Just this morning, I delivered a talk on “Pilgrimage, Migrancy, & Time According to Augustine of Hippo” at the Implicit Religion UK conference on “Time, Chaos, & Order.” The Implicit Religion project, hosted at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, is indebted to the life & work of Edward Bailey, who pioneered this unique methodology during the twentieth century.
My goal in this talk was to connect my previous work on Augustine’s philosophy of time (as distentio) with my more recent (& future) work on Augustine’s description of temporal experience in terms of peregrinatio (traditionally translated as ‘pilgrimage,’ but better translated — at least in my view — as ‘migrancy’ or something closer to the experience of actual refugees).
Here’s a brief snapshot of the opening of my talk:
Overall, I’d say this conference has been quite a success. Not only has Francis Stewart brought together scholars from diverse fields (Philosophy, Sociology, History, Economics) to discuss religion & the secular (& the spaces in between); Stewart has also done well to foreground the work of students through generative “scratch sessions” that amplify the voices of burgeoning scholars. It’s been a wonderful event.