Beyond Individualism: May 15th Conference
Posted: 12 January 2010
Each year, Jubilee Centre tries to organise at least one major event in the UK to give people the chance to engage with us, our research and materials. In 2010, together with another Cambridge-based research body, KLICE, we are planning a one-day conference, Beyond Individualism: Applying A New Sexual Ethic, with keynote speaker pastor Dr Dale Kuehne, author of Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking relationship beyond an age of individualism.
Politics professor and pastor in New Hampshire, Dale was one of the key researchers for the Jubilee Centre's four-year project looking into biblical sexual ethics. Examining current issues pertaining to sexuality and society, Sex and the iWorld asks, 'What kind of world are we creating? And is it a world that is actually harming us more than benefiting us?'
Dale will open the conference on May 15th by contrasting the long-established 'tWorld', in which traditional morality reigned and recent innovations would have been inconceivable, with the post-Enlightenment 'iWorld', in which these innovations are promoted because the perceived immediate needs of the individual are paramount. Both, he finds, fall short of the more biblical 'rWorld', in which a larger web of healthy and nourishing social relationships provides the most personally fulfilling context for sexuality and relational well-being.
Dr Jonathan Burnside (reader in biblical law at Bristol University and author of Jubilee Centre resources including Consent versus Community: What Basis for Sexual Offences?) will then lead another session, drawing on material from his forthcoming opus God, Justice and Society. Other confirmed speakers, to lead highly practical afternoon workshops, include Dr Guy Brandon (Jubilee Centre researcher and author of Just Sex: Is it ever just sex?), Rachel Gardner (Romance Academy's Creative Director and author of Cherished: Boys, Bodies and Becoming a Girl of Gold, which tackles issues facing teenage girls), and Rev Dr David Instone-Brewer (Senior Research Fellow at Tyndale House) and Dr Jenny Taylor (Lapido Media's Executive Director).
For the benefit of participants who plan on staying overnight in Cambridge, we are also offering a pre-conference supper the previous evening, at which Dale will speak about his role as Director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which has hosted the first primary debates in America's recent presidential elections.
We very much hope that you will be able to join us!
For further details, download the conference leaflet:
http://www.jubilee-centre.org/uploaded/files/beyondindividualism.pdf