Plenaries
2026 Institute
Plenaries
Meet the Institute’s plenary speakers for 2026.
Kimberly Belcher, Ph.D.
“A Feast Celebrating the Mystery of Creation: An Ecumenical Dream”
Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 10:00 a.m.
Location: Harre Union, Ballrooms B & C
What does it mean to have a feast celebrating creation? Isn’t it a bit like fish celebrating a feast of water? This plenary will explore the rationale for the feast day and what it means to have an ecumenical feast. The mystery of God’s creation arouses both lament and hope; how are these experienced differently in Assisi, Italy; in Sierra Madre, Phillipines; in Valparaiso, Indiana; and in each of our home communities?
Speaker Bio:
Kimberly Hope Belcher is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. She researches liturgical theology, ritual studies, and ecumenism. She serves on the Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Board of the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship and represents the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the Methodist-Catholic, Episcopal-Catholic, and Pentecostal-Catholic dialogues in the United States. Recent publications include “Ritual Techniques in Affliction Rites and the Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical Liturgy of Lund, 2016,” Yearbook for Ritual and Liturgical Studies (2022) and Eucharist and Receptive Ecumenism: From Thanksgiving to Communion (Cambridge, 2020). Her current book project is on the concept of recognition in sacramental theology.
Terra Schwerin Rowe, Ph.D.
“Petrotheology: Ritual, Narrative, and the Sacred in Petroculture”
Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 2:45 p.m.
Location: Harre Union, Ballrooms B & C
While much of Christian ecotheology has focused on a loss of the divine or sacred in the natural world, a closer look at religion and extractivism suggests that it isn’t so much a loss of the sacred at stake here as much as a particular vision of the sacred. This lecture will outline a logics of extraction narrated within and through central doctrines of Christian theology: what we might call “petrotheologies.” Once the historical and ongoing relevance of these petrotheologies are identified, what forms of ritual, narrative, and articulations of the sacred might be articulated to resist their ruinous effects?
Speaker Bio:
Terra Schwerin Rowe is associate professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas. She received a Ph.D. in Theological and Philosophical Studies from Drew University, an STM from United Lutheran Seminary, and an M.A. in Diakonal Ministry from Wartburg Seminary. She is the author of Toward a ‘Better Worldliness’: Ecology, Economy, and the Protestant Tradition (2017, Fortress Press) and Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology (2022 T&T Clark, Bloomsbury). Other recent publications include a special issue of Dialog on Petrotheology and a co-edited special issue of Religions on Religions in Extractive Zones.
Samuel Torvend, Ph.D.
“An Unlikely Assembly on the Day God Made the World”
Wednesday, April 15, 2026, 9:00 a.m.
Location: Harre Union, Ballrooms B & C
A Feast of Creation can be the opportunity to reclaim what has been submerged or forgotten in our common life and liturgy: that God’s first act of grace is the creation in all its marvelous diversity, a creation now wounded by human folly. And yet this is not enough, for the assembly’s liturgy pulls in another direction: to the margins. What will we find there?
Speaker Bio:
Samuel Torvend is a Faculty Fellow in Humanities and University Chair in Lutheran Studies emeritus at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He has served as the convenor of the Ecology and Liturgy Seminar of the North American Academy of Liturgy and a presenter at the “Feast of Creation” Conference in Assisi in 2025. He is president of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission. He currently serves as priest associate for adult formation at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Seattle and as chair of the Bishop’s Commission on Liturgy for the Diocese of Olympia. His publications include Still Hungry at the Feast: Eucharistic Justice Amid Affliction (2018), Monastic Ecological Wisdom: A Living Tradition (2023), and Jesus in Nature: A Monastic Christology (2025). His next work is Unclaimed Treasure: Living the Baptismal Promises in a Secular World (Augsburg Fortress). He holds the Ph.D. from Saint Louis University.