CFI Events
2025-2026
This Year's Theme: On Beauty & Justice
At Gordon College, we believe that the justice of God is not only unfolding, comprehensive and absolute, but that it is also something beautiful. If God is beautiful as well as just, then our response to beauty and our response to justice are likely to relate to each other, just as our efforts to create beauty and to create justice will relate to each other.
CFI seeks to help our community explore these questions:
- In our efforts to create beauty, how can we invite in those who are suffering?
- In our efforts to promote justice, where do we encounter the beauty of God?
- How might encounters with beauty lead us to a concern for justice?
Over the 2025-2026 year, join faculty, staff, students and honored guest speakers as we explore these vital questions together.
CFI 2025-26 Events
SEPTEMBER 4, 2025
Makoto Fujimura & Haejin Shim Fujimura
"BEAUTY X JUSTICE: Creating a Genesis Moment"
KOSC Loggia & MacDonald Auditorium
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
What if the pursuit of justice began not only with urgency—but with beauty, imagination, and care?
Haejin and Mako Fujimura explore how acts of restoration and advocacy can become “Genesis Moments”: generative openings for renewal, not merely responses to brokenness. Drawing from their work in global anti-trafficking and the arts, they introduce Culture Care as a foundational framework—one that nurtures ecosystems of hope rather than cultures of scarcity and fear. This lecture invites us to reimagine justice as a creative, communal act: one that heals, dignifies, and gives rise to futures filled with beauty.
OCTOBER 30, 2025
Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt
"JUST BEAUTY"
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
Can beauty make a difference in a world of need and injustice?
Some demur, seeing beauty as a luxury for the privileged and a distraction from pressing ethical matters. By contrast, many Christian thinkers, mystics, and artists have made the case that beauty is an essential feature of God’s life and our own. If that’s true, then beauty and justice are necessarily intertwined, and fullness of life emerges when we learn to receive and offer beauty as a gift, a balm, and a prod.
NOVEMBER 13, 2025: Princemere Writers Series
Abigail Carroll
"HABITATION OF WONDER: Tenanting Beauty, Imagining Justice"
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
To be alive in this world is to be awake to wonder.
What are we, asks Abigail Carroll, but “a constellation of salts” bearing the divine signature in our “affinity for zinnias, for swallows and plums, and questions about the lives of ferns”? From a place of holy wonder, we are well positioned to imagine justice. In this reading, Carroll will share poems both published and new, inviting us to engage the prophetic necessity of beauty and boldly envision a just world.
JANUARY 29, 2026: Franz Lecture
Dr. James Taylor
"SHALOM: A Gift and a Task"
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
Shalom is a radical re-envisioning of our relations with God, others, and the world around us.
The world loves peace but trusts in violence. Only through the judicious use of violent force, we are told, can we bring order and meaning to the chaos that threatens us on all sides. Shalom rejects this violent approach to peacemaking and insists that peace comes from life, not death. The task of shalom is to receive this life, tend to it, and allow it to grow us into a thriving community of beings who share this life.
FEBRUARY 26, 2026
Dr. Natalie Carnes
"ART, POVERTY & WASTE: The Christian Vocation in a World of Need"
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
Amidst poverty, crisis, and loss, why enjoy the arts?
How can Christians justify making and supporting art in a world of where people die of unmet need? Why this “waste?” In her CFI lecture, Dr. Natalie Carnes describes how Christian understandings of creation, hope, and community show us a way of holding together the dynamic tensions of poverty and art, fasting and feasting, and excess and waste.
March 19, 2026
Dr. Liz Hall
"LAMENT: Psychological Perspectives on an Ancient Form of Prayer"
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room
4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
Abstract Announced in February
On Beauty & Justice
Symposium 2026
What is Symposium?
Every spring, Gordon College devotes one Thursday, all day long (with no classes) to hear what YOU, the student body, has to say. This is your opportunity to put on an event with your student club, lead a discussion with your friends, create a work of art with your classmates, present your senior thesis, and more!
When is CFI Symposium?
This year the CFI Symposium will be held on Thursday, April 16th!
How do I get involved?
CFI welcomes proposals from any and all majors! Apply by March 26 with your proposal for a 40-50 minute event that will be advertised on campus and open to all. We especially welcome out-of-the-box thinking to connect your ideas with the overarching theme: On Beauty & Justice.
Symposium Applications will be posted in the spring.
April 16, 2026: SYMPOSIUM
Symposium Speaker
Beauty & Justice: Title Announced in March
KOSC Loggia & Chair's Room 4:00 P.M. Reception | 4:30 P.M. Lecture
Abstract Announced in March