The Lilly Network of Church-related Colleges and Universities holds its annual National Conference each fall on one of the Network’s member campuses. Representatives from the Network colleges and universities meet to consider a significant issue of faith and learning, exchange ideas and practices regarding their mission, and foster the whole range of Network programs and activities.
Registration for the 2025 National Conference will open in May 2025.
2025 CONFERENCE DETAILS
The Christian Imagination in Higher Education
The education students receive at church-related institutions encompasses all facets of their experiences both inside and outside the classroom. At the same time, these experiences move them beyond the printed and spoken word into a diverse array of media and arts that they increasingly consume and produce. In this digital age, the visual arts have gained prominence, as students increasingly find their world mediated by visual media and often describe themselves as visual learners.
How does the Christian imagination illuminate students’ experience of the arts? The plenary speakers will unpack the theology and spirituality of the arts and how they challenge us as scholars and teachers. The impact of the arts spans and pushes disciplinary boundaries, challenging us to think holistically about how our work fits into students’ broader lives on campus and beyond. Artistic endeavors raise questions about the common good and about the relationship between formal education and a lifetime of learning. These questions will flow into the group discussions and on-campus art experiences and performances during the conference.
Registration will open in May 2025.
This event is open to representatives from Lilly Network schools only.
October 31-November 2, 2025 Sacred Heart University Fairfield, Connecticut
Registration will open in May 2025
PLENARY SPEAKERS
Natalie Carnes, Ph.D.
Professor of Theology, Affililate Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the Baylor Initiative in Christianity and the Arts, Baylor University
Jonathan Anderson, Ph.D.
Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts, Regent College
Cecilia González-Andrieu, Ph.D.
Professor of Theology, Loyola Marymount University, and President-elect of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States
RECENT CONFERENCES
2024 CONFERENCE
Hearts & Minds: Undergraduate Spiritual and Intellectual Development at Lilly Network Institutions
September 27-29, 2024 Westmont College
Santa Barbara, California
Join us at Westmont College September 27-29, 2024 for "Hearts and Minds: Undergraduate Spiritual and Intellectual Development at Lilly Network Institutions," hosted by Westmont's Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts. The centerpiece of the conference will be a new study, commissioned by the Lilly Network and implemented by Springtide Research Institute, that investigates the intellectual-religious experience of undergraduates at Lilly member schools. Springtide's director, Tricia Bruce, will present findings from that study, Fuller Seminary's Steve Argue will provide additional framing about young-adult development, and a panel of religious-life professionals drawn from Lilly campuses will give a snapshot of what they've seen with their students.
PLENARY SPEAKERS
Steven Argue, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Youth, Family, and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and Applied Research Strategist at the Fuller Youth Institute
Tricia Bruce, Ph.D.
Director, Springtide Research Institute
2023 CONFERENCE
Contemplating Integral Ecology for the Common Good
October 20-22, 2023
Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
What is integral ecology, and how can it be oriented to the common good? How can faith-based liberal arts institutions of higher education train their students to be attentive to both natural and human ecology so as to contemplate and develop effective solutions to questions of ecology and sustainability? Hosted by Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a liberal arts college in the Catholic, Dominican tradition, this conference explored these questions from multiple perspectives, engaging the natural sciences, philosophy/theology, and the humanities/arts.
PLENARY SPEAKERS
Kerry Andrew Emanuel, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Meteorology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Marie I. George, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
St. John's University
Debra Rienstra, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Calvin University
2022 CONFERENCE
Implicit Racial Bias and the Academy
October 28-30, 2022
Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN
In his 2020 book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude writes extensively about what he calls “the lie” regarding race in the United States. “The lie,” he argues, “is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions . . . that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.”
In light of Glaude’s argument, this conference asked about implicit racial bias in the academy—how we organize the academy, how we think about knowledge, how we structure a curriculum, how we frame our disciplines, how we recruit and admit our students, how we do our scholarship, and how we teach.
Further, the academy is devoted to critical thinking, but to what extent is our ability to think critically about race also hampered by implicit racial bias?
Finally, the Christian gospel rejects racial bias, both explicit and implicit. How might church-related colleges and universities employ the gospel narrative to expose and undermine implicit racial bias on our campuses?
These are the questions that framed the 2022 Lilly Fellows Program National Conference.
PLENARY SPEAKERS
Eddie Glaude, Jr.
James S. McDonnell Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies, Princeton University
Tabitha Jones Jolivet
Associate Professor in the School of Behavioral and Applied Sciences, Azusa Pacific University
Forrest E. Harris, Sr.
President, American Baptist College and Professor/Director of the Kelly Miller Smith Institute on Black Church Studies at Vanderbilt University