What potential is there for inter-religious connections in your community?

The United States is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world, and yet many individuals and congregations struggle with establishing authentic relationships with people of other religious traditions.

This course offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential for interreligious community in their own religious lives and relationships, and in their own communities, as well as to gather some practical skills and resources for this task.

A foundational conviction is that interreligious dialogue not only deepens the understanding and respect we have for other religious traditions, it can profoundly impact our understanding and experience of our own.

June 6 - July 22

Registration deadline: May 30. Cost $225; $175
for groups of 3 or more. 2 Continuing Education
Units available. Register here.

Just into our first semester of school our community may already be looking to us to play a rabbinic role and we want to live up to their, and our own, expectations. The jobs we are being offered, on the whole, are not asking us to come sit with a group of folks and talk about how confusing or complicated our personal prayer life is. They want us, understandably, to decode the basic outline of a Shabbat prayer service, or to teach new tunes for the holiday liturgy, or perhaps to look at the meaning of certain central prayers.

I have found for myself that it can become all too easy to slip into the role of leader and facilitator without fully allowing myself the space or giving myself the permission to be in the not knowing. And though the job opportunities may not include this in their descriptions, the place not knowing, at least with regards to prayer, is where most people reside. It’s useful and important to learn the skills—the pronunciation, tunes, choreography, nusach (traditional melodies)—but to evolve a deep and authentic prayer life we also need to continually asking ourselves: why? Not only do we need to sit with those questions to experience prayer in a true and rich way for ourselves, but also so we can relate honestly and compassionately with those who will be looking to us for leadership and guidance.

This past semester at school we tried something new. In addition to gathering as a whole community twice a week in the morning before school for prayer, we added a component called Tefilah (or Prayer) Groups. Each Thursday after our communal prayer experience we gathered in small groups of about 10 students and one faculty member. In these groups we had the opportunity to process, investigate, question, and uncover our relationship to prayer as guided by the prompts of our faculty member and the probing questions of our fellow students.

Our tefillah group, lead by my teacher and mentor Rabbi Ebn Leader, explored the large and perpetually-present questions of prayer. We looked at our conceptions of Gd and asked the question: where is Gd in my prayer? Through our discussions I became more cognizant of the fact that I regularly go through a week of participating in prayer without really bringing Gd into my consciousness. The systems we’ve designed to connect to the Force of the Universe are powerful and have been honed and molded over centuries, but it’s the quality of attention that we bring into these modes that makes them work for us or not.

A powerful question that we asked during our sessions and the one that took central stage in many of our discussions was: what is my goal in tefillah? It seems like such a simple and uncomplicated question in many ways but asking it has helped me to clarify what it is I am looking to get out of a prayer experience. Do I aim to feel gratitude, to worship Gd, to connect to community, to go inward, to sit with sadness, to repent, to feel myself in relation to the grandeur of the universe, to find a place of deep meaning within the Hebrew words, to feel comfort, to gain strength?

I learned that it was not so simple to figure out what my goal was in prayer, but that when I was able to do so establishing a goal helped me to focus my attention and energy in a specific direction. It also helped to open up many more important questions. If I determined that my goal was to worship Gd, I had to then ask the questions: what is Gd and what sort of tefillah would be fitting for Gd’s worship?

Towards the end of the semester we began to look at a question I found fascinating: what role does risk play in my tefillah? Is it a positive aspect that helps challenge us and open us up? Is it a negative aspect that limits us and closes us off? Is it the essence of our prayer? Ebn described that what he sees in the majority of synagogues across America is prayer being used to comfort people and to help strengthen ideas that they already hold, or already desire to hold. At a time when we require a radical shift in consciousness in order to live more sustainably on this planet, and, ultimately, to ensure the future survival of life on Earth as we know it, our prayer needs to go beyond helping us to holdfast to our entrenched ideas. Comfort and support is important, especially during these radically changing and challenging times, but so too is risk-taking and openness, not just to adapt to change but to initiate change.

In a traditional Jewish practice one engages in prayer four or five times per day. With this amount of time, energy, and attention directed toward prayer, what is our goal, and what sort of prayer life do we imagine could serve that goal? To the extent that our prayer is about serving Gd by serving the world at large, a key aspect of our prayer must be to help us learn to risk. To step across the great divide from the known that isn’t working to the unknown that contains our future. May our prayers help us to risk releasing that which is no longer useful and to risk opening ourselves to that which we can’t yet imagine.

This article was originally published on State of Formation.

The 2011 Research Colloquium seeks applications for individual research projects relating to the theme Explorations at the Intersection ofReligious Pluralism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue. Application deadline is February 1, 2011.

