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.

Michelangelo Frammartino is an Italian filmmaker renowned for his meditative, visually striking works that blur the line between fiction and documentary. Though his filmography is small, his work has been showcased and awarded at such prestigious festivals as Cannes and Venice, where Le Quattro Volte and Il Buco received international acclaim.

In addition to his roles as writer, director, and producer, Frammartino has also worked as an architect and currently teaches at IULM University in Milan, where he focuses on film direction and audiovisual art.

We are pleased to screen his 2010 critically acclaimed film Le Quattro Volte. The Guardian described Le Quattro Volte as an “extraordinary movie … a cinematic poem, a spiritual exploration of time and space [that is] designed to make us think and feel about the world around us and our place in it.” The New York Times critic A.O. Scott ended his review by observing that “you have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.” 

Frammartino has kindly agreed to join us by video link for a Q&A following the screening.