Sexuality, Relationships, Marriage, and Family Life

2024 Call for Papers

Mary Gratton, Merion Mercy Academy (PA)

mary.gratton@gmail.com

Emma McDonald Kennedy, Villanova University (PA)

emma.kennedy@villanova.edu

 

This year’s conference theme, “Vulnerability and Flourishing,” invites us to consider how various and evolving kinds of vulnerabilities affect our families, intimate relationships, and kinship networks. Centering experiences of vulnerability along with possibilities of resilience and flourishing, this conference theme invites us to consider how theologies of sexuality, relationships, marriage, and family can contribute resources that respond to vulnerability to violence and abuse and support the flourishing of all of God’s creation. 

 

The Sexuality, Relationships, Marriage, and Family Life section invites papers, panel proposals, and as well as workshop proposals on topics related to vulnerability and flourishing. Preference will be shown to proposals that explicitly engage the conference theme.

 

Potential topics might include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:

 

●      Responses to the prevalence of intimate partner domestic violence

●      The role of the family in sustaining flourishing and preventing abuse

●      Theological critiques of and responses to abuse within families

●      The role of the church in supporting the flourishing of families and preventing abuse

●      Loss of family trust and the church’s sexual abuse crisis

●      Possibilities of flourishing in family formation after experiences of abuse

●      Systemic inequalities and vulnerability of families

●      Diverse family configurations and structures as they relate to vulnerability and flourishing

●      Technology, vulnerability and family flourishing

●      Vulnerability and flourishing of LGBTQIA+ persons and their families

●      Connections between family practices and ecological vulnerability

●      Vulnerability and flourishing for children and parents through adoption and/or foster families

●      Sexual flourishing outside of Church ideals

●      Relationship between vulnerability and flourishing in friendships and in spirituality

 

Proposals should be 250-500 words in length and include one’s current institutional affiliation and position. Proposals should be emailed to both conveners by December 15, 2023. Scholars will be notified of the status of their proposals by mid-January 2024.