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 2024 National Conference opens in April or May.
2024 CONFERENCE DETAILS
Hearts & Minds
Undergraduate Spiritual and Intellectual Development at Lilly Network Institutions
Westmont College Santa Barbara, CA
September 27-29, 2024
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
RECENT CONFERENCES
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