia, Scotland, Canada, Arizona, Michigan, Maryland and Texas. And all of this transpired while I was casually sitting in the living room of an apartment. The convenience was off the charts; I didn’t have to pay for airfare or hotel fees, nor did I need a current passport. In our modern ecological era this is a fantastic supplement to the plethora of conferences on offer.
The Keynote presentations from last weekend were all very engaging and exciting. We got to hear from Sungmin Min Chun, N. T. Wright, Mariam Kamell, Michael Gorman, and Brian Rosner. In addition, I moderated one of the virtual rooms for the break out sessions and heard some interesting papers ranging from Self-help theology to John Locke, and from liberation theology to Bonhoeffer. It was a very stimulating day on the whole.
Here’s a fun picture of Prof. N. T. Wright giving his Keynote address:
The real important issue for us as administrators was to make sure that the event went smoothly. Having an entire conference online can be tricky and although there were a few bumps here and there (some of which is just inevitable), on the whole I was very pleased with the way things turned out. The other administrators did an excellent job trying to make things as smooth as possible.
For those of you who missed Day One, do not fret! You can still sign up for Day Two, which will take place this upcoming Saturday (May 25th: 6am- 4pm PDT, 8am-6pm CDT, 9am-7pm EDT). If you sign up you will have access to all of the video files from last week’s papers and will get to participate in another exciting day of our conference. We have Stanley Hauerwas, Shane Claiborne, Dennis Hollinger, Nijay Gupta, and Michael Barber as keynotes with several other parallel presentations to choose from. For the cost of admission all we ask is for a $10/£7 minimum donation to charity. If you’re free this Saturday please consider signing up! Last week we had over 30 people sign up during the conference and we’ll be accepting registrations all this week as well.
Pass along the word on social media: #ecclesiaandethics
If you’re interested in registering, click here.
If you’d like to see video interviews with a few of our Keynote speakers, click here.
If you’d like to find out more about the conference, including information about keynote speakers, the abstracts from our parallel presenters, or anything else related to the conference, click here.
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