2013 Conference

 

Complex Identities in a Shifting World: One God, Many Stories?

11^th Conference of the International Academy of Practical Theology (IAPT)

April 11-15, 2013

Toronto, Canada

 The largest city in Canada, Toronto considers itself one of the most multicultural cities of the world. The city touts diversity of “religion, race, and lifestyle,” with more than 100 spoken languages.  About 52% of Torontonians are recent immigrants, and another 26% have at least one parent born outside of Canada.[1] But even among the 22% who have two Canadian parents or who are Canadian-born, “complex identity” exists, since Canada has long sought to negotiate among indigenous, French and English loyalties. Today more than ever, with two official languages, different aboriginal peoples and various currents of immigration, the country struggles to weave its many stories into a single national narrative.

This local reality symbolically reflects a global context. Clear and well-defined identities are hard to sustain in a rapidly shifting world. Peoples, goods and cultures are on the move. Internet and other technologies increase the amount, the speed and the intensity of cultural exchanges between individuals, organizations and nations. Our contemporaries develop all kinds of strategies to define who they are in a world displaying different ideals, various ways of life and many models of organization. Religious traditions both collide and interact; many spiritual journeys cross religious boundaries. In a shifting world, those who believe in one God are elaborating different stories, and complex ones at that.

How do theological ideas and religious and spiritual practices help us negotiate this shifting world? What empirical, hermeneutical, liberation, indigenous or other methods help us understand, teach and further practical theological research in such a world?

While other theological disciplines may begin in theory or doctrine, practical theology in particular takes responsibility for the description of this world, its inhabitants, and the way it negotiates religious practices and theology. This conference will pay a particular attention to theological reflection on the stories by which individuals, groups and nations define themselves through time and space.

This conference invites papers on issues such as:

• Mosaic co-existence, multicultural interrelatedness and their effect on identity
• The migration of peoples, of goods, of money and of culture
• The influence and rights of “visible minorities”; the historical and current relationship between racialization and religion
• The way technology is changing the shape of communities, making international relationships more easily possible, but challenging intergenerational and interpersonal  traditions and  communal practices
• The extent to which people negotiate within themselves multiple loyalties to tradition, families of birth and choice, food, religious holidays and many other signifiers of complex identity
• The increasing importance of narrative as we attempt to communicate religious personal and communal meaning-making
• Impact of the these complex, shifting identities on how we understand the relationship between ecclesiology and practical theology
• The relationship of “religion” and “spirituality”—challenges to religious institutions and complexity in the marketplace of religious practices
• The rewriting of social narratives through cultural practices such as “truth and reconciliation commissions”
• The renegotiation of the use of land, when many groups tie their identity, livelihood, and religious traditions to the same land
• Identity formed by texts and practices, especially those deemed both sacred and revelatory
• Political proposals and the role of media in complex and shifting societies
• Changing identities in matters of race, gender and religion
• Crossing geographical boundaries or symbolic ones in individual or group journeys