Theological Colloquium
This colloquium invites participants to read Ivan Illich as a theological thinker of modernity. In his conversations with David Cayley, Illich argues that the modern world becomes intelligible only when understood as both an extension and a perversion of the Christian message. This is not merely a polemical thesis but a method of discernment.
His analysis traces a genealogy of evangelical corruptions: charity becomes administered service, hospitality becomes hospitalization, care becomes sanitary management, teaching becomes compulsory schooling, mission becomes development. What once arose from gratuity, relation, and personal responsibility is thus absorbed into apparatuses that promise the good while organizing its corrupted form.
Illich offers no programme. He proposes instead a critical practice of perception: stripping words bare, identifying thresholds of inversion, defending the vernacular, speaking from the margins without turning them into authority. His work enacts a theology of lucidity - at once ascetic and prophetic - grounded in what is fragile, embodied, and exposed.
The colloquium seeks to examine this method and its contemporary urgency: Where do vernacular spaces still remain beyond administration? What kind of theology may emerge outside dispositifs of control? And how can resistance endure without itself being captured by processes of institutionalisation? To read Illich today is to learn how to name the corruption of the good without reproducing it.
An inter-university collaboration between
Prof. Dr. Isabella Bruckner, Pontificio Ateneo Sant’Anselmo, Rome
Prof. Dr. Gemma Serrano, Collège des Bernardins, Paris
Dr. Anna Sjöberg, Uppsala University, Uppsala
Locations: Pontificio Ateneo Sant’Anselmo, Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta 5, 00153 Roma
Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Piazza della Pilotta 4, 00187 Roma
Participation: Presence and online, No fee, Registration required, Registration deadline 10 May 2026: Please complete the registration form on www.anselmianum.com.
For more information: Prof. Dr. Isabella Bruckner, E-Mail: isabella.bruckner(at)anselmianum.com
