Justice and Peace

2027 Call for Papers

Eileen Fagan, College of Mount St. Vincent

eileen.fagan@mountsaintvincent.edu

Nicholas Fagnant, Boston College (MA)

fagnant@bc.edu

The Justice and Peace section welcomes proposals for papers and panels on the theme of the convention, “Mary, Seat of Wisdom: Refuge and Rabble-Rouser.” Even where Mary is not at the center of your work, what does Marian theology bring into view for justice and peacemaking?

The connections between the convention theme and theological reflection on justice and peace can be explored in a variety of ways, including but not limited to the following:

• Scholarship on war, poverty, migration, incarceration, labor, and ecological devastation has long shaped the work of justice and peace. What possibilities and challenges arise when that work is set alongside Mary: as refuge, as rabble-rouser, as Seat of Wisdom?
• The Magnificat has been read as the church’s own song of liberation, announcing the scattering of the proud and the lifting of the lowly. What does it offer scholarship on economic inequality, political reversal, and the church’s own hearing of that song? What happens when the “Queen of Peace” speaks like a political revolutionary?
• Across much of the world, grief has functioned as political testimony among those who search for the disappeared, the imprisoned, and the killed. Where does Mary, who bore and raised her son under imperial occupation and accompanied him in his state-sanctioned death, enter that conversation?
• Survivors of human trafficking, sexual and physical abuse, gender-based violence, and forced displacement have claimed Mary as refuge. What does that claim mean, and what does it mean when she is invoked over people who have not claimed her?
• Popular devotion and academic theology often run on separate tracks. What is at stake in that distance? What stories, experiences, and apparitions of Mary exist at the margins of Roman Catholic theology as unseen or dismissed, condemned or forgotten?
• Historical and biographical scholarship has traced how faith shapes public action. How has Marian devotion formed the lives and ministries of figures like St. Óscar Romero, Servant of God Dorothy Day, Sr. Helen Prejean, CSJ, and others?
• Empires have used Mary to occupy and colonize, displace and domesticate. Yet, colonized and displaced communities have also found in her a place of resistance. How do postcolonial and decolonial scholarship engage a figure who has served conquest and resistance at once? What happens when Mary becomes a figure of contested belonging across national, ethnic, religious, or political boundaries?
• Questions of women’s authority, embodiment, and gender remain unsettled in the church. What do feminist, womanist, queer, and trans approaches find in Mary, whose virginity, pregnancy, and motherhood have been put to use both to liberate and to oppress?
• Movements for migrant justice, labor, and abolition invoke Mary, and so does the March for Life. What do theologians make of how Mary functions for on-the-ground, faith-inspired actions for justice that span the U.S. political spectrum
• Ecumenical and interreligious work for justice and peace continues across traditions. Among them are Muslim communities, for whom Mary is revered as the only woman named in the Qur’an. Where does she open new ground for understanding and reconciliation, and where does she serve as an obstacle?