Past Colloquia

The APRIL Summer Colloquium has been offered for over thirty years. Below please find a sampling of the past few years’ focus.

APRIL Summer Colloquium Recent Themes

2023 – Memory

A cohort of ten community organizers, academics, and artists met in NYC for two weeks, working on and discussing projects related to memory. From the contested spaces of memorials and monuments to literary memoirs to ancestral heritage, memory enables a human sense of identity, belonging, and exclusion, as our relationships with our personal and public pasts are negotiated, discussed, rewritten, and disputed.

2022 – Oppressions and Repair

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

The 2018 cohort examined gender and all its fluidity. Some of the research was compiled in a special issue of CrossCurrents.

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.