The Monthly Roundup
A recap of June 2024 from Kait Dugan
This June has been quite a month for the Center for Barth Studies! Two weeks ago, the center hosted the 2024 Barth Graduate Student Colloquium, and it was a lively and constructive three days of rich conversation. Participants traveled from across the United States and various other countries to attend the colloquium, including India, Brazil, Scotland, Canada, and Hungary. Hearing participants critically and creatively engage Barth’s theology to probe their own questions for their own contexts reminded me of these words Barth wrote to Christians in Southeast Asia:
“Now it is your task to be Christian theologians in your new, different, and special situation. You truly do not need to become ‘European, Western men’, not to mention ‘Barthians’, in order to be good Christians and good theologians. In my life I have spoken many words. But now they are spoken. Now it is your turn.”1
These emerging scholars are carrying on the best of (and going beyond) Barth’s insights.
The week after the colloquium, the Barth Translators Seminar hosted their second translation meeting (of six) in Princeton through their second Scholarly Edition and Translations Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The center is currently translating the next three volumes from Barth’s The Lectures and Shorter Works of Karl Barth, 1922–1925, 1925–1930, and 1930–1933. Their meetings in Princeton always provide the opportunity for generative conversation and mutual encouragement for this massive translation project. Their next meeting will take place remotely on Zoom in January 2025.
And just yesterday, the seminary released news that Dr. Hanna Reichel, chair of the Barth Center's advisory committee, was promoted to Full Professor and Appointed to the Charles Hodge Chair of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Read the full announcement here. Our sincere and heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Reichel for this incredible achievement!
The Barth Center will be closed to visitors from July 27 through September 30 during my research leave in Switzerland this summer and our Harmut Rosa event on September 23–24. I look forward to seeing many of you again in Princeton this upcoming fall semester.
— Kait Dugan, Director
“Jewish and Christian theologies after Auschwitz”—one of the last speaking engagements of Prof Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024) in the UK. How to be Immortal Online. A hybrid conference on July 1 titled “Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in a Fragile World” organized by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies. “The Palace of Thundering Gods”—A Massively Collaborative Open History of Religion in the United States.
God Here and Now is an online magazine and newsletter from the Center for Barth Studies. If you would like to support our work, you can donate to the center here. All donations are tax-deductible. Questions? Ideas? Email us: barth.center@ptsem.edu
Karl Barth, “No Boring Theology,” South East Asia Journal of Theology 11 (Autumn 1969): 3.
