"Creation, Covenant, and Participation: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition"

September 11-13, 2003
Calvin College

The entire conference was audio-taped, and the sessions are available for purchase through the Calvin College Bookstore. Contact them at 616-526-6376, or 1-800-748-0122, or bookstore@calvin.edu.

Seminars in Christian Scholarship; Calvin College; 3201 Burton St. SE; Grand Rapids, MI 49546.
seminars@calvin.edu
http://www.calvin.edu/scs/

The proceedings of the conference will be published as Creation, Covenant, and Participation: Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition, eds. James K.A. Smith and James H. Olthuis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic Press, 2005). Material should not be cited with permission of the authors or editors.

Some of what follows are papers that might conceivably be available in print, depending on the individual presenter. Some of what follows are responses to those papers, many of which seem not to have been written out in paper form. The rest is conversation, questions and answers, subsequent comments and musings that all occurred on the spot.

NOTE: These are my notes, recording what I heard and processed. It is very likely that I got things wrong at times, and it would never be appropriate to cite my notes as direct quotations of any of the speakers. With the exception of the plenary speeches and the concluding round table, the conference scheduled two concurrent papers for each session slot. For obvious reasons, I was only able to attend one paper during each session. For a list of the papers not represented below, see the conference web site.

abbreviations and format:

The Calvinists at this conference referred to Radical Orthodoxy as RO, while Ward and Milbank maintained Radical Orthodoxy (when they referred to it by name, which is not as often, since they are careful to nuance that “it”). I am utterly dissatisfied with RO, and I shall continue to use my preferred abbreviation, which is RadOx.

Double brackets [[ ]] enclose my comments to myself, and I’ve tried to include also my initials (mba) to clarify this.

Double question marks ?? indicate a question from the floor. Sometimes I have a name for the questioner; most often I don’t, either because I was too busy typing to look, or because I didn’t know who the person was, or both.