Proposed GFCF Speakers for 2023-24 Academic Year: The purpose of the Forum is dialogue across disciplines, ideologies or philosophical persuasions. Dialogue on key issues brings one’s graduate experience to life. Come and meet new friends at GFCF, stimulating interlocutors that could last a whole lifetime.

We explore new ideas, insights and paradigms, featuring inspiring new research, publications and critical thought. We cooperate financially with other agencies such as Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation and Corpus Christi College at UBC. The philosophical foundations of the Forum include a broadly-based discursive, open-minded Christian theism, respecting the long history of tradition within the context of our pluralistic society. Our target audience is the senior members of the UBC research community: faculty members, postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Our proposal works in tandem with former UBC President Ono’s emphasis on ecumenical cooperation among Christian institutions and agencies—creating space for discussions about faith and culture.

1. February 14, 2024: Christopher Watkin, French Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.                          The Bible as a Tool for Changing Culture. 

Abstract: The question of the relationship between Christianity and culture increasingly takes centre stage in debates both within and outside the church today. This talk reflects on how a constructive, nuanced and–to many modern ears–fresh vision for contemporary society can be drawn from a rich engagement with the Bible’s storyline, guided by Augustine’s magisterial work City of God. What might it look like to reimagine Augustine’s mode of engagement with late Roman society in our own cultural moment of late modernity? 

Biography: Christopher Watkin (PhD, University of Cambridge) is senior lecturer in French studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a scholar with an international reputation in the area of modern and contemporary European thought, atheism, and the relationship between the Bible and philosophy. His published work runs the spectrum from academic monographs on contemporary philosophy to books written for general readers, both Christian and secular, and include Difficult Atheism, From Plato to Postmodernism; Great Thinkers: Jacques Derrida. His recent impressive 2022 tome with Zondervan Academic is Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture.

2. March 13, 2024, Abigail Favale, Professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Notre Dame University. Examining the Sources of Gender: Why Sexual Difference Matters.

Abstract: How do contemporary theories of gender compare to the understanding of gender in the Christian imagination? This talk will provide a sketch of two distinct paradigms–the “gender paradigm” and the “Genesis paradigm”–and bring those two frameworks into conversation with one another, highlighting points of consonance and dissonance between them.

Biography: Abigail Favale, Ph.D., is a professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. She has an academic background in gender studies and feminist theory, and writes regularly about these topics from a Catholic perspective. She is the author of The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory (Ignatius 2022) and Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion (Cascade 2018), as well as numerous essays and articles. Abigail’s essays and short stories have appeared in print and online for publications such as First Things, The Atlantic, Church Life, and Potomac Review. She was awarded the J.F. Powers Prize for short fiction in 2017.