March 14, 2026
Location: Loyola University Chicago, Lake Shore Campus
Cost: Free!
Hosted in collaboration with Loyola University Chicago’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage
Worldbuilding is inherently spiritual. Worldbuilding in speculative storytelling insists that all things have meaning, that—if we but hold on until the end, gathering up pieces of language and lore, architecture and myth—all will be revealed. Every tiny detail helps a reader understand the new and wondrous world that the storyteller is weaving together.
Worldbuilding, when seen through a spiritual lens, sits squarely atop the oft-noted Ignatian insight that God is in all things and that all things glimmer with God’s grace. All things—even small—have value, even if we can’t immediately see what that value is. Too often, though, we’re tempted to ignore or skip past those details in our lives that don’t have immediate, understandable value. As adults, we claim to be far too busy for those aspects of life without an immediate ROI.
Fairy tales and fantasy—all the genres of speculative storytelling—have long battled the trope that such nonsensical storytelling is just for children, that wasting time on fictional worlds is a form of foolish escapism. But what if we have it all wrong? Children, after all, are expect worldbuilders. They need to be if they’re going to grow. Children, as they develop, collect seemingly random pieces of information, holding this collection in their heads until such information becomes useful. This is worldbuilding! And yet, when it happens in the real world, we simply call it growing up.
The Catholic imagination insists that the world is charged with the grandeur of God, that all things are dripping with God’s grace, revelatory of God’s great love. But the Catholic imagination also reminds us that all things unfold in God’s time, not ours. And so we see here the juxtaposition, that tension, necessary for good worldbuilding and meaning-making: This here is important…but not yet.
We need to reinvigorate our worldbuilding muscles so as to look with new eyes upon God’s wondrous world. Children do it every day; we all could, at one point. What if we reclaimed the need for worldbuilding once more—and did so as a way to better grapple with God and God’s world? We know the kinds of stories that can help fuel our imagination.
Does this sound energizing to you? Then join us at the “A Faith That Builds: Worlds The Catholic Imagination in Speculative Storytelling” conference where we will tackle these questions together and leave feeling inspired.
The Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage (CCIH) is one of Loyola’s five interdisciplinary Center of Excellence. The Hank Center cultivates, connects, and integrates Roman Catholic thought and practice by supporting research, creating and leading initiatives, offering conferences, symposia, public dialogs, and other programs that engage the communities at Loyola University Chicago, the Midwest, nationally, and internationally.
At the Center, the rich and variant lines of the Catholic intellectual tradition are explored, communicated, complicated, and renewed. The Center’s support of research and course development projects provides support for Loyola faculty. Its prestigious Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. Fellowships in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition delivers critical support to promising doctoral students in dissertation stage from across the U.S. All of these endeavors invite and cultivate transformative scholarship and innovative curricular design with a special focus on academic excellence and the demands of social, environmental, and spiritual justice.
The Center animates the living tradition of Catholic higher education in that it informs and builds-up the connection among faith, reason, and justice— a unity of knowledge, according to St. John Henry Newman, that resides at the heart of the academic enterprise. As a scholarly center dedicated to engaging the vibrancy and legacy of Catholic Intellectual Tradition, CCIH is a primary voice in articulating intellectual priorities in academically normative ways—and in integrating these priorities across the disciplines. Its unique scope of events and programs, strong record of conferences, substantive web pages and resources, and active media presence broaden the Center’s reach and are factors that distinguish the Hank Center as one of the most comprehensive venues for Catholic thought, dialogue, and research in the world.
The Center was founded in 2006 with the goal of preserving and fostering the Catholic intellectual heritage not only at Loyola University Chicago, but also in the local community, the academy, and the church. On April 24, 2007, Loyola University Chicago renamed this Center of Excellence in honor of two generous friends and benefactors, Joan Los (BS’54) and Bill Hank— a couple who have an abiding love for integrated scholarship in the Jesuit tradition. Thanks to their generosity and vision, the radiant light of the Catholic Intellectual Heritage will inform the work of Loyola University Chicago for many years to come.
Learn more at https://www.luc.edu/ccih/
Eric Clayton is the deputy director of communications at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States and the award-winning author of “Where Wonder Leads: Findin God Through Fairy Tales, Myth and Contemplative Prayer,” “Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness,” and more. Follow his writing at ericclaytonwrites.com.
