Philosophandum in fide

It’s that time of year again! Announcing the CFP for the 49th Annual Meeting of the American Maritain Association—Reading the Signs of the Time: Maritain on History and Contemporary Culture—to be held Thursday March 19 through Saturday March 21, 2026 at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.

Living in a society overflowing with technocratic expertise, we are obliged to consider the admonition of Christ to the Pharisees: “You know how to judge the appearance of the sky, but you cannot judge the signs of the times” (Mt. 16:3). Jacques Maritain, whose life span witnessed both unprecedented innovation as well as inconceivable calamity, certainly took this to heart.  Throughout his long career, from Three Reformers (1925) to The Peasant of the Garonne (1966), Maritain showed an acute awareness of how historical movements shape the opportunities and challenges faced by contemporary society. Our own era is fraught with an entire spectrum of developments that appear to be inevitable in the eyes of secularists, but which Christians can read as decisive repudiations of reality, of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Yet our current problems all grow out of historical precedents. Because of that causal relation, Maritain sees the philosophy of history as a branch of moral philosophy. That is, while presupposing speculative metaphysics and the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of history can only advance by concrete application. As he says in On the Philosophy of History, “The philosophy of history is the final application of philosophical truths, not to the conduct of the individual man, but to the entire movement of humanity. And therefore it is moral philosophy.” In fact, if we fail to learn from the appropriate principles from history, “we run the risk of slavishly imitating the past, or of thinking, on the contrary, that everything in the past is finished and has to be done away with.” Thus, it is incumbent on Christian philosophers to be able to read the signs of the times to discover what is truly possible in the order of nature illumined by grace.

We invite papers that consider this interplay between past and present in any area of philosophical inquiry: science, ethics, politics, art, religion. We also invite papers on any topic that engages with the thought of Maritain or the perennial tradition in philosophy.

The plenary speakers are noted scholars who have dealt directly with the consequences  arising from the distortions of modern thought:  Ed Feser (Pasadena City College); John Finley (Thomas Aquinas College); Chris Kaczor (Loyola Marymount); and, Steven D. Smith, (University of San Diego Law School).

Please send proposals of up to 500 words to Dr. James Murdoch at MaritainAssociation.papers@gmail.com by January 1, 2026. Final presentations should be 25-30 minutes in length.