The Common Good in our Common Home:
World Christianity, Earth Community, and the Realm of God
Christian communities have proclaimed God’s desire for the Reign of God in many ways, often with human unity as a constitutive element. The North American Academy of Ecumenists seeks paper proposals for its Fall conference, to be held at Princeton Theological Seminary from September 25–27, 2026 exploring the relationship of Christian unity to central theological, social, and ecological questions of our time.
In the patristic period, the church was sometimes conceived as the Oecumenica, the household of faith spanning the inhabited world. In taking on that name, the contemporary ecumenical movement seeks to restore communion between divided ecclesial communities. This oecumenica has been described as having three parts: the church, humanity, and creation. All of these are grounded in the idea of the common good of the people of God. We seek papers that engage with one or more of these ideas broadly and ask how Christians live into these realities or how scholars study them today.
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In the contemporary academy, studies of world Christianity have proliferated and changed how scholars have studied the church in the world. What new directions in understanding world Christianity should be centered in the field, or what visions and communities are being ignored? How do accounts of the church in the world shape our understanding of the common good of all people and the wellbeing of the earth? How do studies of the local and the global (to the extent that it can be studied) relate?
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Ecumenics seeks to understand unity and division. How are these visions of unity molded by and for political, social and cultural situations, and in relationship to ecological and communal realities? How do varieties of Christian nationalism limit the reach of God’s reign or connect it to particular states? What happens when Christians are formally united with each other in one church, but politically or socially divided from each other by legal or cultural realities? How have conversations about unity changed in response to history of change since the advent of the modern ecumenical movement?
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Ecotheology centers a global account of the common good, includes the good of other-than-human beings, and centers the systems and structures in which humans live. How can ecotheology contribute to understanding the Christian oecumenica? How can ecumenical theology contribute to (or impede) ecotheology? What can it learn from non-Christian traditions and knowledges, including Indigenous notions of “buen vivir“?
By June 15, 2026, please send a proposed paper abstract of 300–500 words by email to submissions@ecumenists.org, along with a current CV. Limited scholarships are available for students, religious, contingent faculty, and others of limited means. To apply for scholarship support, please include with your proposal a brief statement of financial need and other sources of funding available to you. Conference format will be hybrid, allowing for remote attendance of paper sessions. Registration will open in mid-summer.