A Faith That Builds Worlds: the Catholic Imagination and Speculative Storytelling Conference

March 14, 2026

8am–5pm

McCormick Lounge, Coffey Hall, Lake Shore Campus

Registration for this event is free.

At that time Jesus said in reply, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.—Mt 11:25

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.