a conference for
graduate students,
faculty, and
professionals

Communication is often, as the scholar John Durham Peters puts it, "the sink into which most of our hopes and dreams seem to be poured." As students, as professionals, and most fundamentally, as Christians, how do we conceive of and practice the communication arts? Should we consider particular conceptions and practices to be distinctly Christian? How do we evaluate and redeem human communication in contemporary cultures? During our track sessions, we will devote substantial time to interactive panel-format discussions of such questions. We have invited widely recognized scholars in interpersonal communication, rhetorical, and media studies to be with us. We hope you will join the dialogue.

Key questions we'll discuss include:

• How do we conceive of human communication and the activities of human meaning-making?

• Quentin Schultze (one of our track presenters) has written that "God's gift of communication enables us to cocreate cultures." If so, how do we cocreate meanings and cultures righteously and redemptively, in contemporary contexts marked by human difference?

• How does our embeddedness in Christian narrative shape the nature, goals, and audiences of our work, service, and vocation?

• What rhetorical and discursive resources should Christians employ in a postmodern moment of competing narrative structures?

The Communication Arts track will address these and other crucial issues and opportunities for followers of Christ active in the fields of communications, speech and rhetoric, media studies, and the associated areas of graphic and commercial art.