News

On 10 May, Dr. Joshua Furnal was invited to visit Oslo University for a new strategic collaboration among theological faculties in the Guild network. Dr. Furnal represented Radboud University along with Internationalization Officer, Treja Wilkins.

On 22 March the Center for Catholic Studies will organise a conference on ‘Social Utopias’. In line with the research program of the Center for Catholic Studies, the conference will focus on the Christian tradition but, of course, it will also be open to contributions from other contexts and disciplines.The conference will be held in the Erasmus building, room 15.39-41.Attendance is free.Lectures will be given in German and English.To register please email: p.donders@ftr.ru.nl

In a recent op-ed for the Dutch daily newspaper Nederlands Dagblad, Prof. Christoph Hübenthal argues that when recent research in neuroscience reduces religious experience to a region of brain activity, it becomes nonsense and politically dangerous because we are more than our brains. The newspaper article comes from a recent debate at Radboud University.

Theology, Emotion, Politics On 19 February, Dr. Christiane Alpers (KU Eichstätt) will present a research paper on Erich Pryzwara's theology of emotions during the CCS Research Seminar. The title of Dr. Alpers' paper is An Ignatian response to populism: Erich Przywara‘s understanding of the discernment of spirits for a responsible integration of emotions into politics.

In a recent issue of Volzin, Dr. Elisabeth Hense was interviewed about sustainable gardening and agriculture.

On 1 November 2018, Prof. Stephan van Erp was appointed to the special chair ‘Edward Schillebeeckx’ at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He will remain full-time professor fundamental theology at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven.

In November, Dr. Joshua Furnal gave an invited lecture at an international conference hosted by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Malta. The topic of the conference was ‘Resilience in a Troubled World’, which gathered scholars together from Malta, Italy, USA, Ireland, South Africa, the Netherlands, Spain, Czechia, and Poland. The Templeton Prize Winner, Prof. Tomáš Halík (Charles University) gave a keynote lecture in the Caravaggio chapel of St. John’s co-Cathedral to start the conference.The title of Dr. Furnal’s paper was ‘Kierkegaard as a Theological Resource for Guardini’s Resilience in his Time and Ours’. In it he argued that Romano Guardini drew upon at least two aspects of Kierkegaard’s theology.

Dr. Elisabeth Hense received a subsidy from the Forschungsinstitut der Deutschen Provinz der Karmeliten for a German Edition of the private letters of Titus Brandsma to his family. The letters are stored in the family archive of Titus Brandsma located in “St. Archief- en Documentatiecentrum voor r.k. Friesland”. The German edition is a sister project connected to Dr. Hense’s larger English edition project on the collected works of Titus Brandsma.