Call for Proposals
The theme of the Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture 2027 is Entrusted: The Vocation of Christian Stewardship. At the heart of stewardship is a confession: “The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it” (Psalm 24:1). We do not ultimately own what we possess—our resources, institutions, bodies, traditions, or even our time. Rather, God graciously entrusts these gifts to our care so that, as “faithful stewards of God’s grace” (1 Peter 4:10), we might use them to glorify God and bless others. In a culture often marked by disposability and short-term thinking, Christian stewardship calls us to deliberateness, gratitude, and responsibility oriented toward the common good and the flourishing of generations to come.
Stewardship is both personal and profoundly shared. It encompasses the maintenance of what has already been given as much as the creation of something new; it requires attention to the ordinary practices that sustain communities over time. In this light, stewardship is not reducible to environmental care—though care for creation is essential—but extends to the faithful tending of institutions, vocations, bodies, and intellectual traditions.
The 2027 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture invites contributions from across the disciplines. We welcome proposals that explore stewardship as a theological, moral, institutional, pedagogical, ecological, professional, artistic, and civic practice. Possible questions and areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Biblical, theological, and historical accounts of stewardship
- Faithful stewardship of bodies, health, and embodied life
- Stewardship of creation, environmental responsibility, and care for future generations
- Stewardship of institutions, traditions, and inherited practices
- Stewardship and the common good in political, legal, and civic life
- Stewardship of wealth, property, labor, time, and material resources
- Stewardship in business, including questions of waste, sustainability, accountability, and responsibility to stakeholders
- Stewardship in education, including teaching, mentoring, parenting, and formation of the next generation
- Stewardship of attention in art, media, journalism, and digital culture
- Stewardship in medicine and health care, including care for the elderly, vulnerable, and chronically ill
- Stewardship in ministry, including congregational life, Christian practices, and the handing on of tradition
- Stewardship in athletics, including the formation and care of the whole person
- Stewardship of academic disciplines, methods, and intellectual traditions
- The relationship between stewardship, maintenance, repair, preservation, and innovation
- Stewardship in biotechnology and genetics, including questions surrounding gene editing, human enhancement, and responsibility to future generations
- Critiques of stewardship language, including ways it has been used to sanction domination, extraction, or control
- Stewardship in local, regional, and global perspective, including questions of responsibility to neighbor, place, church, and world
We welcome proposals for individual papers, papers with multiple presenters, and panels.
Please note that, due to the volume of proposals, we generally can only accept a maximum of one presentation per person, although an individual may be a co-presenter in multiple sessions.
The Symposium will be February 18-20, 2027, on Baylor University's campus.
If you have any questions, please email ifl@baylor.edu or call 254-710-4805.
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