The 2011 summer Research Colloquium aims at bringing into conversation two discourses that currently run on parallel tracks. On the one hand, there is the discourse on religious pluralism and comparative theologies, which theorizes and reflects on the changing landscape of religious belongings in a globalized and pluralist world, such as multiple religious identities, religious hybridity and migration patterns, or conflicts between various world religions. On the other hand there is the Jewish-Christian relations discourse which has evolved with renewed urgency after the devastating impact of the Shoah and the founding of the State of Israel.

The Colloquium will bring together fellows who have worked on either one of these two parallel tracks and offer them an opportunity for in-depth scholarly exploration of commonalities and differences. By creating an environment conducive to research, open reflection and scholarly inquiry, participants are encouraged to learn from both the plurality of religious voices and the particularity of the case of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

There is a richness of resources that has accumulated in the research and literature on Jewish-Christian relations, but the discourse on Jewish-Christian dialogue may have suffered from a parochial narrowing of perspective. There is a visionary potential for religious plurality, but without deep engagement within a spiritual tradition it may suffer from civic indifference toward communities with deeply-felt religious roots.

At the Colloquium, participants of diverse backgrounds that represent areas of interest in either of the two discourses mentioned above will spend the length of four weeks together, pursuing individual research as well as gathering as a group for focused and facilitated discussions.

The Colloquium is led and facilitated by professors Katharina von Kellenbach, Karla Suomala, Björn Krondorfer and Charles Henderson. We already have a commitment from CrossCurrents, under the guest-editorship of Karla Suomala and Katharina von Kellenbach, to put together a themed volume on these explorations as they emerge in the colloquium.

If you have further questions about the content of the Colloquium, please contact Björn Krondorfer, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, bhkrondorfer@smcm.edu

Karla Suomala, Associate Professor, Religion Department, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa, suomka01@luther.edu.

Katharina von Kellenbach, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, kvonkellenbach@smcm.edu

Application Process:
The Colloquium runs for four weeks during July. Those who are selected for a fellowship are referred to as "Coolidge Scholars" after William A. Coolidge, the principal benefactor of this program. Each Coolidge Scholar works on his or her own project, but benefits by being able to collaborate with others. The collegial relationships that develop within the group are a crucial element of this program and one of its distinctive aspects.

The daily schedule allows a balance of structured and unstructured time, including:

1. Time for individual research, reflection and consultation with fellows and staff   2. Seminars for facilitated and focused discussion that also integrate work-in-progress reports by fellows   3. Common meals and opportunities to explore the artistic and cultural resources of New York City.

The Colloquium is residential and provides fellows with room and board (vegetarian/kosher food available) and access to libraries and research facilities at Columbia University, Teachers College, Union, Auburn and Jewish Theological Seminaries. Participants are required to pay a $125 registration fee upon acceptance plus the cost of travel.

Applications should be sent via an email that includes:

1) Title and brief description of the applicant's proposed project. 2) A brief resume including religious affiliation or preference, academic standing and professional experience. 3) The names, titles, institutional addresses and telephone numbers of two references. (You do not need to have these persons write a letter; we will contact references as needed.)

The successful applicant will be capable of writing for a publication of the caliber of CrossCurrents. Normally, fellows will hold doctorates; some will have professional degrees; a few will qualify by reason of equivalent experience.  For ideas on the types of projects we encourage, please check the CrossCurrents website to view back issues of the journal.

If you have any further questions about the Colloquium or would like to explore the appropriateness of a project you are thinking about, please contact:

Charles Henderson, CrossCurrents, Executive DirectorEmail: colloquium@crosscurrents.org Tel: 212-870-2544 or Cell: 917-439-2305

If respectful debate and engagement enliven our own sacred texts, we must similarly work to make interfaith learning in seminary rather than view it as a passive undertaking. By its very nature, it seems meant to be made, not simply learned cold and dry in a course on comparative religions. This is not to say that such courses should be discounted, but rather that they should be supplemented or structured so that seminarians can engage, struggle with, debate, and thereby gain a fuller respect for other religious traditions.

But how can interfaith studies be made? If everyone in a seminary is of the same denomination (as in many cases) or at least the same umbrella religion (as in most others), with whom can seminarians engage in the creative, tense process ofmaking interfaith learning?

Some seminaries have answered offhand that you simply cannot do so without a multi-faith student body. Hebrew College andAndover Newton Theological School cohabitate the same campus to ensure the creative tension necessary to make interfaith learning happen daily. The now-interfaith Claremont School of Theology similarly brings students in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian programs under the same roof. But for the majority of seminary, divinity, and graduate school students, deeper interfaith learning cannot be found on campus - and sometimes not even nearby.

