Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome, June 24-26 2026
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
— T. S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartets
The Centre for Theology and Philosophy and the Relational Ontology Research (ROR) Group of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Santa Croce, Rome) invite scholars from across disciplines to explore the contested idea of nature. Once regarded as the very ground of intelligibility—what Aristotle called physis and the scholastics treated as a principle of order—nature in modernity has been dismantled, dissolved, or reduced to a functional mechanism. Declared obsolete by some, defended or reimagined by others, “nature” remains at the center of our deepest debates: about the human person, technology, freedom, metaphysics, and meaning itself. The conference is co-sponsored by ICT (Toulouse), St Mary Seminary and University (Baltimore), Triertium (Olomouc) and New Trinitarian Ontologies (Austin).
