November 1, 2021
Dear friends and colleagues:
I bring you greetings this overcast Winnipeg morning as I share with you the work of the Canadian Theological Society.
After much deliberation, the Executive has decided that it will not participate in the annual meeting of the Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences this year and will instead host an independent online conference. This decision was inspired by our experience last year in which the cost of registration with Congress seemed out of step with the kinds of goods it afforded. Further, our Program Chair was taxed with an inordinate amount of work to coordinate our conference with the CFHSS’s online platform. It seemed both more efficient and cost effective to try to host a conference on our own using the now-familiar Zoom platform.
This forum for our annual meeting will be much more reasonably priced for participants. We will charge a nominal fee ($12.50 for full-time members; $5.00 for students, retirees, and adjuncts) to cover such expenses as hiring a student during the annual meeting to oversee our social media communications. We hope that this affordable fee structure will make the conference more accessible to a wide variety of participants.
This year’s conference theme is “Remembering Trauma, Imagining Hope.” It was inspired by the recent discoveries of over 1300 unmarked graves at former Residential Schools. We hope that this conference will afford us the opportunity for critical dialogue about the churches’ responsibility in this and in other atrocities, to imagine a future beyond atrocity, and to think about the theological resources we have to sustain such hope.
The Equity, Dignity, and Justice Committee at the Canadian Theological Society continues to challenge our society to think through the multilayered nature of oppression and to seek to understand how our faith and practices continue to be corrupted by such forces. This year we look forward again to the Committee’s leadership in guiding our conversations toward such critical self-reflection.
The Executive also has as one of its goals this year to coordinate previous records of the Canadian Theological Society. If you have any old minutes or documents related to CTS, please forward them to me (j.barter@uwinnipeg.ca) or our Society’s secretary, Nick Oklovich (nolkovich@stmarkscollege.ca).
We also hope to offer you a time of reprieve from the difficult work of scholarship and the anxiety-inducing effects of this pandemic. Accordingly, this year’s Executive is currently thinking of creative ways to help to foster that wonderful sense of community that we enjoy when we are together, in spite of the fact that (regrettably) we are once again online.
Finally, I wish to thank you for your support and dedication to our Society. I believe that the insights of theologians are more needed than ever and am grateful for a lively scholarly society to steer us toward a future beyond these troubled and difficult times.
Wishing you good health and all happiness until we meet again,
Jane Barter, PhD
President, Canadian Theological Society
Professor, Department of Religion and Culture
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