Past Conferences

Jacques Ellul and 21st Century Technological Society

Chicago, July 2024
2024 conference program (PDF)
Videorecordings of some of the presentations are available on the Film and Video page of this website.

Roosevelt University served as the host site for this milestone event. As this year is the seventieth anniversary of The Technological Society (and the sixtieth for the English edition), it is fitting that we revisit Ellul’s magnum opus with fresh eyes and critical engagement.

 

Arts, Culture, and the Environment in a Technological Society: Revisiting Jacques Ellul

Montreal, July 2022
2022 conference program (PDF)

Ellul’s perspective on the arts has rarely been considered. In The Empire of Non-Sense, Ellul analyses a range of artistic movements, taking up critiques offered by Bernard Charbonneau, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Daix, Guy Debord, Marshall McLuhan and Abraham Moles, among others. Ellul claims that the most dramatic transformation has been modern artworks’ inability to symbolize beyond themselves, or beyond the values of Technique. In a technological society, symbols become clichés or mere images, signaling a loss of place and meaning; they become technical phenomena or materialized theory. Ultimately, Ellul worries that the arts are incapable of confronting the hegemony of Technique, and that, for the most part, they tend to reproduce dominant ideologies rather than create spaces for opposition.

 

Ellul and Charbonneau on Ethics in an Age of Ecological Challenge

Strasbourg, France, January 2022
2022 Strasbourg conference program (PDF)
Videorecordings of some of the presentations are available on the Film and Video page of this website.

Twenty-five years after their deaths, Jacques Ellul (1912–94) and Bernard Charbonneau (1910–96) still have something to say to us—perhaps today more than ever. The challenges raised by the swell of Technique and ecological devastation demand a rigorous analytical framework and resolute ethical engagement. Such are the intellectual, symbolic, and practical resources that our two friends bequeathed to us: to think globally, act locally, elucidate the declensions and effects of the “great molting,” and incite a presence in the world that testifies to freedom and hope through non-power. This conference proposes to probe the depths of the heritage of Ellul and Charbonneau, in their sympathies and differences, to better understand our present and to promote a liberated engagement able to confront the ethical challenges that define our times.

 

Jacques Ellul and the Bible: A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration

Vancouver, British Columbia, June, 2018
2018 conference program (PDF)

Jacques Ellul is best known as one of the premier voices of the twentieth century analyzing the emergence, characteristics, and challenges of the “technological society”—the growing and seemingly irresistible dominance of technological tools, processes, and values over the whole of life and the whole of the world. But the Bordeaux sociologist simultaneously produced almost as many works of biblical study and reflection as he did of sociology. In these studies, Ellul delivered brilliantly creative insights and provocative challenges to traditional theology. All serious students of Ellul, whether part of faith communities like Ellul (in the French Reformed Church) or not (like his colleague and best friend, Bernard Charbonneau), have found interaction with his theological writings an essential complement to the study of his great sociological works. This conference seeks a multi-perspectival hearing of Scripture stimulated by Ellul’s works.

 

Politics Without Illusion, Revolution Without Violence: Reviewing the Contributions of Jacques Ellul

Berkeley, California, 2016
2016 conference program not available.

 

Communicating Humanly in an Age of Technology and Spin

Ottawa, Ontario, 2014
2014 conference program (PDF)

 

Prophet in the Technological Wilderness: A Centenary Celebration and Critical Review of Jacques Ellul

Wheaton, Illinois, 2012
2012 conference program not available.
Videorecordings of some of the presentations are available on the Film and Video page of this website.