Day One, Thursday, 21 September 2017
9.00 Registration and refreshments
Session 1: Apologetics in the interwar Kulturkampf
Chair: Jim Bjork (King’s College London).
9.15 Todd Weir (University of Groningen)
Interwar protestant apologetics in Germany: between völkisch racism and socialist monism
9. 45 Peter Bowler FBA (Queen's University, Belfast)
Ideology and futurology in early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal and their critics
10.15 Discussion
10.45 Refreshments
11.15 John Pollard (University of Cambridge)
Christus Rex, Catholic Action and Vatican apologetics
11.45 Umar Ryad (University of Utrecht)
Muslim apologetics against Western Christian missions in interwar Egypt
12.15 Discussion
12.45 Lunch
Session 2: Global Protestantism and the Cold War
Chair: Gerd-Rainer Horn, Sciences Po, Paris
13.30 Molly Worthen (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
Francis Schaeffer and the evangelical worldview in the Cold War
14.00 Uta Balbier (King's College London)
The apologetics of Billy Graham
14.30 Discussion
15.00 Refreshments
1530 Udi Greenberg (Dartmouth College)
How important was Secularism to Ecumenism?
16.00 Benjamin Ziemann (University of Sheffield)
Martin Niemöller and the defense of a Protestant Germany during the 1950s
16.30 Discussion
17.00 Close of first day
Day Two, Friday, 22 September 2017
Session 3: Apologetics in communist and postcommunist regimes: China and the USSR
Chair: TBC
9.00 Miriam Dobson (University of Sheffield), The privileged position of the believer in the Soviet imaginary: atheism, religion and the Cold War
9.30 Victoria Smolkin (Wesleyan University)
God-seekers versus Dogmatists: Soviet Atheism's Last Stand
10.00 Discussion
10.30 Refreshments
11.00 Sonja Luehrmann (Simon Fraser University)
Gender, kinship, and the aftermath of atheism in Russian Orthodox Christianity
11.30 Ngo Thi Thanh Tam, (Max Planck Institute, Göttingen)
Human rights discourse and Protestant conversion of the Hmong in Vietnam
12.00 Discussion
12.30 Lunch
Session 4: Apologetics in a Dechristinanised Country: The UK since the 1960s
Chair: Benjamin Ziemann, University of Sheffield
13.15 Hugh McLeod FBA (University of Birmingham)
John Robinson and liberal Christian apologetic in the 1960s
13.45 Peter Itzen (University of Freiburg/Breisgau)
‘Where is the Kingdom of Heaven?’ Edward Norman, Enoch Powell and the struggle over the politics of faith in the 1970s
14.15 Discussion
14.45 Refreshments
15.00 Tariq Ramadan (University of Oxford)
The revealing presence of Muslims in the UK
15.30 Callum Brown (University of Glasgow)
The Personal, not the Political or Philosophical: how atheists rationalise nonbelief
16.00 Respondent: John Milbank, Nottingham
16.15 Discussion
16.45 Concluding Discussion
17.00 Close of Conference