For those who watch this space, here’s an update on my research and writing over the past few months, and looking ahead to the summer.
My edition of Robert Friedmann’s book, Design for Living was released at the end of November 2017, and is now available for purchase online. At some point this coming Fall I may put together a symposium-launch for the book with the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre, with contributions from a few scholars who have engaged with Friedmann’s work.
I have been working with several affiliates of the TMTC, and its director Kyle Gingerich Hiebert, on the Mennonite Graduate Student Conference VIII – to be held from June 14-16 2018 in Toronto. My paper will be on moving “Beyond the Crisis and Fatigue of Mennonite Identity,” and it will involve some engagement with the critical-theological work of Hans-Jurgen Goertz. More importantly, the conference will serve as the informal launch of Lydia Neufeld Harder’s essay collection (CMU Press, 2018), and more details on her public lecture will be available soon.
I just returned yesterday evening from the DSR graduate conference at the University of Toronto on the Philosophy of Religion. My paper staged a dialogue between hermeneutic and phenomenological paradigms in the philosophy of religion, and more imaginative and entangled work in political theology, and I had some good engagement from some folks from ICS, and some good conversation on Agamben with Sean Capener. Kiegan Irish, in particular, gave a great paper on Foucault, and I notice that he has a post here on the Locke St. anarchism that Hamiltonians will be familiar with.
After my major comprehensive exams next week, this summer will consist of language study and dissertation prep, and further work on Grace Jantzen’s critical genealogy of violence in her trilogy, Death and the Displacement of Beauty.
This fall I am also excited to be a part of this conference at Brock University:
Dr. Maxwell Kennel 