22nd ISRLC Biennial Conference

University of Stirling, Scotland

September 10-13, 2026

Keynote Speakers:

Richard Kearney and Mayra Rivera

Ruptures abound. Across the globe, established orders have been split apart; norms have been torn asunder. Complex and hard-won institutional bodies long thought stable – governments and civic systems; international organisations, agreements and alliances – have been stress-tested beyond their limits, their fractures and frailty newly exposed. Such ruptures can both liberate and destroy. They can offer overdue reckonings, openings through which long-silenced voices can assert themselves. And yet they can also have devastating consequences, leading to terror, wars and possible war crimes (as seen in Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia; as seen with the Uyghurs and Rohingya), ecological disasters (as seen in the increasing climate crises), individual and collective traumas (as seen in the growing rates of mental illness, political polarization, economic crises, social [media] breakdown).

The 22nd biennial ISRLC conference aims to bear witness to this complex climate of upheaval and rupturing. As we consider the fault lines along which these ruptures take place, we want to ask where our interdisciplinary work across religion, theology, literature, the arts and culture can both probe and suture the splits and fractures we have become witness to. How might our scholarship render or facilitate these opposing moves, or discern when one is more appropriate than the other? “O body / always healing despite me”, writes the poet Kemi Alabi: how might our research, our teaching, our creativity, disrupt the ruptures?

In confronting our contemporary crisis of a riven world order, we confront the question of how to recapture our fundamental interconnectedness with each other and with the other-than-human. Amid the dismantling of social contracts once deemed untouchable, amid a continuing disregard for how we responsibly interact with nature and our environment, how might we revive what much religious sensibility has sought for: a heightened sense of connected bodies – individual, communal, institutional, planetary? In Catherine Keller’s words, how might we “seek to perform the entanglement of our differences: to activate entanglement as solidarity” (Intercarnations, 199)?

And how do we balance such entanglement with ruptures of critique – ruptures that break apart not only the status quo but also authoritarian and autocratic forces? Can we open up further space for minor ruptures of resistance in daily rhetoric and human exchange, for voices of ethical critique that rupture the engines of crisis?  Can we provide critical language that challenges the increasing forces of disconnection and inspires us to imagine or create new forms of contact? In continuity with our 2024 conference, Judith Butler’s words of decades ago seem more relevant than ever:

If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism, and cultural criticism has a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense. (Precarious Life, 2004, 151)

_______________

The 2026 conference and its many panels invite contributions from all traditions and from all corners of the globe – with interdisciplinary and creative approaches especially encouraged – that touch upon this theme of rupture and dis-rupture, keeping in mind Yeats’ words: “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent”.