Renaissance Weekend Celebrates 25th Anniversary With 1,850 Notables

CHARLESTON, S.C., Dec. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Renaissance Weekend, the non-partisan family retreat for innovative leaders from diverse fields, celebrates its 25th anniversary with 1,850 long-time friends gathering for the New Year's weekend in Charleston, South Carolina.

Former President Bill Clinton, US Senator Hillary Clinton, former Bush Administration Attorney-General Dick Thornburgh, Presidential adviser David Gergen, Apollo 13 commander James Lovell, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, comedian Stephen Colbert, former US Poet-laureate Rita Dove, GOP Congressman Chris Shays, MIT president Susan Hockfield, health guru Dean Ornish, and conservative leader Richard Viguerie will be among the Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize-winners, college presidents, religious leaders, and others returning.

Renaissance Weekends were founded in 1981 by Linda LeSourd Lader and her husband, Philip Lader, the former US Ambassador to the Court of St. James and now Chairman of the global media/advertising company, WPP Group.

"The Weekends," Ambassador Lader explains, "seek to build bridges across generations, ideologies, religions, and politics. They are a continuing conversation of accomplished individuals characterized by 'more light than heat.'"

New Year's is the largest of the Renaissance Weekends, but others are scheduled in 2006 for Santa Barbara, Quebec, Park City, and Kiawah Island. They have the spirit, Mrs. Lader observes, of "an extended family reunion of remarkable people with widely divergent backgrounds and views."

Over the New Year's Renaissance Weekend, 700 lectures, seminars, workshops, panels and entertainment programs, led by all the participants themselves, will address public policy and personal issues. In half-day Academies, authorities will focus on scientific, religious, foreign affairs, and economics subjects.

The gathering is "decidedly apolitical and non-partisan," Ambassador Lader notes. "CEOs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, artists and scientists, astronauts and ministers, judges, diplomats and professors far out-number the participants engaged in politics." One program, for example, will discuss "Conservatism in America," with several Republican Congressmen, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, former publisher of the "Conservative Digest," and GOP pollster Frank Luntz.

This year's group will include more than 20 former Rhodes and Marshall Scholars, a dozen Emmy, MacArthur and Pulitzer Prizewinners, five astronauts, eight current and former Governors and US Senators, 15 judges, and several dozen evangelical Christian, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim and other religious leaders.

Renaissance Weekend's diversity is illustrated by the following participants in this 25th anniversary year:

  * Broadway actor Theo Bikel

  * Former Marine Corps General and astronaut Charles Bolden

  * American Conservative Union president David Keene

  * Former US Education Secretary Richard Riley

  * Pulitzer Prizewinning Presidential historian James MacGregor Burns

  * Vanderbilt University president Gordon Gee

  * Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People"

  * Yale child development authority James Comer

  * CNN public opinion analyst Bill Schneider

  * Former American Red Cross president Admiral Marsha Evans

  * "US News + World Report" Contributing Editor John Leo

  * Former US Senator Jean Carnahan

  * Former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Alan Blinder

  * CNN founder Ted Turner

  * Physics Nobel laureates William Phillips and Robert Richardson

  * Conservative talk-show host and former astronaut Walt Cunningham

  * Enron "whistle-blower" and "TIME" magazine's "2002 Person of the Year"
    Sherron Watkins

  * United Negro College Fund president Michael Lomax

  * Tiananmen Square student leader Li Lu

  * Hollywood Bowl conductor John Mauceri

  * "Christianity Today" Executive Editor Mickey Maudlin

  * "Readers Digest" editor Jackie Leo

  * Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe

  * Archivist of the US Allen Weinstein

  * Former International Monetary Fund Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff

  * Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer

  * UNC president Molly Corbett Broad

  * MacArthur Prizewinning Education leader Howard Gardner

  * Business Re-engineering guru Michael Hammer

  * PBS president Pat Mitchell

  * Former Australian Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock

  * JFK assistant and speech-writer Ted Sorensen

  * United Nations Under Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor

  * Norton Utilities inventor Peter Norton

  * Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack

  * Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute president and American Assn. For the
    Advancement of Science president Shirley Jackson

  * US Comptroller-General David Walker

  * CNN Financial Editor Myron Kandel

  * MacArthur Prizewinning Princeton Religion professor Elaine Pagels

  * Former US Senator Fritz Hollings

  * Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  * TV's "Adam Smith," Jerry Goodman

  * Former Reagan political adviser Paul Russo

  * SAS Institute Co-Founder John Sall

  * World religions authority Lamin Sanneh

  * Former US Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater

  * The Corporate Library founder and shareholders' rights activist Nell
    Minow

  * TV news anchor Boyd Matson

  * Washington pundit Norm Ornstein

  * "Archie" Comics publisher Michael Silberkleit

  * Yale University chaplain Frederick Streets

  * "You Just Don't Understand" author Deborah Tannen

  * Former Johns Hopkins Public Heath Dean Alfred Sommer

  * Financial writer Andrew Tobias

  * MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle

  * Columbia University Social Work Dean Jeannette Takamura


  Source:
  The Renaissance Institute
  P.O. Box 22049
  Charleston, SC 29413