2019 Blandy Lectures and Alumni Convocation

Mental health care, especially the practice of psychiatry, is often focused on establishing and maintaining control over distressing or disvalued emotion, experience, and behavior.   Control over one’s body and one’s life is an important human good, especially for survivors of trauma.   But control is not the highest good, and programs of mental health care that focus on control may promote unhealthy practices of self-surveillance and subjection to technologies of control.   By contrast, Christian reflection on action and contemplation has often emphasized that control is a proximate good that enables and points toward the higher goods of love, wonder, and contemplation.   What would it look like for mental health care practices to be oriented not toward control but toward wonder?   Focusing on St. Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of the active life and contemplative life (Summa theologiae IIaIIae qq. 179-182), we will explore the role of prudence and the moral virtues in framing healthy strategies of control that yet point beyond themselves toward the capacity for love and wonder for God and for all that God has made-and how mental health care would look different as a result.

Continuing Education

Several continuing education sessions will be offered, including:

• Undoing Anti-Judaism in the Liturgy presented by The Rev. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski and Rabbi Neil Blumofe.
• New Telemental Health Practices: Ethics, Rules and Clinical Considerations presented by the Southwest Counseling Faculty

Worship in Christ Chapel

Dinner, Live Music and more!

“Wendy Colonna is not just a singer-songwriter, she’s a force of nature.” – Austin American-Statesman

Blandy revs up as it winds down with dinner, live music, and a pep rally for our ThuriBulls in the next day’s Polity Bowl. Austin singer-songwriter Wendy Colonna will entertain with her soulful style that has been described as a soul singer, who, “delivers hard-hitting truths about loss, anguish, and love.”

Find the full Blandy schedule below.

For more information, please contact Katherine Bailey Brown, director of annual giving and alumni relations, at [email protected] or 512.472.4133 ext. 333.

Full Blandy schedule:

Thursday, November 7

1:30                 Registration, light bites, and drinks

1:45                 Welcome and Overview

2:00                 Continuing Ed Session 1: Undoing Anti-Judaism in the Liturgy, The Rev. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, PhD & Rabbi Neil Blumofe

3:00                 Break

3:15                 Continuing Ed Session 2: Undoing Anti-Judaism in the Liturgy, The Rev. Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, PhD & Rabbi Neil Blumofe

4:15                 Break

5:30                 Alumni Eucharist

6:30                 Dinner & Presentation of Hal Brook Perry Award

7:30                 Warren Kinghorn Lecture: Walking with Veterans After War: Combat Trauma, Moral Injury, and the Journey Home

8:45                 Dessert Reception

Friday, November 8

8:30                 Breakfast with the Dean

9:30                 Morning Prayer

10:15               Warren Kinghorn Lecture: From Control to Wonder: Action, Contemplation, and Modern Mental Health Care

11:15               Break

11:30-1:30       Center Continuing Ed Lunch & Learn: Telemental Health- Ethics and Practice Considerations, Southwest Faculty

11:45               Holy Eucharist

12:30               Lunch Panel Discussion

1:45                 Share Shop Session 1

3:00                 Break

3:15                 Share Shop 2

4:30                 Break

5:00                 Evening Prayer

5:30                 Polity Bowl Pep Rally

6:00                 Celebration Dinner

6:30                 Live Music

Saturday, November 9

10:00               Polity Bowl