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I am reminded of Terry Pratchett’s Commander Vimes who occasionally comes out the wrong side of sober and feels in his head a hyperawareness of the world.

That’s usually how I feel after a L’Abri conference, and this year was no different. From meeting elderly sisters of the Faith to getting a nice, long chance to talk with Trevor and Denis to getting a touch of my dander up from the bioethics discussion…a good time was had by me. I am curious if there’s anyone else out there attended this year.

And I must say…I thought I had gotten [i:86da4dcdf8]Extraordinary Machine[/i:86da4dcdf8] out of my system. I learned quickly…not so much.

-Drew Johnson,
fishing for reactions

Err. That’s ‘Travis’, not ‘Trev’.

That’s always the problem of knowing interesting people with similar names…

OK, I’ll bite. I also attended the L’Abri conference, my first, aside from dipping in from time to time at the 50 year Jubilee in St. Louis last year. I also had a wonderful and perception altering time :shock: , and not because of the visits to Newt’s bar after each evenings sessions.

For me it served to uncover and remind me of the existence of some of the foundations of my worldview. Highlights for me included talks by Richard Winter on pornography and on perfectionism, talks by Henk Reitsema "About the Difference Between People, Rabbits and Computers" and on infanticide and related issues (I wanted to hear a Dutch person talk to this issue—and it was chilling), a talk by Dick Keyes on our culture of commodificationk, and, the highlight for me, Christopher Hook’s lecture, "Confronting a World of Designer Babies, Saviour Siblings and Re-engineered Transhumans: Towards a Theology of Biotechnology," which was stunning in its comprehensiveness and in its call for a strong willed, compassionate response.

This sort of conference is an aquarium I love and in which I could swim all my days, but that is part of the difficulty. Even though the topics are key philosophical and ethical discussions for the West, and in some areas for the whole world, I would like to see more engagement with issues of justice and globalization and other cultures. I am coming to this type of engagement late myself, and that in fits and starts, Nor do I want to simply replace one sort of discussion with another, but rather have a both/and approach. Keyes talk on commodification and Hooks plea for adoptions presented a few pathways in which these issues might be broken out.

Finally, I am not much one for political correctness or quotas but it was somewhat disheartening to see an almost completely lily-white crowd of 700 or so, despite a pixel of color here and there, the number of which I think I could count on my two hands. And, I am not saying this simply because of my lovely, Pakistani/American, brown shade of melanin (I like to say that I think Jesus was my color). I suppose what I want is this conferences issues to be more relevant to people of color (though I am not crazy about that term—as if white folk have no flava) and the issues of a globals community be more relevant to this conference.

Your observations about the homogenous crowd are interesting, dassler—I notice there were no women in your list of favored speakers, either. This tendency is something *culture is not optional struggles with, too, though I’m glad to see that half of the presenters we’ve invited for the Practicing Resurrection conference are women, even if the list is still decidedly European. Perhaps those of us in the "dominant culture" should start stepping out and attending events that are traditionally for people of color, in addition to figuring out how to make "white" events more diverse. It seems the only way to break the mold is to pursue relationships and get our stories intersecting.

Kirstin, you point out a dimension that I had not considered. And it may be "can o’ worms" opening time, but hopefully not. First, fully 5 of the 22 speakers at this conference were women. And perhaps that is another thing that needs to be corrected. So, statistically my odds in randomly attending a talk by a woman would have been under 25%.

I attended the talks I did, though, because those were the ones in which I was most interested. Do I have some internal, selecting mechanism which avoids attending talks by women. Not necessarily, but I am not going to lie and say that that might not be a factor in my thinking, conscious or unconsious, in some situations. The more important factors for me are whether the presenter is talking about something that interests me and whether they are engaging to me (if I have heard them before). The issue of whether women are afforded or take opportunities to lecture on specific issues is larger discussion.

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