Beyond Individualism: May 15th Conference
Posted: 13 January 2010
Do you struggle to find the language to explain what the Bible has to say to the world (the ‘iWorld’) about relationships?
Do you want to avoid sounding as if you want to take society back to the so-called traditional morality of the 1950s (the ‘tWorld’)?
Do you want to be able to convey the hope and joyful alternative, the relational well-being offered by the gospel (the ‘rWorld’)?
Do you want to be able to say ‘come and see how our church family shows a better way of living’?
Join us in Cambridge this weekend for our 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 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). We are organising the conference together with another Cambridge-based research body, KLICE.
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