Room Locations (Google Maps directions below)
DCC204 is on the 2nd floor of the Daphne Cockwell Health Sciences, 288 Church St.
ENG-LG06 and ENG-LG11 are located on the lower-ground floor of the George Vari Engineering Building, 245 Church Street
Carlton Cinema, 20 Carlton Street
Oakham Lounge, Thomas Lounge, and Margaret Laurence are all located in Oakham House, 55 Gould St.
JOR-440 is located on the fourth floor of Jorgensen Hall, 380 Victoria St.
Notice: Some slight changes may occur with the programming. We are hoping to have the finalized program available here next week, before the start of the conference. Please check back here prior to the conference to ensure correct timing and location of presentations.
Thursday, Oct. 16
10:00 AM - 12:15 PM | JOR-440
The Porosity and Weirdness of Temporality, Place, and the Unconscious
Moderator: Jasmine Frost (TMU)
Luca Di Maio (Toronto Metropolitan University), “Close Encounters of the Metapsychological Kind: Psychoanalysis and the Unexplained
Tristan Maclean (Toronto Metropolitan University), “The Porous City: On Sociality and Built Space”
Taher Hasoon (Toronto Metropolitan University), “From Enchantment to Disenchantment and Back: Ritual, Temporality & Intentional Ordering”
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM | Carlton Cinema
Special Conference Film Screening
Le Quattro Volte (Italy, 2010) - followed by Q&A with the director, Michelangelo Frammartino, via Zoom
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM | ENG-LG11
Keynote: Mark Wallace, “Can a Christian Worship Nature? A Field Guide to Christian Animism”
Friday, Oct. 17
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Phenomenological Options | Oakham Lounge
Donald Borrett (University of Toronto), “Two Notions of Reversibility in Merleau-Ponty and Two Routes to Re-enchanting the World”
Jeffrey McCurry (Duquesne University), “Constitutions of the World and Enchantments: Five Possibilities”
Session B — Levinasian Resources for Re-enchantment | Margaret Laurence Room
J.P. Farrell (Loyola Marymount University), “Thou Art Enchanting: A Phenomenology of Re-Enchantment”
Rachata Sasnanand (King’s College London) and Casey McKinney (Emory University), “Epstein’s Photogenie and the Other: Cinematic Epoché and the Ethics of Care”
10:30 AM - 11:00 AM — Break
11:00 AM - 1:15 PM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Re-thinking Re-enchantment | Oakham Lounge
Christina M. Gschwandtner (Fordham University), “Can Enchantment Be Recovered? A Critical Perspective”
Ethan Gettes (Fordham University), “Mourning the Earth with Adorno and Rose”
Michiel Meijer (University of Antwerp), “The Fragility of Reenchantment: Charles Taylor on Ethics and Ontology”
Session B — Contesting Disenchantment in the Academy and Science | Margaret Laurence Room
Brandon Vaidyanathan (Catholic University of America), “Science as a Source of Enchantment”
Nuzhat Khurshid (Seneca Polytechnic University), “Re-enchanting the Academy: Beyond the Secular Bias”
Mark Cauchi (York University), “Decolonization Requires Desecularization”
1:15 PM - 2:15 PM — Lunch
2:15 PM - 4:30 PM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Special Book Session — Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (2023) | Oakham Lounge
Patrick Curry (Former UK Lecturer; Author of many books, including on reenchantment | London), “Enchantment, Art, and the Prospects for Re-Enchantment”
J.F. Martel (Author, Public Intellectual | Ottawa), “Where I End and You Begin: Time, Enchantment, and Mystery”
Session B — Re-awakening Perception | Margaret Laurence Room
Nicholas Case (Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas), “Not a Return but a Reawakening: Phenomenology, Enframing, and the Sacred”
Yiftach Fehige (University of Toronto), “Reenchanting Presence: Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology and the Return of the Felt World”
Carlos Alberto Rosas-Jiménez (McMaster University), “Wonder as the Foundation of a Holistic Worldview: Toward a Reenchantment of Reality”
4:30 PM - 4:45 PM — Break
4:45 PM - 6:15 PM — Parallel Sessions
Session A— Re-thinking Nature (A panel of the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience) | Oakham Lounge
Felix O’Murchadha (University of Galway), “Enchanting Polyphony: Agency and the Musicality of Natural Being”
