KU Leuven will be hosting the Twelfth Annual REFORC Conference on Early Modern Christianity, which will take place May 11-13, 2023.

Topic Plenary Lectures: Early Modern Christianity, Economic Entrepreneurship, and Social Welfare

The REFORC conference in Leuven takes the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of the Jesuit Leonard Lessius — one of the founders of modern contract law and free economic initiative — as an occasion to open up the discussion to include the Jewish tradition and the various Christian confessions. Questions that can be discussed at the conference include: How did early modern Jewish and Christian thinkers see the relationship between theology of salvation, economic entrepreneurship, and social welfare? How did they view interest on borrowed money? And how did they define the responsibility of successful Christian entrepreneurs for the poor and destitute? What were the internal discussions within the various confessional groups – also with their own institutional authorities – and with other confessions? And how does all this relate to Max Weber’s now hundred-year-old theory of the spirit of Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe?

Plenary Speakers
Wim Decock (UC Louvain), Nina Javette Koefoed (Aarhus University), Germano Maifreda (University of Milan), Brian P. Owensby (University of Virginia, History Department), Eleonora Rai (KU Leuven), Keith Stanglin (Heritage Christian University, Florence, AL).

The program will be announced in more detail. It will consist of a mix between plenary sessions and short paper sessions.

Short Papers:
The (in-person) conference is open to individual short paper presentations (20 minute presentations) and to thematic sessions of two or three short papers. Papers can focus on all disciplines related to Early Modern Christianity, ca. 1400-1700, such as philosophy, law, history, theology, etc., independent of the theme of the plenary papers.

It is also possible to attend the conference without giving a paper.