2010 Symposium
2010 Faith, Reason & World Affairs Symposium
Awakening to Wonder: Re-enchantment in a Post-Secular Age
Sept. 14-15
Conventional wisdom has long predicted that rising tides of science, technology and modernization will drown out all sense of mystery, magic and marvel, leaving us in a world stripped of meaning, denuded of wonder, and governed by mechanistic laws. Despite these predictions, we find ourselves in a time of multiple re-enchantments. From Harry Potter and Twilight to films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, popular culture is full of magic. Ecologists call for a recovered sense of the earth as a precious, fragile, enchanted oasis of life, and scientists increasingly speak a language of wonder and awe as they widen our view of the natural world. All this occurs against the backdrop of a widespread resurgence of religion in a world that was supposed to be growing more secular by the day.
The symposium will explore the role of wonder in today’s world by asking such questions as:
- What role does wonder play in popular culture, including literature, movies, and games, and what is the significance of the current attention to wonder and mystery in these areas?
- What place does wonder have within the intellectual vocation of making sense of the world?
- Can reason and wonder coexist, or are they in serious conflict with one another?
- How and why is the place of religion changing in the contemporary world?
- Do such changes in religion involve changes in our sense of the world as a locus of wonder?
- What are the experiences writers in a wide range of fields of study have in mind when they speak of re-enchantment?
- Do shared experiences of wonder represent a common ground where people of different faiths, cultures, and academic disciplines might meet, understand and appreciate each other, or explore solutions to problems they have in common?
