Conference

Justice, Spirituality and Creation’s Lament

Sylvia Keesmaat

As creatures formed by and from the earth, we are meant to have a life-long engagement not only with the beautiful and diverse creatures that inhabit the land and the waters, but also with the land and the waters themselves. So what happens when the wild places disappear? And what does this have to do with spirituality and justice? Together we will explore biblical stories that show what the wild places tell us about the Creator, ourselves, and living justly with the creatures with whom we are in relationship.

Sylvia Keesmaat is an activist, scholar and farmer, as well as the co-author of Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice (Brazos, 2019). She teaches online at bibleremixed.ca.

The Poetry of Nature: A Wake-up Call to Re-enchantment

Deborah Bowen

What use is poetry? What can it offer to a jaded world? In her poem “Sometimes,” Mary Oliver gives “instructions for living a life”: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” 

Our project, Poetry in Place, aims to embody such a local glossary of enchantment in contemporary poetry that pays attention to the specificities of a place and its nonhuman inhabitants. The poetry is local to the area between the tip of Lake Ontario and the watershed of the Grand River in southern Ontario, an area despoiled by industry and by the history of settler invasion and Indigenous marginalization. In this presentation we will read several of these poems and hear what the poets said in interviews about their approach, whether from a spiritual perspective or not. Might poetry be able to articulate a restored sense of our ‘belonging’ in relation to nature? 

Deborah Bowen is an English Professor emerita at Redeemer University and the editor most recently of Poetry in Place: Poetry and Environmental Hope in a Southern Ontario Bioregion (Guernica, 2025).

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Homemaking in Dangerous Times

Brian Walsh

Weaving together story, biblical reflection and the music of Bruce Cockburn, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen, this presentation will tease out the meaning of homemaking in a dangerous time of wide-ranging homelessness and exile.

Brian Walsh is a theologian, activist and farmer, and the author most recently of Rags of Light: Leonard Cohen and the Landscape of Biblical Imagination (Wipf and Stock, 2024).