Through a Glass Darkly Symposium
Through a Glass Darkly
The 2024 Symposium will be held on 8 October 2024.
Through a Glass Darkly Symposium
Through a Glass Darkly IX: "Alternative Endings" – An Eco-Workshop
Tuesday 8 October, 9:00am to 2:30pm
Human activity is responsible for the current environmental crisis. But what is implied or lost by calling it an environmental apocalypse, a label that is ubiquitous in both popular culture and the academy? Construing a modern scientific problem and social issue in terms of an ancient theological worldview freights assumptions that inhibit realistic solutions. For example, the worldview's radical alterity casts the Earth as the ultimate Other, something of no true value that is destined to be destroyed with the new creation. Likewise, the eschatological horizon of the worldview presumes that history is finite and the future is unchangeable, while the expectation for supernatural salvation limits the ability of humans to solve problems for themselves.
It is time to autopsy the toxic influence of apocalyptic thinking on crisis modelling and to explore alternative concepts of ends and endings (e.g., non-Abrahamic religions, indigenous spiritualities, and non-religious systems). This preliminary workshop offers an informal and open-ended discussion on methods, approaches, and ideas, in aid of larger and more structured events in the future. Colin McAllister, a mediaevalist and general editor of the Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature, will deliver a keynote lecture that revisits Lynn White's landmark article. "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" (1967).
About the Symposium
The study of humankind's fascination with the apocalyptic worldview is a vast field which has increased in interest over the last three decades with the approach and passing of the start of a new millennium. It is a subject that spans cultures, religions, time, and space, and one that resists easy categorical definition. In Through a Glass Darkly, scholars and artists gather each year to deliver presentations and engage in dialogue.
Through a Glass Darkly was founded in 2015 and is directed by Colin McAllister from the UCCS Department of Visual and Performing Arts. In 2018, Lorenzo DiTommaso of Concordia University Montréal joined as Co-Director. Through a Glass Darkly has been generously underwritten by the UCCS Humanities Program, the Heller Center for Arts & Humanities, the UCCS Department of Visual and Performing Arts, the UCCS Department of History, the UCCS Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life, the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University Montréal, and the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada / Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada.
