Join me Jan 31-Feb 1, 2025, at the Internet Archive in San Francisco to explore the Future of Theology & Human Thought at a conference I’m organizing with Jordan Modell of Northwind Seminary. Visit https://ideasworthsaving.org/ to get all the details, read topic ideas, and submit an abstract.

Fahrenheit 2451: Ideas Worth Saving 
The Future of Theology & Thought

Call For Papers 

At the end of Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist meets a living library: a community of people who have each memorized a classic book to protect its contents from conflagration. Their mission is similar to the Internet Archive’s goal “to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge”—i.e. to do, in digital form in real life more or less what Bradbury’s “bookmen” do for fictional human culture. Beloved authors have always been committed to the preservation and transmission of ancient, timeless truths: think of how such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revived or created mythologies, believing that such wisdom was also inspirational to the human imagination. 

For this inaugural conference at the Internet Archive, we invite proposals for presentations on ideas worth saving. If you were to choose a work of literature, religion, film, or art and ensure that it would still be available in the year 2451, what work would that be? Talks may be wide-ranging, coming from any number of disciplines, talking about the what, why, or how of knowledge preservation and dissemination. In particular, we seek to highlight the Archive’s theological holdings, so projects that draw from those resources will receive special attention. 

We are looking for lively, energetic presentations that take advantage of a live, synchronous, hybrid gathering, rather than merely papers read aloud, which is boring and could be done more efficiently in a printed medium. Consider how you might take advantage of the gathered attendees’ collective knowledge, involve your audience, include embodiment, or otherwise bring your material to life in memorable ways. 

Theme & Ideas 

We are interested in questions including, but not limited to, the following: 

• What are the benefits of knowledge retention? 
• What genres, media, forms, or even themes lend themselves to ready conservation? 
• What barriers exist to protecting the works of certain demographics? 
• What are the challenges of preserving sacred works in a digital era?
• What role does storytelling play in wisdom alive for future generations?

Topics for panels or individual talks might include these sorts of concepts: 

• Digital Memory: Online Archives as a Modern Library of Alexandria
• The Role of Oral Tradition in Knowledge Preservation
• AI and the Future of Literary Preservation
• Hobbits in the 25th Century: Enjoying Tolkien’s Legendarium into the Future
• The Rings of Power and the Ethics of Adaptation
• How Fantasy Inspires Activism Today for a Better Tomorrow 
• Superheroes as Modern Mythology
• Sci-Fi Futures: Predicting or Shaping Tomorrow?
• Safeguarding Sacred Texts in the Age of Information
• The Jedi Archives vs. The Borg Collective: Lessons in Knowledge Preservation
• Shakespeare’s Moral Framework for Future Generations
• Ancient Scriptures in Posthuman Discourse

You get the idea! 

Please submit an abstract of 100–250 words describing your proposal talk using this form. We are interested in knowing your topic, your angle on the subject, where the scholarly conversation is now, what original contribution you’re making, and how you will make this a lively presentation (not merely a paper read aloud, which is boring). Note that presenters are expected to travel to the location and present onsite.