At a recent Christian worldview conference at a leading university, a student asked "Is there a model for engaging the culture?" The panel of experts were stumped. Of course, there is. William Wilberforce and his Clapham friends developed the first issue campaigning in England and in doing so changed the nation's view to support the abolition of the slave trade and then slavery, but equally important this small group of friends changed England from a self-indulgent and decadent world of the late 18th century into a much more civilized world by their active engagement and philanthropy. This talk will outline how this small group of about 10 people did that and how we can do that today.

The presidential primary campaigns have demonstrated with tremendous clarity three fundamental ways in which Americans interact with religion: the civil approach, the experiential approach, and the realist approach. However, the media, government, and political cultures continue to look at the thinking of religious people in a very monolithic fashion. A deeper understanding of the ways various people approach religious knowledge would help judges, government officials, and even political strategists connect in much more helpful ways with their constituencies.

To the dismay of many, religion is becoming one of the defining issues of the presidential election campaign. From the scrutiny of Mike Huckabee's views about evolution and Mitt Romney's Mormonism on the Republican side, to unseemly e-mails questioning the religious upbringing of Barack Obama among Democrats, religious faith is once again front and center in electoral politics. At the same time as some are paying increased notice to religion in the campaign, others are lamenting that not enough attention is being paid to science. Ironically, both the preoccupation with religion and the avoidance of science in the presidential campaign may have been fueled by the scientific community itself.

In a world torn apart by religious extremism on the one side and a strident secularism on the other, no question is more urgent than how we live with our deepest differences-especially our religious and ideological differences. In his recent book, The Case for Civility, Os Guinness makes a passionate plea to put an end to the polarization of American politics and culture that -- rather than creating a public space for real debate -- threatens to reverse the very principles our founders set into motion and that have long preserved liberty, diversity, and unity in this country.

What do Aristotle, Descartes, the Regensburg Address of Pope Benedict XVI, and the debate about teaching "intelligent design" in public schools have in common? They coalesce around the question of the nature and limits of human reason, the respective roles of science and religion, and the possibility of real philosophical knowledge. In this whirlwind tour of Western intellectual history, Mark Ryland will argue that the wisdom of Aristotle, largely lost at the time of the scientific revolution inaugurated by Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and (above all) Newton, must be restored in order to find the proper order and relation between science, philosophy, and religion. He will briefly apply this neo-classical solution to the debate about teaching evolution in public schools.

Education is most often understood in light of scientific and economic utilitarianism. The modern system of education is seen mainly as the way in which we train our students to be effective contributors to the economic viability of the United States. Even moral or character educations is understood in light of its pragmatic benefits. You teach people stealing is wrong, not because it is a transcendent good, but because of the impact stealing has on the economy at large. Modern education is hamstrung by its inability to properly make value judgments about what is normative about ethical behavior.

But what then should education look like? Can education in a pluralistic society make statements about truth? If education is the means by which we come to train others to know what is really true and what is false, who decides what is true?

Evangelicals today probably have more political influence in the U.S. than at any time in the last century--but they may not be certain what to do with it. It has been difficult to develop a unified voice on pressing issues such as social justice and moral renewal. Ron Sider's new book, The Scandal of Evangelical Politics, seeks to provide evangelical Christians with a systematic political philosophy to guide and sustain political activism. In his lecture, Sider will talk about the need for Christians on Capitol Hill to base their political activity in biblical principles guided by a careful study of society.

No phrase in American letters has had a more profound influence on church-state law, policy, and discourse than Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation between church and state," and few metaphors have provoked more passionate debate. Introduced in an 1802 letter to the Danbury, Connecticut Baptist Association, Jefferson's "wall" is accepted by many Americans as a concise description of the U.S. Constitution's church-state arrangement and conceived as a virtual rule of constitutional law.

Despite the enormous influence of the "wall" metaphor, almost no scholarship has investigated the text of the Danbury letter, the context in which it was written, or Jefferson's understanding of his famous phrase. Dr. Dreisbach will give an in-depth examination of the origins, controversial uses, and competing interpretations of this powerful metaphor in law and public policy.

Fairy tale and modern fantasy stories project fantastic other worlds; but they also pay close attention to real moral "laws" of character and virtue. By portraying wonderful and frightening worlds in which ugly beasts are transformed into princes and evil persons are turned to stones and good persons back to flesh, fairy tales remind us of moral truths whose ultimate claims to normativity and permanence we would not think of questioning.

In recent decades, too many Christians have forgotten about the importance of narrative and story-telling. Jesus used many parables to impart moral truths, knowing the power of stories to form one's moral imagination. Christians would do well to recover this truth.

