Canadian Theological Society

Category: Announcements

  • 2010 CTS Student Essay Contest

    Canadian Theological Society / Société théologique canadienne

    Student Essay Contest

    Subject: “Connected Understanding” or another topic in theology

    Eligibility: any Canadian student currently registered in a university or theological college, in Canada or elsewhere, or any other student registered in a Canadian university or theological college

    Length: 20 pages, typed and double spaced (5,000 words)

    Due Date: February 5, 2010 (by e-mail only)

    Essays need not be written originally for this contest and may be assignments from a course in theology or religious studies. The topic, however, must be theological in nature. This year’s theme allows for exploration of, for example, theology and globalization, the relation of theology to other disciplines, or the relation of Christianity to other religions.

    A letter or e-mail from a member of the theological or religious studies department to which the student belongs, indicating that the student is registered and in good standing with the university or college, must also be submitted for each applicant.

    The author of the winning essay will receive a $100 student prize; an invitation to read the paper at the annual meeting of the Canadian Theological Society at Concordia University, Montreal, 31 May-2 June 2010; payment of conference registration and accommodation costs; and a subvention towards travel costs.

    Send essays by e-mail by February 5, 2010 to Lee Cormie at lee.cormie@utoronto.ca

    Please include with your submission: institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone number(s), and e-mail address. Submission via e-mail attachment in Microsoft Word is preferred.

    Send letters verifying a student’s registration in a theological college or university to the above e-mail address, or by mail to Lee Cormie, Faculty of Theology, St. Michael’s College, 81 St. Mary St., Toronto, ON  M5S 1J4

  • CETA Call for Papers: 2010 Congress

    Call for Papers:

    Canadian Evangelical Theological Association

    Annual Meeting

    Concordia University, Montréal

    May 30, 2010

    The Executive of the Canadian Evangelical Theological Association (CETA) welcomes proposals for papers to be presented at the May 30, 2010 Annual Meeting to be held in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Concordia University in Montréal.

    CETA encourages submission of high quality papers on any topic of theological relevance to Canadian Evangelicalism. The theme for this year’s Congress is Connected Understanding (www.congress2010.ca). Papers which address this theme in relation to Canadian Evangelicalism are encouraged.

    Papers should be scholarly but not highly specialized presentations aimed at an audience of scholars from across the spectrum of theological disciplines, including biblical studies and historical, systematic, moral and pastoral theology. Proposals from graduate students are welcome.

    Proposals should be approximately 250 words in length and should be accompanied by a short CV. To facilitate anonymous review of proposals, please include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information on a separate page from your paper proposal.  All proposals should be submitted electronically to the address below in either Word or PDF format by February 15, 2010. Please entitle your email “CETA 2010 Paper Proposal.” Papers chosen for participation will be notified by March 5, 2010.

    Email all conference paper proposals to:

    Dr. Jeffrey McPherson
    President, Canadian Evangelical Theological Association
    jeffrey.mcpherson@taylor-edu.ca

  • 2010 Call for Papers / Appel de Communications

    Annual Meeting
    Concordia University, Montréal
    May 31st to June 2nd, 2010
    Connected Understanding

    The 2010 Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences theme of “connected understanding” invites an exploration of the impact of digital technology on scholarly research and research-creation, the links that scholars make with their colleagues in other fields and with larger audiences beyond the academic world. Theological reflections on this theme may include topics such as:

    • the synergies of interdisciplinary work in theology (with bioengineering, cosmology, ecology, epidemiology, genetics, nanoscience, neuropsychology, political science, popular culture, literature, etc.)
    • engagements between theological doctrine and preaching
    • digital technology’s influence on church and theological scholarly practice
    • public theology and a multi-faith, intercultural society
    • engagements with theologies of the global south
    • ministry in unconventional settings

    While we invite you to submit proposals on any theological subject, we encourage you to consider topics which relate to this theme.

    See the complete 2010 Call for Papers.


