I’ll be participating in a workshop on ‘Hope in Turbulent Times’ on Friday 23 March, 11 am- 5 pm, in the Old Staff Common Room at Queen’s University Belfast. The workshop hopes to promote ‘constructive engagement and dialogue between secularists and religious believers, in order to imagine an alternative narrative for our day.’
The workshop is free and open to everyone. You can register here.
The workshop is organised around a book edited by Gerry O’Hanlon SJ, ‘A Dialogue of Hope: Critical Thinking for Critical Times.’
A description of the workshop is reproduced below:
We live in an Ireland, and a world, where conventional economic models have failed, politics is fractured, what it means to be human is contested, and opposition between secularists and believers is conducted like some kind of Punch-and-Judy show. The dominant narrative of our time is spent. What might replace it? A group of individuals, with expertise in different fields of Irish life, have come together to make a case for constructive engagement and dialogue between secularists and religious believers, in order to imagine an alternative narrative for our day.
This narrative, involving a more participatory democracy, would be in service of social and ecological justice and human flourishing. It is a narrative that would welcome input from secular sources and religious voices, from poor and rich people, from atheists and believers, from scientists and philosophers, from poets and theologians. This book is the fruit of their sharing and deliberations. It is their hope that they can contribute to a more widespread dialogue of hope that will champion an inclusive vision of society where all can flourish and feel at home.
A workshop based on the themes of the book will be held at Queens University Belfast on Friday 23rd March to further continue this important dialogue of and for hope in our turbulent times.
Workshop Schedule
11.15 am – Welcome – John Barry
11.30 am-12.30 pm: David Begg – Joint chapter (respondent Gladys Ganiel)
12.30 pm- 1.30 pm Dermot Lane – ‘Anthropology in the service of bridges to hope’ (Respondent – Gordon Ramsay)
1.30 pm-2.30 pm Lunch
2.30 pm – 3.30 pm Iseult Honohan – ‘Religious perspectives and the public sphere’ (Respondent –Tanya Jones).
3.30 pm- 4.30 pm Gerry O’Hanlon SJ – ‘A challenge to the churches’ (Respondent – Nichola Brady)
4.30pm – 5pm – Concluding Thoughts
‘The dominant narrative of our time is spent’. What is/was the ‘dominant narrative’?
Has an ‘alternative narrative’ been presented in the book, and is the workshop intended to comment on it?
Or, is the workshop intended to produce an ‘alternative narrative’?
The ‘description of the workshop’ is ambiguous.