Keynote Speakers

Richard 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.

Mark I. 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.