Theme: Creation and Imagination Keynote speaker: Daniel McInerny
Daniel McInerny is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College. He is also a novelist and dramatist. As both a theorist and practitioner of literary art, McInerny brings a combination of technical precision and down-to-earth relevance to Christian conversations around writing and literature.
As a philosopher of the arts, he is foremost interested in reactivating an Aristotelian understanding of art as mimesis or imitation. His 2024 book on the arts, "Beauty and Imitation," was described by one reviewer as "literally the best book on beauty that I have ever read: the most convincing, clear, and comprehensive; the most eye-opening and satisfying; the most insightful and delightful." McInerny is currently working on a sequel to this, centred around the philosophy of creativity.
McInerny's novel "The Good Death of Kate Montclair" (2023) depicts a brave woman in midlife struggling to come to terms with a terminal diagnosis by joining an apparently innocent death discussion group. Hailed by writer Maya Sinha as “an instant classic of 21st-century Catholic fiction,” it deals with one of our culture's most hotly contested issues, euthanasia, as well as with the themes of conscience as an argument for God’s existence, and bespoke spirituality and ritual in our contemporary world. McInerny has also authored a play, The Actor, about the subversive wartime theatrical activities of the young Karol Wojtyla, the man who would become Saint John Paul II.
McInerny’s substack