The first ever international conference on ‘Spirituality in Society and the Professions‘ will take place in the Waterford Institute of Technology (WIT), May 16-18, 2019 in Waterford, Ireland. The conference has attracted speakers from various parts of the USA, Australia, mainland Europe, UK, and Ireland. It is a collaboration between WIT and the Spirituality Institute for Research and Education (SpIRE), headed up by Dr Michael O’Sullivan SJ and Dr Bernadette Flanagan, along with the European Institute for Spirituality in Economics and Society (SPES). You can book for the conference by clicking here.

The topic of the conference is related to the Routledge International Handbook of Spirituality in Society and the Professions (2019) edited by Laszlo Zsolnai and Bernadette Flanagan. This book, and four other works in spirituality by SpIRE board members, will be launched at the conference.

Some of the issues and questions to be addressed at the conference will include looking at understanding spirituality in different professions and questioning how and why materialistic worldviews dominate social practices and the professions? As well as how professional education can be enriched by a spiritual perspective and orientation.

Speakers at the conference include Dr David Coghlan SJ, whose topic is ‘Developing a Spirituality of Scholarship’, Gavin Murphy, blogger and part of the team in Irish Jesuit Communications, speaking on the ‘Psycho-Spiritual Inspiration of Three Saints’, and SpIRE director Michael O’Sullivan on ‘Spiritual Capital: Spirituality for Social & Planetary Well-being’. Petra Sebek, a recent graduate from the MA in Applied Spirituality with SpIRE, will be speaking on her thesis topic, ‘Spirituality in the Selfie Culture of Instagram’.

In this interview with Pat Coyle, Michael O’Sullivan and Bernadette Flanagan outline the significance of this international event, and give a brief sketch of the book on which it is based. Bernadette begins by saying that you can see deep threads of spirituality running through various professions, once you start to look for them.