There is a strange, almost eerie, quality to the debate over American strategy in the ongoing, multi-front war with international terrorists. Our adversaries have made it clear in both word and deed that their struggle is a "holy war" waged by true believers against "infidels" and "heretics," but the head of the FBI's counter-terrorism unit has freely admitted under oath that he neither knows the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, nor considers that information to be particularly important to his work. Though Americans are a religious people, whose culture was described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1832 as "a marvelous combination" of "the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom," recent studies have concluded that "[c]urrent U.S. government frameworks for approaching religion are narrow, often approaching religions as problematic or monolithic forces, overemphasizing a terrorism-focused analysis of Islam and sometimes marginalizing religion as a peripheral humanitarian or cultural issue."

Is it possible that America's leaders and foreign policy establishment neither understand the character of our enemy, nor the strategic value of America's extraordinary ability to draw energy, optimism, and courage from our unique fusion of faith and freedom? Professor Destro will consider the role of religion in American public life and diplomacy in light of Sun Tzu's warning in The Art of War: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."

Modern economics did not begin with Adam Smith, as some contend. Instead, it is rooted in Thomas Aquinas, who integrated elements of thinkers from Aristotle to Augustine to create the first complete outline of economics, which was taught for more than five centuries by all major Catholic and Protestant thinkers.

How can the church resolve socially contentious questions about women's rights (and men's roles)? How can Christians demonstrate a fresh solution that goes beyond the conservative-liberal deadlock? A surprising new perspective emerges when we consider history. Before the Industrial Revolution, most work was performed in the home and its outbuildings (barn, mill, shop). A household's income was not a matter of the father's job but the family industry. Husband and wife worked side by side, sharing in economic production as well as child-rearing. It was only after the Industrial Revolution that husbands began leaving their families all day to work in offices or factories, while women were cut off from economically productive work. When people talk about the traditional family, often they have in mind the family of the 1950s. But a truly traditional approach would go back much further. Over the vast scope of human history, men and women have enjoyed a greater balance of work and parenting, and Pearcey's contention is that it was healthier for both of them.

The presentation will be based on chapter 12 in Pearcey's Gold-Medallion winning book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity.

Who are the true enemies of the West? What do they believe? And why are our efforts against them so critical to the future of our civilization? Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, will evaluate the impact of the Islamo-Fascist threat on the future of the Judeo-Christian world and the importance of our response.

In their efforts to be tactically effective, Christian activists have sometimes allowed controversial issues to be defined by terms that limit the range of political reflection. Using conventional language in political debate may help with focus-groups and with sound-bite media coverage (e.g., "right to life"). But they can obscure the deep differences in understanding reality that are at the root of our most intense disagreements. What's worse, rhetoric carelessly employed can reinforce assumptions that "got us into this mess in the first place." Must Christians in politics accept conventional framing of issues, or should they acknowledge in their own use of language the need for paradigm shifts on many important issues? And if the way we think and talk about issues needs to be different, how do we communicate the significance of that difference that to the media, to constituencies, and to fellow lawmakers?

Global news is generally bad news. On the surface, the story is about war, poverty, ethnic and sectarian strife. Democracy movements advanced by the U.S. government seem to be stalled or even reversed. Yet just below the surface, more hopeful trends are brewing. A new global awareness of the people at "the bottom of the pyramid" is summoning forth an unprecedented response to human need and suffering.

U.S. military and economic power are basic components of America’s presence in the world; but in an environment of rampant anti-Americanism, it is compassion that is America’s most consequential export. Civil society, once the distinctive characteristic of American democracy, is now advancing across the globe, carrying with it new forms of philanthropy, citizenship, and volunteerism. Tens of thousands of voluntary associations are prying open closed societies from within, solving problems in new ways, and forming the seedbed for a long-term cultivation of democratic norms.

The peace church tradition associated with the Mennonites, Quakers and others has always been a part of the landscape of American Evangelicalism. That tradition however tended to eschew active political involvement as "outside the perfection of Christ." Over the past several decades, however, evangelical pacifists have rejected the "quietism" of their peace church ancestors in favor of an active role in politics and statecraft. In his talk, Keith Pavlischek will show how this blend of absolutist pacifism and political activism (especially in foreign policy) results in nothing less than moral and political confusion.

Dr. Sommerville will make two main points having to do with countering secularist assumptions that may be blocking any consideration of religious points of view. One is that arguments are often won not by the reasons or ideas in them, but simply by the words people use. There are words that trump any argument, that are absolutized in current discourse. Second, there is a key to choosing effective words for presenting Christian viewpoints, which is the language of the human good. This is because such considerations of value quickly get into questions of ultimate value. And that, we understand, is the area of religion. By way of contrast, Dr. Sommerville will address the dominant ideologies which shape American debates, which are liberalism, naturalism, and market freedom.