The Monthly Round-Up
A recap of June 2025 from Kait Dugan
It is hard to believe that the month of June is almost over! This month has been quite busy for the Barth Center. On June 12, the center hosted a day-long research seminar in the center’s reading room with five colleagues from the University of Basel—Prof. Dr. Georg Pfleiderer, Anne Nielsen, Julia Rau, Alexander Tontsch, Ruben Cadonau. On the Princeton side, we hosted Dr. Hanna Reichel, Maxine King, Reese Grosfeld, Yanan Melo, and Emily Pruszinski. This research seminar was part of the on-going research project funded by the Swiss National Fund through the University of Basel titled “Die Krise der Wirklichkeit. Zur Leistungskraft (post-)apokalyptischer Theologie in Zeiten kognitiv-existenzieller Unsicherheit am Beispiel Karl Barths.”
The following Sunday, we hosted the 2025 Karl Barth Conference titled “The Incarcerated God: Thinking with and beyond Barth on the Prison System,” which I have written about in depth a few times.
On Wednesday afternoon following the 2025 Barth conference, the Barth Translators Seminar held their June hybrid translation meeting at the seminary. The team is currently translating three volumes into English, Karl Barth’s Shorter Essays and Lectures, 1922–25, 1925–30, and 1930–33. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the center a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant in 2024 to fund this translation project.
In two weeks, I will be traveling to Switzerland to attend the 2025 International Karl Barth Conference on the theme of Christian hope in the time of crisis. The speakers include Matthias Wüthrich (University of Zürich), Hanna Reichel (Princeton Theological Seminary), Benedikt Friedrich (University of Heidelberg), Ralf Frisch (Evangelische Hochschule Nürnberg), Philip G. Ziegler (University of Aberdeen), and Günter Thomas (University of Bochum). I am looking forward to a few days of rich discussion.
There is much to look forward to for the rest of the summer. I am excited to take some time to begin planning some new projects and events. But in the midst of a busy few last months at the center and everything happening in the world right now, I am also grateful to get some time this summer to slow down and rest. Please remember to take good care of yourself and others in these most unpredictable times. See you next month!
📝 May and June Highlights
Christocentric Concreteness versus the Religion of Empire
"By dividing Christ from those crucified with Him, Christianity becomes a religion of Empire, one complicit in its atrocities, one that ignores the afflicted and whitewashes the physical reality of Golgotha: colonial subjugation, brutality, and death. It is a division that should have every self-described person of faith asking themselves where they stand: in the center with Jesus Christ, or the machinations that put Him to death."
Toward a Theology of Rebellion
In the very “disorder” against which police forces were arming and fortifying themselves, Cone heard in the “language” of the riots a sacred and liberative content. “It was like a revelation, a sudden bolt from the blue, a fire burning inside me,” he writes in his memoir. Drawing on language from Paul Tillich’s theology, Cone asserts that the uprisings, far from pathologic disorder, is the “affirmation of [black people’s] being despite the ever-present possibility of death.” And in this rebellious affirmation of being “in the midst of nonbeing,” Cone heard not simply a “language of the unheard,” but the gospel itself: “Black Power is the gospel of Jesus in America today!”
On Falling in Love with ChatGPT
When technology is turned to as a form of redemption from the messy particularities and limits of real humanity, whether in AI relationships or pornography, humans misplace their hope for salvation and deliverance and grow addicted to cheap substitutes for the real. The wound is both vertical—a misplaced hope for deliverance that only Jesus Christ provides; and horizontal—a loss of skills and vocabulary to live well within real human limits and experiences.
📚 New Books
Can a Feminist Say the Nicene Creed? ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution. The 2026 Scottish Dogmatics Conference, “The God Who Speaks” will take place at St. Andrews next June. Learning humility as a student pastor. Whistle-Blower Jennifer Lyell Who Ignited Sexual Abuse Reckoning Among Southern Baptists Dies. The Southern Baptist Convention also voted this month to overturn same-sex marriage in the United States. US Roman Catholic bishops object to the treatment of migrants and challenging the president’s deportation agenda. The church cannot bless war. Why fascists fear ideas. “Political Eschatologies of Mismanaged Decline” (minute 3:09:00). America’s Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff.