What does it mean for a person to change? Under what conditions does such change occur?What are the private and public ethical implications of personal transformation? What is thelegitimate role of the state in relation to individual and collective projects of moral transformation? The Annual Symposium of the Center for Metanoia Studies is dedicated tobringing together researchers from a broad range of disciplines as well as practitioners fromcivil society to reflect and exchange on questions such as these. This year’s symposium willfocus particularly on the continuities and discontinuities in the notion of conversion as appliedto religious and non-religious contexts. 

Presentation

What does it mean for a person to change? Under what conditions does such change occur? What are the private and public ethical implications of personal transformation? What is the legitimate role of the state in relation to individual and collective projects of moral transformation? The Annual Symposium of the Center for Metanoia Studies is dedicated to bringing together researchers from a broad range of disciplines as well as practitioners from civil society to reflect and exchange on questions such as these. This year’s symposium will focus particularly on the continuities and discontinuities in the notion of conversion as applied to religious and non-religious contexts. Indeed, religious metaphors have long haunted the social and human sciences, from Marx’s description of capitalism as a form of primitive totemic religion (1867) to Yuri Slezkine’s analysis of the “religious fervor” of communist revolutionaries (2017). This is also true in the fields of politics and the media, on both sides of the political discourse; for example, commentators on the right have used religious analogies to delegitimize the “woke” movement (Dejean, 2022) or climate concerns (Woods et al., 2012), whilst those on the left have described neoliberalism as a religion (Mavelli, 2019), as well as rightwing “panics” as “witch-hunts” against “folk-devils” (Cohen [1972] described the behavior of conservatives in religious terms that have since been widely successful in the political space; see also Hutchins-Viroux, 2008). This is particularly true for the theme of conversion: religious vocabularies and frameworks are often used metaphorically to describe transformation experiences pertaining to commitment, outlook, or ethos in domains not typically considered religious. Examples include ideological change on specific issues such as abortion (Layman & Carsey, 1998; 1999) and feminism (Yang et al., 2022), political party affiliation switching (Clark et al., 1991), life trajectories of radical political activists (Linden & Klandermans, 2007; Raynaud, 2017), sexual orientation change efforts (Davison & Walden, 2024), environmentalism (Schauffler, 2003), management development (Peters, 1997), and shifts in values (Tjeltveit, 1986) or morality (MacLaughlin, 2008). This symposium explores how the idea of conversion—religious and secular—shapes our understanding of personal transformation, ethical change, and social life across diverse historical and contemporary contexts.

Guest attendees are welcome. To register, please visit metanoiastudies.org

Programme

Monday, 15 December 2025

9:00-9:30 Registration and coffee

9:30-9:45 Welcome

9:45-11:15 Panel 1

• Kate Cooper & Hildelith F. Leyser, Narrative, change, and transformative experience
• Sergio Gadea, Love for one's neighbour as secular conversion: agape in the post-Christian era

11:15–11:30 Break

11:30–13:00 Panel 2

• Kevin Gary, Despair and transformation
• Alexis de La Ferrière, The constant carnival: social dedifferentiation as a barrier to personal transformation

13:00–14:00 Lunch

14:00–14:45 Café littéraire avec Charles Wright

14:45–17:00 Panel 3

• Heather Krasker, Conversion and its false pretences: the example of actresses (18th-19th centuries)
• Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, What is the relationship between conversion as metaphor and conversion as practice? The case of Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900)
• Matthew Croasmun, Working from parody to the real: shifting hypergoods in the pluralistic undergraduate classroom

17:00–17:30 Break

17:30–18:30 Keynote address

• Ruth Harris, Krishnamurti and the Oriental Christ

19:30 Dinner in College (for speakers)

Tuesday, 16 December 2025

9:00–10:30 Panel 4

• Laurent Chabert, From spiritual revolution to institutional reform: Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalism and the birth of Institutional Psychotherapy
• Charles Mercier, Personal and institutional transformations within the French academic world in 1968: the example of René Rémond and the University of Nanterre

10:30–10:45 Break

10:45–13:00 Panel 5

• Elyamine Settoul, The Experience of Military Commitment as Metanoia: Anthropological, Ritual, and Identity Analogies
• Frédéric Rouvière, Les expériences mystiques des philosophes, une hypothèse sur l’heuristique des concepts
• Vincent Forray, Legal forms and transformations of persons: the strange case of civil status

13:00–14:00 Lunch

14:00–14:45 Café littéraire avec Marion Muller-Colard

14:45–16:15 Panel 6

• Julien Argoud, Trajectories of conversion from Islam to Christianity in Morocco
• Gauthier Simon, The heuristic analogy of religious conversion to understand ecological transformation

16:15–16:45 Break

16:45–18:00 Conclusions and Horizons

• Adam Ellwanger
• Alexis de La Ferrière

Participants

Keynote Speaker

• Ruth Harris, Professor of History, Oxford

Panelists

• Julien Argoud, Political Science, Sciences Po Paris
• Laurent Chabert, Criminology, Université catholique de Lille
• Kate Cooper, History, Royal Holloway
• Matthew Croasmun, Theology, Yale
• Alexis de La Ferrière, Sociology, Royal Holloway
• Adam Ellwanger, English, Houston-Downtown
• Vincent Forray, Law, Sciences Po Paris
• Sergio Gadea SJ, Philosophy, Comillas
• Kevin Gary, Philosophy, Hillsdale College
• Heather Krasker, History, EPHE Paris
• Hildelith F. Leyser, Neuroscience, McGill
• Charles Mercier, History, Université de Bordeaux
• Marion Muller-Colard, Author, Theologian and Editor
• Frédéric Rouvière, Law, Aix-Marseille Université
• Elyamine Settoul, Political Science, CNAM Paris
• Gauthier Simon, History, Université de Bordeaux
• Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa, History, Oxford
• Charles Wright, Author