The organisers of the 2025 CIRF Student Symposium are pleased to publish the call for papers.

Call for papers: Temporality and religion: bound and unbound in time

Faculty of Divinity, Monday 23 June 2025

Religions and spiritual traditions have long grappled with our temporalised existence: what is time? Is it linear, cyclical, or something else altogether? What are our rituals and rhythms in time? Can we escape time? What awaits us in the future: an ‘end of times’, utopia or apocalypse? And what about our own mortality—birth, rebirth, judgement, purgatory, or oblivion? 

Whilst dealing with these complex questions of temporality, religious traditions themselves are deeply shaped by their own times, memories and histories, as they today face some of the most pressing contemporary challenges shaping the future, including war, climate change and the rise of new technologies.

We are delighted to announce the call for papers to this Cambridge University student-led symposium, and eagerly look forward to the range of responses the CIP has now been accustomed to at this annual event. Don’t be shy—we want to hear from you, and encourage you to be as imaginative as you like in response to the ever-elusive concept of ‘time’! 

Themes could include—but are certainly not limited to, how religion and temporality intersect with:

• Philosophies and theologies of time
• Rhythms and rituals: birth, stages of life, death, rituals, nature, pilgrimage, ecology, timekeeping, clocks
• Bound and unbound by time: Meditative practices, perceptions of time, spiritual paths, transformations, epiphany, escaping temporality, liberation/nirvana, eternity
• Temporalising religion: Religion through time, memory, history, unfolding revelation, inter and intra religious encounters across time, tradition & modernity, secularisation
• Mapping lives and afterlives: birth, death, past lives, afterlife, purgatory, rebirth, samsara, karma, judgement 
• Futures and futurism: cycles of time, climate change, end times, apocalypse, utopia dystopia, futurism, space exploration, AI, technology

Formats

Full papers will be up to 20 minutes. Lightning presentations (~3 minutes) are also invited. Creative and off-piste proposals are welcome—including contributions from the visual and performance arts.

We are also looking for students (undergraduate or postgraduate) who are interested in moderating panels. If this is of interest, please send an email enquiry to our shared mailbox, if-forum-symposium at divinity.cam.ac.uk.

If you have an idea—perhaps based on coursework or a new research proposal—and you are uncertain about the fit, you can send questions and enquiries to our shared mailbox.

Practicalities

The symposium will be held at the Faculty of Divinity, Sidgwick Site (off West Road), Cambridge.

It will be wholly on site, i.e. remote presentations cannot be accommodated. 

It is expected that participants will be current students or recent graduates of the University of Cambridge.

Presenters must commit to attend the full symposium, which will begin no earlier than 9:15am and end no later than 6:00pm. 

To submit a response, please complete the web form below—this requires a short description or abstract.

Deadline extended: The deadline to respond to this call for papers is 11:59pm on Thursday 15 May.

We expect to respond to proposals within a week of that deadline.