In 2025, the Catholic University of Leuven celebrates its 600th jubilee. For this occasion, the XVth LEST-conference (Leuven Encounters in Systematic Theology) will address the challenges and opportunities for the future of the Catholic university. The conference is organised in collaboration with the Australian Catholic University. It will focus on the qualitative concept of catholicity in its plurality of forms and functions within the university.
The university: reconsidering its tasks and purpose
The university is an institution characterised by a specialisation of disciplines and a variety of methods. It is a ‘laboratory’ where arguments are advanced, experiments executed, histories explored, and conversations conducted. Sometimes this leads to surprising synergies and even syntheses, although a marriage of disciplines seems to be further out of sight than ever before. The university has become an organisation of research and instruction, shaped by interests, insights and values characteristic of ever more particular methods, theories, and political identities. It is therefore also an arena of intellectual and social power, where criteria of quality are applied and standards of accountability and purpose are set, and these are not always shared by the different branches of knowledge and fields of inquiry.
In a time of growing specialisation and pluralisation, one could conclude that the contemporary university is a multiversity: a convenient, mostly administrative collaboration between schools and research institutes, each having its own educational task and professional aim. Questions then remaining concern the nature and goal of learning and formation, and discovery and exploration. If the university is regarded a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community that searches for possibilities in the real, serves the public interest, and pre-pares for life in the future, then the question arises what the universitas of the university is: uniformity, universality, commonality, or something else?
Catholicity: thinking towards a qualitative wholeness
Catholic universities have formulated answers to this question in the past, and according to the task of the university, they should continually renegotiate these answers and reformulate new ones. The term ‘catholic’ could shape and inform these tasks. The etymological sense of the term ‘catholic’ is ‘according to the whole’ and refers to a quality of something being open to a wholeness that is greater than itself. It seems a good starting point for exploring the idea, function and task of the university, as a space of thinking together the particular and the common, the individual and the collective, and the self and the cosmos in a coordinated and dynamic, and mutually implicating way.
The history of catholicity in this sense, however, has frequently been one of instructive failures, most often privileging the universal over and at the expense of the particular, with the whole trumping the part. A solely and simplistically quantitative approach has not been the only or most fruitful way of thinking the term, despite being dominant in the popular imagination. In the patristic, medieval periods and again since the 19th century a more interesting theological family of qualitative or intensive senses can be perceived: these are understandings which emphasise the qualities of fullness, integrity, and wholeness, which fed into the serious broadening of ecumenical, interreligious, intercultural and secular encounter and dialogue following the Second Vatican Council.
Theology: reconfiguring its place in the university
Recent theological notions of catholicity, most notably in the ressourcement tradition, are marked by a heightened attention to alterity and different kinds of difference. As a consequence, catholicity has become an instrument for understanding the apophatic, conjectural, and future-oriented dynamic of fundamental relations, for example between reality and knowledge, God and the world, revelation and truth, faith and reason, and the Church and the churches. Can this nuanced, dynamic, and differentiated theological interpretation of catholicity serve as a model for understanding the complex synergy of the diverse branches of knowledge in the university, and their variety of relating to reality?
Theology has different positions and roles in universities worldwide. In some parts of the world, its confessional and traditional foundations are contested, while in other parts its search for understanding, wisdom and beliefs is valued and flourishing. In a multiversity of particularist identities and theories, theology could at best find its place in the margin of the academy and content itself with a supporting role of understanding meaning and life within specific religious traditions. In a university that seeks to reformulate the nature and purpose of formation and exploration, however, theology might well have to play a significant, lead-ing role in critically constructing and intermediating concepts employed in other academic disciplines, for example, the world, origin, nature, life, time, power, humanity, and so on. In a Catholic university, a theological expansion of catholicity could be instrumental to explain, not only what it means for a university to be distinctly, yet penultimately Catholic, but also what it means to be a university tout court, and thus be an example of a laboratory of culture, in pursuit of, and dedicated to the truth.
We welcome papers on the following subthemes:
- Theological and philosophical notions of catholicity
- Catholicity in ressourcement theology
- Realizing catholicity through diverse charisms: the contribution of the religious orders and congregations
- Qualitative catholicity and other concepts of the universal, fullness, or wholeness in academic disciplines
- Theological and philosophical reflections on the university
- The place of theology in the university
- The organisation of knowledge: from hegemonic wholes to fragmented silos, artificial intelligence, and beyond
- The role of unknowing and nescience in the academic disciplines
- Current debates on the Catholic university: contextual, political, and religious issues
- The role of power and identity in the university: dispute, debate, and dissent
- The purpose of education: faith, formation, and flourishing
- Papers of 20 minutes are invited on the conference theme
- Please submit abstracts via the registration form on the website of LEST XV: https://theo.kuleuven.be/en/lest/lest-xiv/proposal-form
- Deadline for submission is May 15, 2025
- A selection of the papers will be published after peer review.
