Conversion as a Personal and Political Phenomenon

March 29, 2026

Conversion as a Personal and Political Phenomenon

Event Series: Barcelona, March 2026

We tend to think of conversion in individual, religious terms–as a radical shift in worldview and way of life. But the idea of moral and spiritual regeneration and reorientation is relevant for societies and all of humanity, given the existential threats we face. What examples of collective, political conversions might we point to? What cultural and spiritual resources might promote a global shift away from destructive power competition in the direction of greater cooperation in the face of shared challenges?

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Participants

Ranjit Hoskote

Ranjit Hoskote is an Indian poet, theorist, and curator whose influential work centers on the complex history and presence of cultural pluralism from the local to the global. He has authored eight books of poetry—including Icelight (2022), Jonahwhale (2018), and a translation of a fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic-poet, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Dĕd (2011)—and the acclaimed book Confluences: Forgotten Histories between East and West (2012, with Ilija Trojanow). Hoskote has curated more than 50 showcases of Indian and global art over the past three decades, including India’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., is the undersecretary for the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education. Before that he served as the editor in chief of the Jesuits’ biweekly review, La Civiltà Cattolica, a post he assumed in 2011. Since entering the Society of Jesus in 1988, he has worked in a variety of capacities, including joining the review’s community in 1998. Fr. Spadaro considers his work to be part of the new cybertheology–“thinking faith in the Internet age.” He has also served on the Georgetown University Board of Directors.

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels, most recently Home Fire (2017) and A God in Every Stone (2014), which was shortlisted for the Baileys Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, as well Burnt Shadows (2009) and In the City by the Sea (1998). Her novels have been translated into more than 25 languages, and three have won awards from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. In 2013 Shamsie was named one of Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists.” She grew up in Pakistan, studied in the United States, is based in London, and is now serving as writer in residence at Georgetown University in Qatar.

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists; The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s was published in May 2025. He also writes for the New York Times and its Book Review and Sunday magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal.