The Association for Reformational philosophy in the Netherlands organizes about every five year an international symposium to bring its members and sympathizers from all over the world together and promote Reformational thinking. We plan to have the next symposium in the year 2005 and hope to use this special occasion to highlight the one Christian calling in a more and more unified and yet culturally very diverse world. We will try to establish a real exchange between Christians from different continents concerning the challenges of our time, looked upon from a biblical perspective.
As a theme of this symposium we have chosen: Ethics: Person, Practices and Society.

The relation of late modern culture to morality and ethics is filled with tension.
On the one hand we see in the past decennia a constant advance of ethics, especially in relation to social sectors and professional practices (for example, bio-ethics, computer ethics and business ethics).
Ethics has become professional in two senses: it is connected with a specific profession and it has become the business of specialists (often institutionalized in ethical committees and protocols).
On the other hand, at least in Western culture, a powerful resentment is at work against the rehabilitation of an obligatory morality in public life. There is a wide mistrust, especially among intellectuals and in the media against (the restitution of) communally shared values and norms.
Especially civic morality is the object of this criticism, a morality which is the result of a union between liberal Christianity and classical Humanism.

An important aim of the symposium is to analyse the spiritual and philosophical roots of the above named tension and to search for a Christian-philosophical perspective which can offer a more reliable orientation.

This analysis and search hold consecutively for the individual person, the various professional practices (and social institutions) as well as society as a whole.

The International Symposium was from Monday 08-15-2005 untill Friday 08-19-2005 in Hoeven, a small town in the South of the Netherlands.