CHARLESTON, S.C., Dec. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Renaissance Weekend, the non-partisan retreat founded in 1981 to build bridges among innovative leaders from diverse fields, today brings 1,000 participants to Charleston, South Carolina, for 500 lectures, seminars, discussions, and performances concluding with their singing of "Auld Lang Syne" and "God Bless America" at the stroke of the New Year.

The tradition was founded and is hosted by the former US Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, Philip Lader, who is chairman of WPP plc, the world's largest advertising/media services company, and his wife, Linda Lader.

"For 29 years," Ambassador Lader said, "Renaissance Weekend has continued to be a cross-generational conversation among accomplished individuals with widely divergent perspectives. Civility prevails; partisanship is frowned upon; and commercialism is banned."

"Though strikingly different views of religion, politics, and every other field are represented, there is more light than heat," Lader added.

The meetings are likened to the reunion of "an extended family" of prominent leaders in business and finance, education, religion, law and medicine, government, the media, science and technology, sports, non-profits and the arts. This year's gathering includes CEOs, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, artists and scientists, astronauts, athletes and university presidents, judges, journalists and diplomats, as well as government, non-profit, and religious leaders.

The breadth and diversity of discussions is illustrated by the following partial list of this New Year's participants:

• Obama Administration "Drug Czar" Gil Kerlikowski
• Physics Nobel laureate Bill Phillips
• Former Bush Administration Interior Secretary, & US Senator, Dirk Kempthorne
• Former Clinton Administration Education Secretary & South Carolina Governor Richard Riley
• Space Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly & Astronaut Joan Higginbotham
• TV's "24" Executive Producer, Howard Gordon
• Peterson Foundation President & former US Comptroller-General, David Walker
• Former Bush Administration Under Secretary of State, & Ogilvy & Mather Chair, Charlotte Beers
• Flags of Our Fathers author, Ron Powers
• Time's 2002 Person of the Year, & former Enron executive, Sherron Watkins
• Microfinance giant, Opportunity International President A.T. Tshibaka
• American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene
• "(500) Days of Summer" & "Pink Panther" screenwriter Scott Neustadter
• Columbia University Medical Center Dean Lee Goldman
• Barbara Bush's former Chief of Staff, Susan Porter Rose
• Passages author Gail Sheehy
• Evangelist Leighton Ford
• Hedge fund managers Samuel Gottesman & Jeff Weber
• Conservative direct mail guru Richard Viguerie
• Why Bad Things Happen to Good People author, Rabbi Harold Kushner
• Financial writer Andrew Tobias
• RPI president & former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair, Shirley Jackson
• Financial Services Roundtable President, & former Dallas Mayor, Steve Bartlett
• NBA consecutive free-throw record-holder Stan McKenzie
• MacArthur Prize-winning education professor Howard Gardner
• Media venture capitalist Kay Koplovitz
• Society of Neuroscientists president Mickey Goldberg
• New Yorker humor writer, & "Ice Age 3" screenwriter, Yoni Brenner
• Yale and Princeton theologians Lamin Sanneh and Elaine Pagels
• Sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer
• SAS Institute Co-founder John Sall
• Newsweek contributing editor, & TV commentator, Eleanor Clift
• You Just Don't Understand & Talking 9-5 author Deborah Tannen
• Former CNN Business anchor Myron Kandel
• African Methodist Episcopal bishops Vashti McKenzie & Bill Deveaux
• MIT media sociologist Sherry Turkle
• Economics historian John Steele Gordon
• Game software developer Nt Etuk
• Conservation ecologist Stuart Pimm
• American Council on Education, & former UNC System, President, Molly Broad
• God's Politics' author Jim Wallis
• CalTech cosmologist/theoretical physicist Sean Carroll
• Fortune Cookie Chronicles author Jenny 8 Lee, and
• Washington lawyer Thurgood Marshall, Jr.

Programs cover a broad spectrum of public policy and personal issues, such as

• Apocalypse Not (What's the Economy's "New Normal"?)
• Yes, He Can!!??? (Assessing the Obama Administration's First Year)
• Where's Hollywood Heading?
• What Christians Don't Understand about Islam
• How Galaxies Form & Evolve
• Financing Smart Power & Renewable Energy
• The Saga of Healthcare Reform
• Brains Behind Technology's Better Mousetraps
• Freedom's History
• Recalibrating Risk in a Moral Hazard Economy
• Treatable Scourges of the Immune System
• Transforming Non-profits into e-Organizations
• Why the New Gold Rush Is Green
• Digital Convergence
• How Young People's Brains Differ from Past Generations'
• Books that Change Lives
• Invisible Wounds of War
• Rediscovering Values ... On Wall Street, Main Street, and Our Streets
• Why More Education Spending Brings Only Mixed Results
• Is Print Obsolete?
• Miracles of Microfinance
• Understanding the Personal Genome & Its Applications
• How Do We Cope with the Internet Age's Erosion of Privacy?
• Where Should Your Money Be Now?
• What I Wish My Parents Had Told Me
• Chronicles of Philanthropy

The New Year's gathering, designed to be the largest, is traditionally held in the Laders' hometown. Additional Renaissance Weekends in 2010 are scheduled in Santa Monica on President's Day, Hilton Head Island on July 4th, and Aspen on Labor Day.

"Each Renaissance Weekend, with equally distinguished participants, seeks to build bridges across traditional divides of religion and politics, geography and generations, religions and philosophies," Mrs. Lader explained.

Renaissance Weekend celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2005 with past participants Gerald R. Ford and Bill Clinton as co-chairmen. More than a dozen past candidates for US president have regularly attended Renaissance Weekends.

SOURCE The Renaissance Institute

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