Call for Papers

2025 Barth Conference: "The Incarcerated God"

Call for Papers

The 2025 Barth Conference titled “The Incarcerated God: Engaging with and beyond Barth on the Prison System” will bring together leading scholars, activists, theologians, and formerly and currently incarcerated students to think together about mass incarceration through the lens of Christian theology in conversation with the life and work of Karl Barth.

Barth was a person with a criminal record who also served as a volunteer prison chaplain for a decade of his life. Barth’s fundamental theological commitments confront us with the truth that the God worshipped, followed, and obeyed in Jesus Christ has a criminal record. This Christocentric specificity leads God's incarnate flesh into the heart of the Roman criminal justice system, where God publicly identifies Godself once and for all with those condemned as a threat to the property, law, and order of the state. Following Barth's fundamental theological commitment to probe the implications of God's incarnational identity with and for humanity in the concrete history and person of Jesus Christ, we come together to explore the theological and ethical implications that the only incarnate God is an incarcerated one.

We, therefore, invite critical and constructive theological reflection upon the implications of a God who works for the redemption of all creation as a condemned person in the company of and in identity with condemned persons. Possible themes include the ostensible purpose(s) of incarceration and carceral systems; restorative justice and how to repair social and interpersonal harm; criminal justice reform, and the abolition of prisons; the disparate impact on different ethnic, gender, and racial groups of policing, legal, and carceral systems in the United States; soteriologies, anthropologies, and theologies that can counter or support carceral systems, etc.

Many attending this conference will be religious and faith leaders in their communities and institutions. It is vital to interrogate the history of religious institutions and their relations to the carceral system and identify their often-unnoticed posture towards it. We intend to start discussions and courses of action that will continue long beyond the conference week, and we intentionally invite religious and faith leaders, activists, chaplains, educators with interest or experience teaching in prisons, and others whose work orbits in and around prisons to attend and to submit proposals alongside scholars in a wide variety of fields.

Abstracts not exceeding 300 words should be sent to barth.center@ptsem.edu no later than Monday, March 24, 2025. Papers should not exceed 3,000 words to be delivered in 20 minutes, with 10–15 minutes reserved for questions and discussion. Please separate your personal information, including your current professional or academic standing, from your submission to allow for anonymous review.

Accepted applicants will receive free registration and lodging.

The conference webpage and registration will be available in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more information!