First Two Speakers Announced for Imagination Redeemed 2019
The Anselm Society is pleased to announce our first two speakers for the 2019 Imagination Redeemed conference. The full schedule and roster will be released in early 2019.
John Skillen
Professor John Skillen directs the Studio for Art, Faith & History while serving in several capacities as senior advisor in the Global Education Office at Gordon College.
Dr. Skillen completed his Ph.D. (1982) at Duke University, concentrating in medieval and Renaissance literature. A graduate of Gordon College, Skillen joined the English department of his alma mater in 1983 as the specialist in medieval, Renaissance and 17th Century literature. He served two terms as department chair before being appointed the inaugural chair of the Communication Arts department. After leading a number of Summer Seminars in Italy, Dr. Skillen collaborated with his colleagues in the Art department to create the arts-oriented program in Orvieto, Italy, now in its 20th year. Dr. Skillen directed the Gordon IN Orvieto program from 1998 to 2008. The program was featured in a volume of Best Practices in Christian study abroad programs entitled Transformations on the Edge of the World (Abilene Christian University Press, 2010).
The Studio for Art, Faith & History was established in 2005 as the wing of the semester program for developing and administering special projects that offered creative contemporary responses to pre-modern traditions in visual art and theater.
Skillen's book, Putting Art (back) in its Place (Hendrickson Publishers, 2016) can be purchased here. His essays on the arts and tradition have appeared in IMAGE journal and CIVA SEEN, the journal of Christians in the Visual Arts, in the volume dedicated to painter Bruce Herman’s Magnificat triptychs, in Transformations at the Edge of the World, and on the Studio’s website. Essays published on-line include an account of educating "in situ” in Orvieto in Cardus’s Commentary e-journal, and essays for the European ArtWay on the contemporary architect Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church near Rome and on the new interest in the tradition of ekphrasis, or writing poetry about artworks. Several of the papers presented at the conference entitled Eucharist and Eschatology: Art and Theology in the Orvieto Duomo were published with Dr. Skillen’s assistance by the Seminary of Central Italy in the volume Spazi e Immagini dell'Eucaristia: Il Caso di Orvieto (2007).
Professor Skillen lives in Newburyport, MA with his wife Susan.
Junius Johnson
Junius Johnson works in historical and systematic theology, with special interests in trinitarian theology, Christology, metaphysics, and the Eucharist. He is also especially interested in the Medieval period, and in the works of St. Bonaventure and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He holds a BA from Oral Roberts University, an MAR form Yale Divinity School, and an MA, two MPhils, and a PhD from Yale University. He is the author of Christ and Analogy: The Christocentric Metaphysics of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fortress Press, 2010), Patristic and Medieval Atonement Theory: A Guide to Research (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Bonaventure on the Eucharist: Commentary on the Sentences, Book IV, dist. 8-13 (Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 2017), and the forthcoming The Father of Lights: A Theology of Beauty. He is currently at work on a trilogy of monographs on Bonaventure and a translation of the Eucharistic treatises of Radbertus and Ratramnus.
Dr. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Historical Theology in the Honors College at Baylor University and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Rivendell Institute at Yale.