Symposium focuses on religion and life
ByChurch and state have intertwined discussions this week as scholars from all over the country, and even Peru, examine religion and culture at Utah State University.
The 2004 O.C. Tanner Symposium started Wednesday and will continue through Saturday. The purpose of the conference is to explore “the ways in which the spiritual values of our religions and cultures affect the choices we make in our lives, the ways in which we perceive our world and how we live in communities,” the schedule pamphlet states.
Several USU alumni, emeriti and professors will be presenting at the conference.
President Kermit L. Hall introduced Episcopalian Bishop Carolyn Tanner Irish as the opening speaker for the event.
Hall said he could think of no better person than Irish to speak at the symposium and claimed her as one of USU’s own because of an honorary degree in social sciences given in 2002.
“Our focus on this conference really is on spirituality. Spirituality is not the same as religion,” Irish said.
Irish is the 10th Episcopalian bishop of the diocese of Utah. She directs 6,000 people with 22 congregations in Utah and one in Arizona.
The conference is broken up into three parts – religion, culture and spiritual imperatives. Using these parts as a base, politics, culture and science has been explored.
“Science is too potent not to be answerable to a spiritual and religious framework,” Irish said when discussing the conference.
The O.C. Tanner Foundation, Marie Eccles Caine Foundation and the College of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences sponsored the conference. History department chair Norman Jones chaired the conference, leading a steering committee that chose how the event would run.
“I’m always amazed at the imaginative assembly of things put together for this symposium,” Irish said as she discussed the symposium.
Her speech focused on the involvement of universal spirituality in the conference.
“To my mind, [spirituality] is a more universal dimension of human life than religion,” Irish said.
USU President Kermit L. Hall will present at 2 p.m. Friday. His lecture, titled “The Supreme Court and ‘Values’ of Religion,” will address the “persist, powerful and often divisive struggle” between the constitutional law of religion and the role of the Supreme Court.
Gary Kiger, dean of the College of HASS, opened the conference quoting scripture.
“Religion involves ultimate values,” Kiger said, using politics as an example of this, specifically situations in the Middle East and Northern Ireland.
The conference has and will address everything from Mormon history to a session by Richard Steinberg titled “Yoga is Everything.”
Friday’s topics are centered on politics and religion’s involvement or detachment through history. Politics are the life of a city, in its largest sense, and every citizen participates whether actively, or passively, Irish said, referencing the recent elections.
Irish said spirituality is important because as human beings, people aspire to things, long for the divine and are inspired by experiences that give a certain sense of freedom from something or for something.
Though individuals often link spirituality and religion, not all religions share the same values, Irish said.
Spirituality, however, is a universal thing within all people, Irish said. She said the word spirit means breath universally in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
“Anyone attending the conference will come away with a deeper appreciation of how religion and culture interact in modern America,” the pamphlet states.
The O.C. Tanner symposium continues through Saturday with its final focus being on “spiritual imperatives in non-theistic and new age value systems.”
-natandrews@cc.usu.edu