CBHD’s new location at LeTourneau University, known as The Christian Polytechnic University, prompts us to reflect on the term “polytechnic” and how bioethics is a polytechnic field. At its root, polytechnic simply means “many arts,” and more specifically, combining the liberal arts with the technical, or “practical,” arts. Bioethics has always been multidisciplinary, drawing from Medicine, Theology, Philosophy, Law, and many other fields. Ethics is applied philosophy, and bioethics specifically combines the technical with the philosophical. It goes beyond asking an abstract question, like “What does it mean to be a human living in community?” to “What will we do with this patient right here before us?” Bioethics, it seems, is very much a polytechnic field.
And just as CBHD has championed a distinctly Christian view of bioethics for the last thirty years, LeTourneau University takes a distinctly Christian view of the polytechnic.
Our 2026 Summer Conference, then, will focus on the polytechnic nature of bioethics, including the various fields from which the discipline draws; the many issues raised that are immensely practical, technical, and temporal; and the deeply human and timeless questions that bioethics raises, like what we will or will not pursue when it comes to matters of life and death.
In addition to our annual Zimmerman Virtue Ethics Lecture, we are inviting talks on bioethics and public policy, ethics and advanced practice professionals, xenotransplantation and the future of organ donation, genetic screening and reproductive technologies, and many others.
We invite you to join us at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas, June 25–27, 2026, for The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s 33rd Annual Conference, Polytechnic Bioethics.
More information coming soon!
CBHD's conference will be held on the campus of LeTourneau University:
2100 S Mobberly Ave
Longview, TX 75602
