CFP: JIS Symposium 2026: The Future of Democracy: Renewing Ordered Liberty

Suggested Themes:

By its 250th anniversary, American democracy is at a crossroads.  The American experiment in self-government faces a triple challenge: moral, cultural, and political.  In The Fragility of Order (2018), George Weigel recounts America’s major twentieth-century challenges whose successes have come into question.  Weigel argues that order is a “fragile thing,” and needs continual renewal, especially in a postmodern cultural context unsure about the truth of anything.  According to Weigel, order rapidly unraveled in the United States on three levels: moral, cultural, and political.  Skepticism and relativism of the moral order found expression in nihilism in both popular and high culture, which also translated into increased partisanship in the political order.  The question arises how to restore the American Founders’ ideal of a government that invoked “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” with a conception of human nature as a “crooked timber of humanity,” but redeemable, that set up a constitutional framework with checks and balances to circumscribe the exercise of political power.  If this “One nation under God, with liberty and justice for all,” is to endure, then its Judeo-Christian cultural roots need to be rediscovered to nurture individuals, families, and communities, reaffirming America’s promise of equality of opportunity, in contrast to quasi-Marxist “equity” as leveling egalitarianism or “equal outcomes,” a democratic temptation that Alexis de Tocqueville warned against in his Democracy in America.  The neo-Freudian obsession with sex and its perversions needs to yield to the imago Dei vision of human dignity (Gen 1:27); the un-American emphasis on race and gender in education and public policy (affirmative action/DEI) replaced by merit as the best criterion for gauging individual effort; while politics need the leaven of respect for all.  In brief, can America find its soul and redeem the American Dream?

JIS Symposium 2026 endeavors to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and denominations for an exciting international conference which takes both scholarship and faith seriously.  JIS Symposium 2026: The Future of Democracy: Renewing Ordered Liberty (Online via Zoom) is co-sponsored by IIR-ICSA-JIS.  All conference participants must pre-register.

Abstracts (250 words) due: April 1, 2026: c/o Dr. O. Gruenwald, JIS Editor, 1065 Pine Bluff Dr., Pasadena, CA 91107, USA, per e mail (no attachments) to: [email protected]. Include: Paper Title, First & Last Name, faculty or student, institution, mailing address, telephone & e-mail. Fully-developed papers will be considered for publication in the refereed Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies XXXIX 2027.  Web: https://www.jis3.org/symposium2026.