Martin Nitsche (Czech Academy of Sciences), “The Phenomenology of Passage through the "New Wilderness" as a Way to Reenchanting the World”
Session B — Psychedelics | Margaret Laurence Room
Michael Kramer (Duquesne University), “(Re-)Enchantment of the World in the Manifestation of Soul: The Via Psychedelia within Phenomenological Philosophy”
Jim Vernon (York University), “High Magic: Western Esotericism as Alternative to Psychedelics”
6:15 PM - 8:00 PM — Dinner
8:00 PM - 9:30 PM | DCC204
Keynote: Richard Kearney, “Hosting Earth: Between Poiesis and Symbiosis”
Saturday, Oct. 18
9:00 AM - 11:15 AM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Cinema as Reenchantment | Oakham Lounge
Benjamin Goff (King’s College London), “Re-Enchanting Contingency: Past Lives (2023), Charles Taylor, and the Post-Secular Mood”
David Schwartz (Michigan State University), “A Pope Who Doubts: On Postsecular Cinema and the Anatheist Moment in Film”
Joseph Kickasola (Baylor University), “Film, Re-Enchantment, and the Dynamics of Attention and Imagination”
Session B — Contemplative Practices | Margaret Laurence Room
Jonathan Scruggs (Duquesne University), “Speech’s Other: On Silence and Re-Enchantment”
Ann Post (Toronto School of Theology), “Reading the Bible Through Rembrandt’s Eyes: An Arts-Based, Qualitative Study Utilizing Visio Divina and Visual Exegesis as a Catalyst for Spiritual Formation in a Parish Adult Christian Education Program”
Jake Benjamins (Institute for Christian Studies), “Reenchanting Parenthood: Contemplative Practices in Neoliberal Society”
Session C — Realisms, Reality and Art | ENG-LG06
Francesco Menichetti (University of Perugia), “The Ecstasy of Reality, Dis-closure and Adoration in Jean-Luc Nancy”
Harris Bechtol (Texas A&M University - San Antonio), “Whence an Event: On Caputo’s Evental Realism”
Isabel Ballan (Fordham University), “Finding Resonance in Art with Adorno and Rosa”
11:15 AM - 11:45 AM — Break
11:45 AM - 1:15 PM | ENG-LG06
Keynote: Patricia June Vickers, “Transformation and the Ancestors”
1:15 PM - 2:15 PM — Lunch
2:15 PM - 3:45 PM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Climate Change and the Overcoming of Disenchantment | Oakham Lounge
Theoren Tolsma (Fordham University), “Marx’s Structural Account of Alienation from Nature”
Nikolas Kompridis (Toronto Metropolitan University), “The Sublime, Reverence, and Catastrophic Climate Change”
Session B — Re-Enchantment in Literature 1 | Margaret Laurence Room
Cory Stockwell (University of Minnesota), “Desaturation and Enchantment in the Work of W. G. Sebald”
Fan Xu (University of Toronto), “Beyond Enlightenment, the Reenchanting Merit of Poetry as Redemption?”
3:45 PM - 4:15 PM — Break
4:15 PM - 5:45 PM — Parallel Sessions
Session A — Indigenous Resistance to Disenchantment | Oakham Lounge
Benjamin Strachan (Institute for Christian Studies), “Akinoomage: Resistance as Re-enchantment”
Jeordi Pierre (School of Indigenous Learning)
Session B — Re-Enchantment in Literature 2 | Margaret Laurence Room
Erik Brownrigg (York University), “Re-enchantment through the Literary Image: The Case of Bachelard and Saint-Exupéry”
Elena Pnevmonidou (University of Victoria), “Towards a Gothic Paradigm for Spiritual Ecology: Romantic Reenchantment of Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s “Rune Mountain” and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Mines of Falum"
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Abstracts and Bios (Keynotes and Special Speakers)
Kearney, Richard
Title: Hosting Earth: between Poiesis and Symbiosis
ABSTRACT: If the anthropocene has been an age of disenchantment, we are now in urgent need of a symbiocene of re-enchantment. Arguing for both a poetics of earth and a symbiotics of hospitality, this paper attempts to respond to the imminent dangers of our climate emergency.
Kearney is an Irish philosopher and the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He holds graduate degrees from McGill University, the National University of Ireland, and the University of Paris, and has taught at University College Dublin, the Sorbonne, and the University of Nice.
Kearney’s research spans European philosophy, literature, and hermeneutics, with a particular focus on ethics, imagination, and religion. He is the author of 27 books and has contributed widely to public discourse through appearances on ABC, CBC, and NPR.
