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International Conference 
ThemeIn the growing body of theological and spiritual literature on the family over recent years there is hardly any publication that does not explicitly refer to the “domestic church”. Christian households are said to be or called to become “little churches of and in the home”. Since the Second Vatican Council’s retrieval of this concept from patristic precedents, more recent magisterial teachings of the Roman Catholic Church speak of the Christian family as “a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion” (FC 21). In spite of this broad interest and official endorsement, however, the concept itself today still dwells in a “doctrinal vacuum” (Michael A. Fahey). Where the model of the “church in miniature” is not used to further align the family with the ecclesial institution, it simply serves as a ‘pious metaphor' to restore some spiritual dignity to the Christian household. Likewise, theological treatises on the Church seem more concerned with its universal character than with its smaller, local units and so the “domestic church” has remained a marginal and exotic note in ecclesiology as well. One may wonder, however, whether small communities, as families are, have indeed so little to tell the “new family of God” to which Christ has called his disciples to belong. Can the churches really afford to neglect the specific competences that families have when it comes to serving and sharing with each other, to dealing with differences and otherness of its members, be they related to gender, age, ethnicity or religious conviction, and to encountering God in ordinary life with its everyday ties, duties and responsibilities? The conference is intended to revisit critically the notion of domestic church and to explore the potential, both theological and pastoral, that the idea of minusculae Ecclesiae may have for the life of the churches and of families. The conference is targeted towards scholars and practitioners who are working in the fields of ecclesiology, family studies, ecumenical theology, moral theology, social ethics, practical theology, contextual theology, public theology, gender studies, feminist theology, church history, biblical studies, patristics, and hermeneutics, amongst other fields. Conference Main Page | Theme | Travel Programme | Call for Papers | Information | |
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