    Congrès annuel
    Université Concordia, Montréal
    du 21 mai au 2 juin 2010
    Le savoir branché

    Le thème du Congrès des sciences humaines 2010 évoque l’impact croissant de la technologie numérique sur la recherche et sur la recherche-création.  Il renvoie aussi aux liens que les chercheurs créent avec des confrères travaillant dans d’autres domaines et avec le public au-delà du milieu universitaire.  La réflexion théologique sur ce thème peut inclure des sujets tels que :

    • la réflexion théologique interdisciplinaire (en lien avec le génie biologique, la cosmologie, l’écologie, l’épidémiologie, la génétique, les nanosciences, la neuropsychologie, les sciences politiques, la culture populaire, la littérature)
    • les relations  entre la doctrine théologique et le sermon
    • les effets des technologies numériques sur les communautés religieuses et la réflexion théologique
    • la théologie publique et une société multiconfessionnelle et multiculturelle
    • l’engagement avec des théologies de l’hémisphère  sud
    • le ministère dans les lieux non-traditionnels

    Bien que nous vous invitons à soumettre des propositions sur n’importe quel sujet théologique, nous vous encourageons à considérer des sujets reliés à ce thème.

    Voir l’appel de communications pour Congrés 2010.

  • New CTS website and email list

    Well, if you have found yourself to this point, you already know that the CTS has a new website and web address. At the AGM in May, it was announced that the CTS would be establishing its own website at a new web address. The purpose of the change is to enhance communication with CTS members, and to make CTS more visible to the wider academic community. For many years the CTS webpages have been hosted by the CCSR, and we appreciate the opportunity that this represented. However, with our pages buried within the CCSR and other society pages, many search engines and indexes did not give prominence to the CTS. In addition, the CCSR site did not provide many of the technical opportunities available on many websites today.

    The new domain name of the website is CTS-STC.CA. This is intended to be a bilingual address. At this point in time, there is very little French material on this website, but we hope that it will be possible to increase the francophone participation in the CTS and that a volunteer might be found who can translate the existing pages and help us develop new content.

    In addition to the website, there is another opportunity made possible by the new domain name. We now have an email listserv. This is an automated email distribution system. This will allow the CTS executive to communicate with the list members quickly and effectively.

    • Subscription to the email list is currently open to the public, it is not restricted to CTS members
    • This is not a discussion list. The list is intended only for the distribution of CTS- and Congress-related announcements. The CTS Facebook group is available for some discussion
    • There is a list archive in case you misplace an announcement
    • To avoid spam, the list requires subscribers to reply to a “confirmation email” before their subscription is activated
    • The automated list allows subscribers to revise their subscription details (email address, name, html or text, etc…)
    • The webmaster can assist with changing subscription details
    • Our existing list of CTS members has been automatically subscribed to the new list

    To add, edit, or cancel your subscription to the email list, please visit http://cts-stc.ca/email-list or email webmaster@cts-stc.ca

    Finally, one other feature of the website is the new RSS feed. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a means of distributing new website postings, such as this one. By subscribing to the RSS feed with an RSS reader or aggregator, you will be notified as soon as a new post is added to the CTS website.

  • Call for Papers: TST 40th Anniversary Conference

    Ecumenism and the Challenge of Pluralism: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

    May 7-8, 2010

    In May, 2010, North America’s largest ecumenical consortium of theological colleges will be hosting a conference celebrating 40 years of preparing people for ministry and academic theology around the world.  The general theme of this conference is to reflect on the ecumenical calling of the Toronto School of Theology and its calling to train and equip men and women in Christian leadership within a world of almost innumerable and often competing claims.  The Christian faith itself is also comprised of numerous and dissonant communities, each claiming to be participants in the one Church.