His recent work on the phenomenology of touch explores how embodied experience and relational presence can help counter the disenchanted abstractions of modernity. This inquiry forms part of his broader effort to recover a sense of sacred immanence in philosophical and theological thought.
A member of the Royal Irish Academy, Kearney received the Research Ireland Medal in 2025 for distinguished international scholarship.
Wallace, Mark I.
Title: Can a Christian Worship Nature? A Field Guide to Christian Animism
ABSTRACT: Can a Christian show reverence for everyday sunshine, a grove of fruit trees, a river or a stream, or the atmosphere that surrounds us? Can a person of faith venerate all things as sacred beings in the manner of St. Francis who called these creatures Brother Sun, Mother Earth, Sister Water, and Brother Wind? Can a Christian, in a word, worship nature? Biblically speaking, it seems that paying obeisance to any living thing other than God is a form of idolatry. Yet insofar as the natural world is an extension of God’s creative love, and thereby filled with divine presence, it appears to be a good and fitting object of worship. Christian faith does not condemn the reverence of divine nature as long as such worship honors God’s preeminent presence in all things.
In this talk, I analyze nature worship as an exercise in Christian animism. In dialogue with Indigenous communities, pre-modern and today, animism envisions non-human nature as “ensouled” or “inspirited” with living, sacred presence (what Christians call the Holy Spirit). In this dialogue, my aim is to give new life to the central Gospel teaching that God became flesh and dwells among us. The essential grammar of Christian faith is both unitary and twofold: the heavenly and the earthly are one because divinity and all of created matter subsist together as one body, one substance, one flesh. Thus, in a certain manner of speaking, a Christian can worship the natural world just insofar as the eternal Godhead is carnally in-carn-ated – literally, made into meat – within the roots, bones, blood, feathers and visceral, vulnerable flesh of all created beings.
Wallace is an American philosopher and the James Hormel Chair of Social Sciences at Swarthmore College, where he is professor in the Department of Religion. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
Wallace’s research engages the intersection of theology, ecology, critical theory, and postcolonial thought. His work explores how religious traditions shape our ethical and imaginative relationships to the natural world.
His influential book, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-enchantment of the World, has become a widely discussed contribution to philosophical and theological efforts to rethink the sacredness of nature. The book has played a significant role in contemporary debates around reenchantment, offering a vision of Christianity that embraces the Earth as a site of divine presence.
In addition to his academic work, Wallace serves as core faculty for the U.S. State Department’s Institutes on Religious Pluralism at Temple University.
Vickers, Patricia June
Title: Transformation and the Ancestors
ABSTRACT
Ayaawx--Ts'msyen ancestral law–was given to us by the Creator. One of our sayings at a Potlatch (feast)—"Sagayt K'uulm Goot"—is translated as "All together as one Heart." Ancestral law aligns with the transformational teachings of Christ, the Master Shape Shifter. Land-based ancestral cleansing ways connect us with the Supernatural and couple with the transformational experience of sacred communion. This unification/connection was distorted by the co-founders of Indian Residential Schools. Expression of life experiences through the arts is an ancient way to communicate the transformational power of healing, reconciliation, and truth-telling and to connect us with the transformational teachings of Christ.
Vickers is a Ts’msyen visual artist and clinician at Raven's Claw Canada INC., offering mental health and trauma services with a focus on holistic, Indigenous healing. Vickers' research and work focus on the intersection of artistic, spiritual, and psychological healing.
Vickers' visual art has been displayed throughout Canada, including a 2023-4 exhibition at the Dal Schindell gallery of Regent College, entitled: Healing Journey: Art of Patricia June Vickers. Outlining a shared history of Indigenous and Christian thought, inherited from her respective parents, Vickers brings together the spiritual communality of these traditions. This dual perspective gives Vickers important insight into the inner workings of colonialism as a spiritual issue that requires a transformative solution.
Serving as an instructor in the Indigenous Studies Program at the Vancouver School of Theology, Vickers’ latest published work, Singing to the Darkness: Monologues and Meditations (2024), explores themes of trauma and healing through art, story, and song.
Pierre, Jeordi
Pierre is an Ojibwe Man of the Land and co-founder of the School of Indigenous Learning (S.O.I.L.), in Thunder Bay, ON. Pierre's work with S.O.I.L. emphasizes traditional, land-based Anishnaabeg practices, customs, and knowledge.
