McDonald Centre Annual Conference 2026 – 11-13 June 2026
Reimagining Humanism: Religious Humanisms as Frameworks for Building a Common Life in a Fractured World

Join us for the McDonald Centre’s 2026 Annual Conference as we explore how religious humanisms can address our fractured world’s most pressing ethical and political challenges.

Since ancient times, humanism has challenged boundaries of citizenship and identity. Yet modern humanism became associated with secular philosophies and, critics argue, aligned with colonial domination. Today, scholars are recovering humanism’s diverse religious forms across multiple global traditions, from the abolition movement to humanitarian initiatives to anti-apartheid struggles.

This conference examines religious traditions of humanism as points of connection between divergent frameworks. We focus particularly on how Christian humanism intersects with Jewish and Islamic humanisms, tracing their entangled histories and contemporary expressions in democratic movements.

Contributions from the 2026 conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics dedicated to religious humanisms as moral and political frameworks. This event builds on last year’s conference, Christian Humanism and the Black Atlantic, which examined theological articulations of what Paul Gilroy has termed “reparative humanism.”

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