2023 Providence College Veritas Conference
Greater Love Hath None: Friendship and Christian Hope
Spring Conference | April 21-22, 2023 | Providence College
The Providence College Humanities Program is pleased to invite abstract submissions for its 2nd annual Veritas Conference, “Greater Love Hath None: Friendship and Christian Hope,” to be held at Providence College April 21-22, 2023. Keynote speakers include Rusty R. Reno (First Things), Carl R. Trueman (Grove City College), Francis X. Maier (Ethics and Public Policy Center), and Ken Myers (Mars Hill Audio).
About the Conference
Our inaugural Veritas Conference explored how the supposedly “sovereign individual” in modern America currently finds him- or herself trapped between the demands of (increasingly arbitrary) self-definition and the simultaneous dissolution of the mediating institutions (e.g., family, fraternal organizations, churches, etc.) that once conferred identity. We seem to be both inherently aimless and yet required to determine our own aims/goals: as sovereign individuals, we are alone in our sovereign self-determination, but required to pretend that we are not lonely.
The second annual Veritas Conference will consider the roles of “friendship” and “hope” in articulating a substantive vision of human flourishing on the other side of alienation and arbitrary self-definition. The Christian gospel announces that we have something definite to hope for—ultimately, the coming of the Son of Man—and that this is a good that will be enjoyed in the fellowship of others. Thus: For what may we hope? And how do we articulate Christian hope in the contemporary context? Or again, Christian hope is friendship: friendship with God, and friendship with each other in and through God. So how might the “natural” love of friendship provide an intimation of ultimate beatitude? How is friendship healed and elevated—transformed—by grace? This approach to hope and friendship has particular resonance in our context of regnant autonomous individuality: What has become of friendship in the modern world? How is friendship transformed and/or reordered within a Christian frame of reference? What can we do to foster friendship in the modern setting—among young people? in synagogue and parish communities? in our neighborhoods?
In the humane spirit of the Veritas Conference, the Humanities Program welcomes abstracts that engage the themes of “friendship” and “hope” (separately or in conjunction) from a variety of points of departure, including theology, philosophy, political theory, law, history, economics, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, literature, and the arts.
Please direct inquiries to veritas.conference@providence.edu.
About the Keynote Speakers
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
Maier served as senior adviser and special assistant to Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., for 23 years in Denver and Philadelphia. He previously served as editor in chief of the National Catholic Register newsweekly and as a story analyst and screenwriter in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and New York University’s School of the Arts, he is a former fellow of the American Film Institute’s Conservatory for Advanced Film Studies. He is a cofounding board member of the University of Pennsylvania’s Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture and a board member of the Napa Institute.
His bylined work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, First Things, National Review, The American Spectator, Crisis, This World, America, The Catholic Thing, Commonweal, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Christian Science Monitor, France Catholique, and other national and foreign outlets.
Since 1993, Ken Myers has served as host and producer of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. Formerly the editor of This World: A Journal of Religion and Public Life and executive editor of Eternity, an Evangelical monthly magazine, his career began as a producer and editor for National Public Radio, working for much of that time as arts and humanities editor for the Morning Edition.
Myers did undergraduate work in film theory and criticism and holds a masters in theological studies degree from Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia.
R. R. Reno has served as Editor of First Things since 2011. He received his Ph.D. in theology from Yale University and taught theology and ethics at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska for 20 years.
Reno has published in many academic journals, and his opinion essays have appeared in Commentary, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New York Times, and other popular outlets. His most recent books include The End of Interpretation, Return of the Strong Gods, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, Fighting the Noonday Devil, Sanctified Vision, and a commentary on the Book of Genesis.
Born and raised in England, Carl Trueman is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge (M.A.) and Aberdeen (Ph.D), and has taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen before moving to the United States in 2001 to teach at Westminster Theological Seminary (PA). In 2017-18 he was the William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Since 2018, he has served as a professor at Grove City College in the Calderwood School of Arts and Humanities.
Trueman is widely published in both academic and popular circles, is a contributing editor at First Things and Touchstone Magazine, an opinion columnist at World magazine, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution and Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (both from Crossway), and (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and Calvinism (Oxford University Press). His writing has also appeared in Deseret Journal, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and Public Discourse.
Conference Overview
* Plenary and Breakout Sessions will be held in the Ruane Center for the Humanities
Friday, April 21
- 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Welcome and John F. Fay ’68 Plenary Address: Francis X. Maier (Ethics and Public Policy Center), “What We Need Now” - 5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Humanities Forum Reception
Saturday, April 22
- 8:00 a.m.
Mass at St. Pius V Church (240 Eaton St., Providence, RI – across the street from PC campus) - 8:15 – 9:00 a.m.
Continental Breakfast in the Fiondella Great Room - 9:00 – 10:15 a.m.
Panel Discussion: Patrick Briscoe, OP and Joseph-Anthony Kress, OP (hosts of “Godsplaining), “Do My Friends have to be Christian?: Thomas Aquinas on the Unique Nature of Christian Friendship” - 10:30 – 11:45 p.m.
Second Plenary Address: Ken Myers (Mars Hill Audio Journal), “Liberalism and the Trivializing of Friendship” - 12:00 – 1:15 p.m.
Lunch in Raymond Dining Hall - 1:30 – 3:15 p.m.
Breakout Sessions (See roster below) - 3:30 – 4:45 p.m.
Third Plenary Address: Carl Trueman (Grove City College), “The Grace of Friendship” - 5:00 – 6:15 p.m.
Concluding Plenary Address: R. R. Reno (First Things), “Friendship in an Age of Polarization” - 6:30 – 8:00 p.m.
Dinner in the Fiondella Great Room
Breakout Session Paper Titles
Saturday, April 22 (1:30 – 3:15 p.m.)
Concurrent Session 1 (Ruane 205)
- Joseph Leake, “Literature and the Problem of Apeirokalia: Lewis and Tolkein’s Cure for Unenchantment”
- Mark Doyle, “Friendship and Hierarchy in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings”
- Jakob Thibault, “Gender Dysphoria: Four Kinds of Things a Man Must Love”
Concurrent Session 2 (Ruane 206)
- Chris Fisher, “A Faculty of Friends: Christian Friendship and the Mission of Catholic Education”
- Maura Shea, “Friendship with Christ and Eschatological Hope in the thought of Benedict XVI”
- Daniel Gallagher, “Hope and the Essentially Communal Dimension of Christian Faith in Spe Salvi”
Concurrent Session 3 (Ruane LL05)
- Dylan Belton, “Ecstatic Embodiment: A Thomistic Perspective on Friendship”
- Thomas Clemmons, “Augustine on Friendship”
- Rick Moore, “Augustine on the Possibility of Friendship and Hope in a Mediated World”
