The APRIL Summer Colloquium has been offered for over thirty years. Below please find a sampling of the past few years’ focus.
Past Colloquia
APRIL Summer Colloquium Recent Themes
In 2022, we look at issues of repair after the trauma and harm of multiple oppressions. This includes a focus on restorative justice; the criminal justice system; reparations regarding slavery and native genocide and land theft; repair of the earth in the face of environmental racism; distributive justice around economic inequality and work for equity; and other modes of oppression.
2020-2021 – Canceled due to the Covid pandemic
2019 – Reproductive Justice
The 2019 Colloquium theme drew on theology, ethics, and religious studies that work to shift the cultural frame away from the punitive frame of justification and toward a liberative frame of reproductive justice.
2018 – Gender, Transgender and Other Transitions
2017 – Reformations: Past, Present and Future
The 2017 topic was suggested by the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, while projects focused on the broader theme of reformation and transformation within political, social, cultural, artistic or personal spheres.
2016 – Climate Change, Food, and Human Sustainability
While the 2016 theme was sufficiently broad to include a wide variety of topics, we were particularly interested in projects that connect with what Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si: On Care of our Common Home, called “integral ecology.” This begins with the recognition that humanity now faces an existential crisis on multiple fronts: extreme economic disparity, increased competition for resources including land and water, a severely degraded natural world, failing nation states, and a climate on the verge of spinning out of control.
2015 – Mission and Media: Shaping the Beloved Community
In 2015, we invited applications from scholars and writers, artists and activists, as well as those involved in the not-for-profit sector, who were interested in faith-rooted work shaping a more just and peaceful world and are eager to explore ways and means of enhancing their impact and extending their reach through use of various traditional and social media.