    A keynote address will be delivered by Dr. John McGukin, a professor at Union Theological Seminary who was installed as the first Ane Marie and Bent Emil Nielsen Professor in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History in 2008. He is a Stavrophore priest of the Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Romania) who came to New York from England in 1997 where he was formerly a Reader in Patristic and Byzantine Theology at the University of Leeds.  He has authored numerous books, including St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (2000; Nominated for the 2002 Pollock Biography Prize).  In 2005, Prof. McGuckin was invited onto BBC Radio Belfast for a Public Radio discussion on the meaning of salvation in contemporary thought and life. He is also currently working with Co-Director Norris Chumley on a feature film about monastic prayer life, entitled: ‘Sophia Secret Wisdom.’ In 2007 he was on site filming extensively in Sinai, the Egyptian desert, and the monasteries of Transylvania.

    We seek proposals from a wide variety of fields that can speak to this issue and its relation to Christianity, including but not limited to systematic theology, philosophy, biblical studies, history, ethics and pastoral theology.

    Proposals should be 300 – 500 words and include your name, the title of the paper and your college/university affiliation.  Proposals are due October 30, 2009.  Please send to conference@adsa.ca.

  • Free Book: The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study

    Joseph Martos, author of Doors to the Sacred: A History of Sacraments in the Catholic Church, invites all members of the CTS with a professional interest in sacraments or liturgy, to write to him for a complimentary copy of his forthcoming book, The Sacraments: An Interdisciplinary and Interactive Study, which will be published by Liturgical Press this summer. Please write to him at JMartos@Bellarmine.edu and put the words “Free book” in the subject line.

  • Announcing the Annual Jay Newman Memorial Lecture in the Philosophy of Religion

    Professor Jay Newman

    Professor Jay Newman

    Jay Newman was a former president and long time member of CTS. He was a prominent Canadian scholar with a keen interest in the philosophy of religion. He authored eleven books, seven relating to religion or the religious life. He was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Guelph from 1971 until his death on June 17, 2007. Professor Newman left a bequest to CTS for the purpose of endowing an annual lecture in the Philosophy of Religion. It is his generosity that enables us to launch this annual lecture this year.

    We welcome Professor John Schellenberg to give the 2009 inaugural lecture. John Schellenberg holds an Oxford D.Phil. His first book is the well known Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason. He has just finished a trilogy on the philosophy of religion: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion (2005), The Wisdom to Doubt: a Justification of Religious Skepticism (2007), The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion (2009).

    Dr. Schellenberg’s lecture, entitled “Philosophy of Religion: A State of the Subject Report“, will address why philosophy of religion today is so often theologically conservative — the resulting demarcation problem — how both religious and philosophical assumptions are hindering insight in contemporary philosophy of religion — how the resolution of these problems is likely to favour non-conservative rather than conservative theology. The lecture will be given as part of the Annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on Tuesday, May 26th at 11:25 am in the Herzberg Building, room 4351, at Carleton University. For further details, see the complete CTS 2009 program.

  • 2008 Note from the CTS President

    Dear Members of CTS:

    Welcome to new members, and greetings to all.

    Next year’s meeting of the CTS is June 2-4 in Vancouver. The theme of the 2008 Congress is

    Thinking Beyond Borders: Global Ideas; Global Values
    Penser sans Frontières: Idées Mondiales; Valeurs Mondiales.

    Please post the attached Call for Papers and consider papers and or panels which you would like to propose on the theme or other areas of interest. Although the deadline for proposals is January 11, 2008, I would encourage the membership to begin consideration of possible panels now. I would particularly encourage creative formats for proposals, which may require extra time to prepare. Might we explore together alternative pedagogical styles and theories? Joint sessions with our partner societies, such as CSSR, CSBS, CSCH, and CSPS are also strongly encouraged.

    The CTS Executive would like to decide on a speaker for our joint lecture in 2010 as the Congress meets at Concordia. We invite you to consider possible speakers that will appeal to our partner members of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies, the Canadian Society of Church History and the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies. In the past we have hosted such renowned scholars as Larry Rasmusssen and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz. Please send suggested names to us by the end of August so that we may begin initial contact and confirm the speaker’s availability.

    I’m looking forward to serving you this year as President of the CTS.

    Shalom,
    Loraine MacKenzie Shepherd