Conferences and Papers

Two recent calls for papers piqued my interest. I’ve submitted abstracts to both and will share them here. While I don’t yet know if they will be accepted, I intend to write the essays regardless and potentially submit them to a journal or magazine.

Call for Papers: Notre Dame Conference

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture’s 25th Fall Conference, titled “That which I Also Received: Living Tradition,” will focus on St. John Henry Newman, who famously asserted in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that it is sometimes necessary for an idea to change with new contexts and situations precisely in order to remain the same. “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often,” he wrote. This posture is both retrospective and forward-looking, suggesting that the rich heritage of the past can be faithfully reinterpreted by each new generation.

The conference will explore how living tradition—whether dogmatic, religious, literary, artistic, legal, interpretive, or cultural—bridges past and future.

Here’s my proposed contribution.

Title: That Which Hutton Also Received: Newman’s Epistemology and the Science-Religion Conflict:

Abstract:

The 19th-century “conflict thesis” framed science and religion as irreconcilable, but Richard Holt Hutton, editor of The Spectator and a perceptive theologian, recognized that figures like Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer were not merely defending science—they were advancing a rival theology of materialist metaphysics. This essay argues that John Henry Newman’s thought was foundational to Hutton’s critique. Newman’s work provided Hutton with the conceptual tools to expose scientific naturalism’s hidden dogmas, particularly its unexamined assumptions about nature, progress, and the limits of knowledge.

Hutton’s writings—especially his Spectator essays and Essays on Some of the Modern Guides of English Thought (1887)—demonstrate how Newman’s epistemology shaped his approach. Where Newman dissected the interplay of reason, conscience, and implicit belief, Hutton applied these insights to reveal how scientific naturalists relied on moral and imaginative commitments, even as they claimed neutrality. Newman’s influence enabled Hutton to move beyond the “conflict” paradigm, reframing the debate as a clash of competing theologies rather than science versus superstition.

This essay also highlights the enduring relevance of Hutton’s Newman-inspired perspective. By recovering his critique, we gain a model for today’s science-religion debates—one that rejects reductive oppositions in favor of a deeper examination of the philosophical and theological frameworks underlying both disciplines.

Call for Papers: Theology/Religion of LOST

Few commercial television series have had as lasting an impact on audiences as LOST, which aired from 2004 to 2010 and is still available on streaming services. Initially presented as a mystery/action drama following a plane crash in the South Pacific, LOST quickly evolved into a meditation on existential and theological questions: faith versus reason, science versus religion, the nature of time, the possibility of redemption, and the search for meaning in a seemingly chaotic universe. The series explores the tension between order and chaos, divine presence and absence, and the nature of suffering and grace.

Our call for papers welcomes submissions that explore the religious and theological dimensions of LOST from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including Christian, Buddhist, and indigenous spiritual traditions, as well as feminist, ecological, and comparative theological frameworks.

Here’s my proposed contribution.

Title: From Eden to Eschaton: LOST and the Quest for Human Meaning in Suffering

Abstract:

LOST is more than a narrative of castaways on a mysterious island; it is a theological parable that uses biblical and religious motifs to explore the contours of human nature, suffering, and redemption. By weaving together Christian, Buddhist, and indigenous spiritual frameworks, Damon Lindelof constructs a comparative theological landscape where characters struggle to discern the meaning of suffering in a world that oscillates between fate and free will, chaos and order.

This paper examines how LOST employs the biblical arc of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and New Creation as a narrative structure that reflects broader religious questions about human nature and destiny. The island functions as a liminal space, a purgatorial Eden where characters like John Locke, Jack Shephard, and Ben Linus are confronted with existential crises reminiscent of the trials of Job and the disillusionments of Ecclesiastes. Their struggles evoke a deeper theological anthropology, positioning the human person as a pilgrim suspended between the terrestrial and the transcendent, the rational and the mystical.

In the final season, as characters move toward their eschatological convergence, the presence of Flannery O’Connor’s work gestures toward the deeper mystery that underpins the series. Like O’Connor’s fiction, LOST employs suffering as a grotesque yet redemptive force, where grace intrudes violently and unexpectedly, unsettling characters and compelling them to reckon with the convergence of time and eternity. Through the lens of theological anthropology, LOST ultimately gestures toward an eschatological vision of human existence, where redemption remains elusive yet possible, and where suffering, far from being a mere obstacle, becomes the necessary path toward spiritual awakening.