Bound and unbound in time 

This one-day event is for University of Cambridge students (all levels) and recent graduates. Registration is essential.

Scroll down to access the registration form.

Download the full programme, including abstracts for each presentation (PDF, 935kb).

Outline schedule

09:15 | Welcome 

Name badges and other information will be available to collect from 09:15.

09:30 | Session 1

Philosophy: Bound and unbound in time

• Diffractive mysticism: entangled temporality in Ibn ʿArabī and Karen Barad | Sahar ElAsad
• Theological compatibilism and branching time | Marcus Ackermann
• Does God have time for us? Reflections on the origin, impact, and potential theological challenges of divine timelessness | Elise Harboldt

11:00 | Break time                            

11:30 | Session 2

This is a parallel session. Choose from papers on literature, modernity, or ritual.

Literature 1: Disrupting temporalities

• Time and trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved    Madeleine Jenkins
• Tracing an anti-progressive temporality in HD’s HERmione | Anna Dijkstra
• Does the sun move in a devotional poem? Time and celestial sanctification in John Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” | Anika Goddard

Modernity 1: Fashioning temporal solidarities

• Neo-traditionalism and its conception of the past and present | Ferhat Kafali
• A critical exploration of constructions of Sikh identity (1873–1950) in the light of Hindu religious nationalism | Inderpreet Kaur Pejatta
• A time of fellowship: time and the organising of a Pan-Buddhist world after Europe | Andi Schubert

Ritual 1: Rhythm, ritual, and echoes of timelessness

• Time in Sufi traditions | Luke Wilkinson
• Crossing the immemorial: the metaphysics of recognition in Babette's Feast | Michael Wilcher
• Echoes of the afterlife: Froberger’s Meditations and the phenomenology of devotional time | Edward Campbell-Rowntree

13:00 | Lunch

14:00 | Session 3

This is the second parallel session. Choose from papers on literature, modernity, or ritual.

Literature 2: Redemption and eternity

• Surprised by the Present. One man’s approach to redeeming the time(s): time, temporality and ethics in the works of CS Lewis | Siân Morris
• The fall of a sparrow: literary excursions on a theology of estrangement and repentance | Ben Hewitson
• Keeping time: form as redemption for tragic time in Eliot’s Four Quartets | Amy Galliford

Modernity 2: Christian encounter: modernity, the secular and the state

• Christian patriotism and statal immortality in 19th century Pan-African political theology | Apeike Umolu
• Constructing agency between temporal regimes in the histories of Domingo Chimalpahin and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl | Sofía Williamson-García
• Belief wound up and unwound in time: on the temporality of second naïveté | Matthias Teeuwen

Ritual 2: Sacred time, sacred space

• The moon, Makkah and Stonehenge: making meaning of pilgrimage sites | Imad Ahmed
• À la recherche du temps propice: searching for auspicious time through Feng shui | Xiangshu Li
• Transtemporal empathy: memory, architecture, and sacred space | Katherine Graham

15:30 | Break time

15:45 | Session 4

Lightning talks

• The secular state & the breakdown of morality | Amna Farooq
• LDS reception: effective-delay and restoration chronology | Jono Lethaby
• Islamic time and Hui Muslim life in northeast China (former Manchuria) | Jeri Jiarui Wu
• Cultivating Barakah: Sufi land practices and everyday devotion in southern Spain | Reem Fatthelbab

Philosophy 2: Cycles: futures and returns

• Hindu cosmic visions of yugas, and Mother Kālī, the Goddess of time | Ammie Vudathu
• Would the Messiah speak the language of Eden? Beginning and end of time in Jewish philosophies of language | Lola Graziani

17:15 | Close 

Participation as a presenter or moderator is open to undergraduates and postgraduates. Others are welcome to attend, capacity-permitting.

General registration is now open. (There is a separate registration process for those presenting.)

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(If you cannot see the registration form below, scroll to the bottom of this page and use the link provided to open the registration form in a separate tab.)

Check out the reports from previous symposia:

Report from the 2023 Symposium, Religion – Conflict – Dialogue

Report from the 2024 Symposium, Reconciliation and Rupture