Conference Rewind

Here's a brief review of the Gradeur of Reason Conference.

Overall, it was pretty good.

First on the location: Rome is beautiful city with a captivating mixture of ancient history and modern life. It's not as easy to navigate as I hoped, but by the end of the week I was getting the hang of it. The people are usually friendly, but there was more of a language barrier than I anticipated. One tobacco shop tried to rip off my friend's parents who were buying bus tickets--twice! But, all in all it was an enjoyable city with good folks.

Second on the conference itself: There was an obvious diversity of people from places as close as Italy and as far away as the land down under. The papers were generally good, but there not much time for interaction, usually about 10 minutes. If there were less papers overall this would have helped. If you wanted to, you could see papers from 9am to 9pm with an hour break for lunch. (Of course, if there were less papers, I may not have had mine accepted!) Even in the plenary addresses panelists didn't interact much; more time for this would have been nice, especially for the O'Donovan, Hauerwas, and Milbank panel. Hauerwas's paper was fantastic, a wonderful mixture of humor, insight, depth of character, and clarity. Even if I disagree with him on some rather minor points, he undoubtedly overflows with wisdom and Christian virtue.

Nate Kerr and I had an interesting exchange at his paper where we both indirectly accused each other of being Donatist. We talked afterwards at dinner and had a good discussion. He's a great guy, and I look forward to more interaction with him in the future.

Third, on the Vatican: Apparently, all points on this planet are NOT equidistant from God. It's simply breath taking and gorgeous. Standing in the midst of millenia of Christian and human history is humbling and exciting. I didn't get to the museums or the Sistine Chapel. I also didn't get to the Pope's public audience for interesting reasons. There were only 75 tickets available to go, even though the conference originally ordered 150. We heard that the Vatican cut the number in half to avoid the appearance that they were trying to steal sheep from the Anglicans, given the recent Lambeth Conference and tensions in the Anglican Communion. So, the organizers had a lottery for the remaining tickets. Well, "lottery" is a generous description. It was obvious that the RO crowd and conference organizers were simply given tickets. I have no major objection to this, since it makes sense that those who put in a lot of work making the conference happen should get to go. My guess is that only 25-35 tickets were actually up for grabs; calling this a "lottery" is a little duplicitous.

Anyhow, all in all it was enjoyable, but would have been better if my wife was there with me, since she makes everything better!

Many Blessings,

Tim F.