Symbolic World Summit Oxford 2026

Symbolic World Summit at Oxford: Paradise Imagined

What do we mean when we speak of Paradise?

Is it a garden at the beginning of the world, a kingdom at the end of history, a hidden country glimpsed in story and vision, or a place we are learning to remember? Across Scripture, folklore, liturgy, and the symbolic imagination, Paradise appears again and again as the lost center: the place of communion, beauty, order, and encounter with God. Yet it is never merely behind us. It calls from ahead as well.

The Symbolic World Summit at Oxford: Paradise Imagined will gather speakers from across theology, storytelling, biblical interpretation, and symbolic thought to explore the many ways Paradise has been seen, lost, guarded, distorted, and sought. Together we will consider Eden and the Otherworld, the expulsion of the evil one and the return to the Garden, the city as a garment of skin, and the strange overlap between biblical cosmology and the deep mythic patterns of folk tradition.

Featuring talks from Dr. Martin Shaw, Aidan Hart, Fr. Jacob Siemens, Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Dcn. Seraphim Richard Rohlin, and Jonathan Pageau, this summit will invite participants to think beyond modern categories of “myth” and “history,” “imagination” and “reality.” Paradise is not simply an idea. It is an image of the world healed, a pattern of perception, and a promise that reshapes how we understand creation, fall, exile, repentance, and return.

Hosted in Oxford, a city layered with scholarship, pilgrimage, memory, and Christian imagination, Paradise Imagined will be a gathering for those who want to recover the symbolic vision of the world and ask what it means to seek Paradise now.