Human dignity is something that should drive how one views society, culture, politics, and everything else around oneself.
It’s this belief which led a group of Hillsdale College students to partner with the World Youth Alliance to hold The Modern Identity Crisis: Emerging Leaders Conference, which will take place Feb. 16-17. The conference will examine topics ranging from bioethics and culture wars to sex and gender.
According to official promotional materials, the conference’s purpose is to “analyze the modern identity crisis of the human person with an interdisciplinary approach; identify and educate about contemporary problems with regards to bioethics and other topics of human dignity; propose and implement grassroots-level responses.”
“Once you realize that the random people you see on the street are human people and have dignity, that’s a radical and life-changing thing,” said sophomore Dietrich Balsbaugh, a member of the conference student leadership team. “Once we start there, everything else builds off of that.”
Two speakers will deliver keynote addresses to interested students and members of the public.
Ashley K. Fernandes, MD, PhD, is the associate director of the center for bioethics and medical humanities at Ohio State University College of Medicine and an associate professor of pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. In a pre-conference talk on Feb. 16, Fernandes will address the possibility about a move toward an end to assisted suicide and euthanasia.
On Feb. 17, Fernandes will deliver her keynote address on courage in an age of secularist medicine with an eye towards bioethics.
Member of the leadership team sophomore Sarah Becker, who spent the past summer as an intern at the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, said she believes there is a need for a type of natural-law framework within bioethics, which Fernandes promotes.
“When you don’t start with the human person, it’s not going to serve the human person,” Becker said. “I think we must start with ‘Who is the human person? How is he constituted? What constitutes his flourishing?’ Then we build and expand into policy, education, health, and other things.”
Christopher O. Tollefsen, PhD, a professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, will deliver the keynote address on Saturday, titled “The Ethics of Medicine and its Counterfeits.”
Around these keynote addresses are several other lectures with members from various departments of the Hillsdale College faculty, as well as lectures from Julia Kenney, director of operations of the World Youth Alliance North America. Faculty members will also lead participants through a series of breakout groups in order to foster serious consideration and discussion of the core issues.
“We have tried to choose professors from a variety of disciplines and also professors whom students have taken lots of classes with and are aware of,” Becker said. “I think that gives the students and the professors a basis that they can work from. And I think that will allow the conversation to go deeper, more quickly.”
Sophomore Cait Weighner, a member of the student leadership team, expressed the importance of these types of questions to members of all sectors of campus and beyond.
“I think often in facing these issues, we fear they will pose some challenge or threat to how we want to see the world,” Weighner said. “But if we actually think that we both have the truth and are pursuing it, then we must face these things in earnest and reshape the way we see things accordingly.”
Professor of Philosophy and Religion Nathan Schlueter agreed with Weighner on the universal importance of these topics and referenced C.S. Lewis’ prescient warnings about modern science and technology in “The Abolition of Man.”
“I think all of these issues are of intrinsic human interest,” Schlueter said. “We all face birth, death, marriage, and illness, and so we should all be concerned with technologies that profoundly affect these, such as bioengineering, in vitro fertilization, and euthanasia. If you want to be ready to engage the culture when you come out of here you better be there.”
Registration is now open for the event through Facebook. Additionally, walk-up registrations will be accepted on the day of the conference.