Attending to Anishnaabe language revitalization; land-based skills in hunting and medicine gathering; and traditional artistry; S.O.I.L. strives to bring about an environment for participants to learn and engage the Old Way of teaching.
Pierre has, additionally, served as Director of the Board for Negahneewin College of the Confederation College; a Member of the Indigenous Reference Group for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine; and President of the Thunder Bay Indian Friendship Centre.
An accomplished traditional dancer--recognized both nationally and internationally--Pierre has been featured on CBC, and in "The First Pow Wow in China," a video project, produced by the city of Thunder Bay, displaying ceremonial Canadian-Indigenous dances on the Great Wall of China.
Curry, Patrick
Title: “Art and Enchantment”
ABSTRACT
In this talk, I shall begin by devoting some time to answering the question, ‘What is enchantment?’, as well as what it is therefore not. We shall consider its essential characteristics and dynamics, including wonder, relationality, wildness, concrete magic, truth, and passingness, and the conditions that either favour enchantment or discourage it. Then we shall look at how these play out in art, specifically painting, music and fiction. In closing we shall think through the implications for any project of ‘re-enchanting the world’.
Curry is a Canadian-born writer and scholar who lives in London. He holds a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from University College London. He has been a Lecturer at the universities of Kent and Bath Spa. He is the author of Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, rev edn (2004), Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, rev. ed (2017), Enchantment: Wonder in Modern Life (2019) and most recently Art and Enchantment: How Wonder Works (2023). He is also Editor-in Chief of an online journal, The Ecological Citizen (http://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/) and a Companion of the Guild of St George. More information and some of his writings can be found on www.patrickcurry.co.uk
Martel, J.F.
Title: Where I End and You Begin: Time, Enchantment, and Mystery
ABSTRACT: The rhetoric of disenchantment signals a problem in our understanding of time. It evokes the image of a world that time has forgotten: a world fixed in a static eternity, devoid of the excess that opens onto imagined futures and undiscovered meanings. In conversation with Patrick Curry's reflections on art and enchantment, I will argue that
Henri Bergson's philosophy, with its reinvention of time as durée, suggests an enchantment as ambient and inescapable as gravity. Yet Bergson could only disclose the conditions of such enchantment; he could not make us feel it and live it. For that, we need art, which alone can occasion the encounter in which durée is lived and enchantment reveals itself as radical mystery.
Martel is a writer and lecturer on art, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, recently reissued by Basic Books with an introduction by the novelist Donna Tartt. With musicologist Phil Ford, Martel co-hosts the popular art and philosophy podcast Weird Studies. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.
Frammartino, Michelangelo
Frammartino is a critically acclaimed Italian filmmaker and visual artist whose work dwells at the intersection of cinema, landscape, and elemental life forms.
His debut feature, Il Dono (2003), established his minimalist and contemplative cinematic style. His second feature, Le Quattro Volte (2010), marked a significant turning point: it premiered at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, won the Europa Cinemas Label, and received international acclaim for its meditative blend of observational documentary, poetic realism, and cosmological reflection. The film’s quiet, four-part structure invites viewers into an experiential meditation on cycles of life and death, from human breath to animal movement, vegetal growth, and mineral rest.
Frammartino’s cinema is rooted in an aesthetics of attentiveness — often eschewing dialogue in favour of elemental soundscapes and patient observation — and it invites a renewed sense of wonder in the nonhuman world. His work is frequently cited as a contemporary example of cinematic re-enchantment, offering a spiritual, even metaphysical sensibility that reimagines our relation to nature, time, and the cosmos.
Alongside his filmmaking, he teaches directing and audiovisual practice at the University of Bergamo and IULM University in Milan, and has served as a mentor in various international film labs and workshops.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the generous funding and support of the Department of Philosophy, Toronto Metropolitan University, the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS), and Christian Courier.
We also thank our partners, the Society for the Phenomenology of Religious Experience (SoPheRe) and the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology (SCPT), for their help in planning the conference, especially with soliciting and reviewing papers.
We extend our sincere gratitude to the Office of the Provost at Toronto Metropolitan University for its financial support of this conference.
Jorgensen Hall, 380 Victoria St. East (JOR-440)
George Vari Engineering Building, 245 Church St. (ENG-LG06 and ENG-LG11 )
Oakham House, 55 Gould St. (Oakham Lounge, Thomas Lounge, and Margaret Laurence)
Daphne Cockwell Health Science, 288 Church St. (DCC204)
Carlton Cinema, 20 Carlton St.