Dominican Lay Scholars Offer Conference on Poverty and Morality

REDONDO BEACH, CA May 12, 2008 --In collaboration with the Ethikon Institute, the Dominican Lay Scholars Community (DLSC) co-sponsored a high level conference on Poverty and Morality from March 28-30 in Redondo Beach, California. 

Organized by the DLSC's managing director and chaired by William A. Galston of the Brookings Institute, the conference was structured as a dialogue event, involving authoritative spokespersons for diverse moral systems, both religious and secular. 

Moral traditions and other perspectives represented in the dialogue included Buddhism, Christianity, Classical Liberalism, Confucianism, Egalitarian Liberalism, Feminism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Marxism, Natural Law, and development economics.  Distinguished spokespersons for these perspectives included Michael Walzer (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (New School University), David R. Loy (Xavier University), Kent Van Til (Hope College), Loren E. Lomasky (University of Virginia), Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Brown University), Darrel Moellendorff (San Diego State University), Nancy Hirschmann (University of Pennsylvania), Arvind Sharma (McGill University), Noam Zohar (Bar Ilan University), Andrew Levine (University of Maryland), Stephen J. Pope (Boston College), and Peter Hoffenberg (University of Hawaii). 

The project is designed to produce another book for The Ethikon Series in Comparative Ethics.  In a previous dialogue-publication project, the DLSC collaborated with the Ethikon Institute in a conference and book on prospects for a planetary ethic. The conference for that project was held in Salamanca, Spain, and the book produced through it, The Globalization of Ethics, was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. 

Further information on the DLSC is available on its website. Information on the Ethikon Institute is available on its web site