Conferences

The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage offers a variety of conferences as platforms for the exposition and interchange of ideas by specialists in their own field.‌

  • Poets of Presence Conference

    In-Person Conference and Workshop
    October 27-28
    Loyola University Chicago
    Beane Hall, Lewis Towers, Water Tower Campus
    Keynote Speaker, Christian Wiman
    All aspects of the conference are solely in-person and registration information will be coming soon.
    This event is co-sponsored by Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.

  • 2022 Catholic Studies Symposium

    We were pleased to host the 2022 Catholic Studies Symposium was held at Loyola University Chicago from September 8, 2022 - September 10, 2022. This event welcomed over 50 national scholars, leaders, and directors of centers in Catholic Studies. You can learn more about the prompts for the symposium here.

  • Pope Francis, Vatican II, and the Way Forward

    Along with our friends at Boston College's Boisi Center and Fordham University's Center on Religion and Culture, the Hank Center was pleased to host “Pope Francis, Vatican II, and the Way Forward.” Over two days, a diverse group of conference attendees were provided a forum where bishops, academics, journalists, and others could speak frankly to each other about important issues affecting the Church today-- all of us working and praying together to carry forward the synodal vision of the Second Vatican Council in the pontificate of Pope Francis, and beyond. We were grateful for our time and conversations together, and grateful to our speakers for providing compelling insights and setting the stage for needed dialogue. The meeting was characterized at once as a living expression of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, a practicum in Catholic Social Teaching, and an example of the kind synodality to which the Holy Spirit calls us today. With the strong support of our respective Jesuit institutions, it was a privilege to organize this meeting, the fruits of which might be described in this shorthand: "unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials, charity in all things."

  • Catholic Conversion Narratives in Modern Aesthetics

    In collaboration with the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), the Hank Center was pleased to host this international and interdisciplinary conference exploring modern conversion narratives.
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    Andalusia in Andalucía: An International Conference on Flannery O'Connor

    Universidad Loyola Andalucía, in conjunction with the Hank Center, hosted a conference on the American writer Flannery O'Connor in Seville, Spain in June 2017.

  • Instant History: The Postwar Digital Humanities and their Legacies

    In 1949, Jesuit scholar Father Roberto Busa began to collaborate with IBM to build a massive lemmatized concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Our day-long conference explored several aspects of this legacy of Father Busa’s mid-century humanities computing, including the history of natural language processing and digital text processing, systems of textual markup and the creation of digital scholarly editions, topic modeling, and large-corpora analysis.

  • The Challenge of God: Continental Philosophy and the Catholic Intellectual Heritage

    The Hank Center was pleased to sponsor an international conference on the challenge of God. This three day conference featured keynote addresses from major figures in the disciplines of continental philosophy and Catholic thought, as well as paper presentations and panel discussions from junior and senior scholars in these fields.

  • The Third Annual Chicago Catholic Immigrants Conference: The Poles

    The third installation of the Hank Center's Chicago Catholic Immigrants Conference. In 2015, in conjunction with the Interdisciplinary Program in Polish Studies at Loyola University Chicago, the Hank Center looked at the Polish community in Chicago.

  • “this need to dance / this need to kneel”: The Poetry and Poetic Life of Denise Levertov

    In Fall 2015, the The Hank Center hosted an international conference devoted to the life and work of the poet Denise Levertov (1923-1997). “this need to dance / this need to kneel”: The Poetry and Poetic Life of Denise Levertov took place October 23-24, 2015 on Loyola's Water Tower Campus.

  • Chicago Catholic Immigrants Conference: The Mexicans

    In November 2014 Loyola University Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage (CCIH) launched the second in a series of conferences that focused on the historical, cultural, and religious roles that Roman Catholicism played in sustaining ethnic identity for many immigrant communities who came to Chicago in the 20th century. The 2014 Chicago Catholic Immigrants Conference focused on the the Mexican immigrant community here in Chicago.

  • Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014

    From 16-18 October 2014, the Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago hosted a conference marking the bicentennial of the Restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814.