Interregnum XV Theme Announced

The King’s College is pleased to announce the theme for Interregnum XV: Order and Chaos. Throughout the 2018-19 academic year, students will compete in a series of academic and artistic feats centered around this theme, culminating in the three-day competitive festival April 10-12, 2019. The theme draws from required readings chosen by the committee, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the biblical text of Ecclesiastes. The evening lecture will be held on April 9, 2019. (For a review of how this unique tradition came into practice at King’s, you can catch up with “A Brief History of Interregnum.”)

This year’s Interregnum Committee comprises Hank Jeannel (RTS ’20) as chair, Zsuzsa Williford (PPE ’19) as vice-chair, Elle Rogers (Philosophy ’19) as academics coordinator, Damaris Parry (RTS ’19) as events coordinator, Jackson Fordyce (Finance ’20) as institutional coordinator, Dr. Joshua Blander as faculty advisor, and Leticia Mosqueda as staff advisor.

Instead of the traditional fall Interregnum Reading Test, this year, students will engage with the readings through the Interregnum Film Festival on November 9-10, 2018. Houses will have 12 hours to produce a short film, filmed on a smartphone, in response to a prompt. Students will also be required to “interact critically with one another’s work in short film reviews,” the Committee says.

Jeannel says, “We wanted a theme that really drove at the idea of character formation. The need for order within and without is so great in the lives many of us lead, lives that are characterized by chaos and a lack of peace. We are excited to see engagement and, ultimately, edification happen around our campus this year as we embark on this academic enterprise.”

Students are asked to consider questions like the following: In what ways do our practices effect order or disorder in our lives, our souls, and our bodies? To what degree should governments attempt to halt the chaos that arises from human selfishness? What roles do peace and rest play in the Christian life? Is there organization to the cosmos and human existence, as Aristotle argued, or was Hobbes right to call life nasty, brutish, and short? Do pride and the desire for power necessarily produce chaotic consequences for the self and the community?

“At its best, Interregnum, like King’s, asks us to confront defining questions and chaotic realities with one another in ways that leave us and the institutions around us changed,” Rogers wrote in an op-ed published in the campus newspaper. “[Interregnum] demands that we become interlocutors in a great conversation that brings us in accord with tranquility and prepares us for the city to come.”