What did deacons do?

May 12th – 14th 2020 in Joensuu, Finland

The School of Theology (University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu) is planning the next international and ecumenical research conference on patristic understandings of diakonia. It will be the fourth such conference held. Our purpose is to continue the work of earlier symposia (2014, 2015, 2017), inspired by the Rome 2009 conference “Diaconia, diaconiae, diaconato”.
The topic is ‘What did deacons do?'. In this conference, we will be focusing on Late Antiquity, especially the 3rd and 4th centuries.
Most of the 2017 congress, along with some additional papers, was published by Mohr Siebeck as Deacons and Diakonia in Early Christianity: the First Two Centuries. (Deacons 2018). Our co-operating partners are Prof. Bart J. Koet (Tilburg), Dr. John N. Collins (Melbourne), Dr. Anni Hentschel (Würzburg) and Dr. Edwina Murphy (Sydney) as well as the Finnish Association for Research in Diaconia, Societas Patristica Fennica and IDC – Pro Diaconia Christi.
The conference will be held on May 12th – 14th 2020 in Joensuu, Finland.
The Call for Papers is now open (below and on one sub page).
The dead line is 25 April 2019.

22nd Biennial Symposium of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society

“Conversions and Life Passages through the Mirror of Medieval Preachers”

Hospedería-Convento Santo Domingo in Caleruega (Spain)
17 July to 21 July 2020

Host: Linda G. Jones, Vice-President of the IMSSS
Organizing Committee: Linda G. Jones (Pompeu Fabra University), Bernard Hodel, O.P. (University of Fribourg), Oriol Catalán (Pompeu Fabra University), Adrienne Dupont-Hamy (Ph.D. Université Paris VII)

The past few decades have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the scholarship on inter-religious conversion. The old dichotomous models that privileged either the inner, subjective, affective, or psychological experience of the individual convert or the social, institutional, or ritual aspects of religious conversion have given way to more nuanced approaches that recognize not only that narratives of the experiences of individual converts must be historically and socially contextualized, but also that they play ideological and symbolic roles within society (Szpiech, 2013). Ideally, sociological and biographical or psychological perspectives should be combined since no one approach or discipline alone suffices to comprehend fully the phenomenon of conversion (Jindra, 2014). Conversion studies scholars have increasingly moved toward introducing comparative and global perspectives, acknowledging that the processes, experiences, and contributing factors of conversion differ from one religion to another, change over time or in response to inter-religious interactions, and are inflected by other factors such as gender, ethnicity, or social status (Fox & Yisraeli, 2017; Jindra, 2014; Rambo & Fardahian, 2014; Kimber Buell, 2005). Traditional images of passive converts and of conversion as a sudden radical change have given way to considering the convert as an active agent, and conversion as a lengthy process (Rambo & Fardahian, 2014). Finally, new themes have emerged as foci of study: alongside inter-religious conversion, scholars are paying more attention to phenomena such as intra-religious conversion, the intensification of one's own faith tradition, forms of resistance to religious conversion, “deconversion,” and conversion as a transition from one life passage to another—as opposed to one religious tradition to another.