The Sanderling Resort, North Carolina

Duck Beach Symposium at The Sanderling Resort in North Carolina, May 31st, 2010 from 9am-1pm

The John Adams Center is proud to sponsor an academic symposium on Duck Beach in North Carolina at  The Sanderling Resort, 1461 Duck Rd. We’ll be getting everyone together to flex our cerebral cortices before summer officially begins!

The focus of the event will be to discuss “Mormons and the Public Square.” Duck Beach is the perfect location as it’s where many of the young, intelligent, and ambitious LDS from around the country often get together! Come join us for an intriguing discussion about how our religion relates to public life!

Some of the speakers and topics include:

• Daniel Peterson, “Mormons, Muslims and Religious Freedom”
• Warner Woodworth: “The Fourth Mission of the Church: Personal and Political Implications”
• Ralph Hancock, “Liberalism, Conservatism, Mormonism”
• James Ceaser, “Religious Voices in American Politics: Opportunities and Constraints”

The idea of Human Rights is now the common language of ethical and political debate and deliberation in Western democracies and indeed throughout the world – often even for peoples who would contest the essentials of Western liberalism. So dominant is this vocabulary of rights that it might almost seem impertinent to inquire into its sources or foundations, except that the very meaning of these rights, as well as the relation of the ethics of rights to other moral vocabularies and bonds of community, remains very much an open question.

Central to the philosophical problem of Human Rights is the question of the role of Biblical religion and of appeals to nature and reason. Human rights are in one sense asserted against any superhuman authority, and in their classical form these rights were held to be founded upon a “nature” accessible to simple human reason. And yet the very sense of the dignity of every human individual that informs our rights seems clearly to have sprung from a Judeo-Christian understanding.

Does the authority and even the meaning of human rights require a faith in God or, alternatively, a foundation in nature? Or is humanity now able to affirm its dignity and its rights without recourse to any foundation, whether natural or divine? These and related questions will be examined through a series of lectures and discussions involving noted scholars invited to join us in Provo and Orem as well as numerous participants from the host institutions.

For more information and a comprehensive schedule of events: Download our PDF