Yet such learning must continue to take place. Without it, an entire generation of clergy may enter congregations and positions of leadership with notions of other traditions that resemble cardboard cutouts rather than refined, detailed pictures wrought by intensive study and full-hearted grappling.

Clergy will be less able to collaborate with other religious communities if they do not understand their own traditions in relational terms - terms forged through intensive discourse. Yet even American seminaries devoted to a single denomination can encourage students to make interfaith learning - in this case online.

Current seminarians are expected to be versatile online - and in time even use online resources to teach and help make their traditions come alive. A number of websites, notably this very online publication, have worked to foster quality dialogue between readers and commentators of different traditions. Yet few have enabled seminarians to actually guide the conversation and contribute a majority of articles.

As Chris Stedman, Managing Director of State of Formation, a new forum for emerging religious and ethical leaders, notes in a recent article, "The current American discourse on religion and ethics is primarily defined by established leaders... While their perspectives are invaluable, this leaves an entire population of importantstakeholders without a platform: the up-and-comers.'"

For future clergy to truly make interfaith leadership, they must first find a conversation that they can join as equal partners. When we are willing to allow it, this may readily take place online.

This article was originally published on the Tikkun Daily and then re-featured on the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue's State of Formation website.

During hevruta with a fellow seminarian, I encountered the depths of my own Christian faith in a new way.  This was my first experience of hevruta, the study of the Torah with a partner, but it was familiar for my partner, Gideon, a rabbinical student.  He had never read the text we studied, Luke 10:25-37, but I knew it as both a foundational story of my religion and a favorite Christian justification of interfaith relations.  After reading the text aloud, Gideon asked me what I thought it meant.  Reeling through years of Sunday school explanations to seminary theology, I offered the common explanation for the parable: the Samaritan demonstrates the command to love one’s neighbor in a way which we are to emulate.  Gideon responded, “But that’s not what it says.” I do not remember the conclusion to our discussion that day, but I realized that Gideon might be right.  Surely Jesus calls us to love everyone and to care for the needs of all as the Samaritan did, but my familiarity with the text blinded me from seeing other meaning.

The common explanation that confused Gideon is not necessarily incorrect because Jesus concludes by saying, “Go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37 NRSV).  However, the question which provoked the parable, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29), was asked to identify who the second greatest Christian commandment calls us to love, and the answer is the Samaritan.  He certainly demonstrates an admirable way to behave, but the story is told from the perspective of the man in the ditch. This man is not in a position to discriminate based on the labels of class and religion given to the hearers.[1] Perhaps the point of thisparticular parable is not to render assistance to all others, but a call to take a perspective in which we recognize each person who walks by as a possible neighbor, one I must love as myself.

This reversal of perspective illuminates the centrality of the religious other for my own faith and belief as a Christian. The original question of this discourse is “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25).  If part of the answer is to this question is to love your neighbor as self, and the helping Samaritan is my neighbor, then could this parable suggest that my eternal life depends on seeing myself in need of the other to the point that each who I encounter is my neighbor?  We prefer to read this story in a way that the other’s life is in my hands, but actually my life is at stake in my ability or refusal to recognize my neighbor.

Prior to my conversation with Gideon, I assumed that this pericope meant that I should recognize people all over the world who were different from me as my neighbor, but the command to love the Samaritan was not surprising because Samaritans were different religiously and ethnically, but because they were living in the same land.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’”[2] This was surely known by the expert in the law questioning Jesus.  Were the Samaritans too strange to be a neighbor, and too near to be a stranger?

The ambiguous nature of the Samaritan is particularly significant to us today. In her description of A New Religious America, Diana Eck explains, “Adherents of other faiths are no longer distant metaphorical neighbors in some other part of the world but next-door neighbors.”[3] The religious other is now one among us, like the Samaritan, and our very lives and faith depend on our ability to recognize them as our neighbor.

This phenomenon is relatively new for Christians in the West, many of whom experienced their entire lives in predominantly homogenous religious cultures.  This provided the context for much Christian theology and practice in Europe and America over many centuries.  Since religious others were ‘metaphysical neighbors,’ or strangers depending on perspective, they could be treated conceptually along with their religion, and perhaps this accounts for the prevailing understanding of pluralism.  In Christian theology, pluralism has usually meant the claim that all religions and religious truths are valid, taking part in a conversation which explores the relationship between the Christian religion and sweeping treatments of other religions, i.e. Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim.  Our daily realities, however, consist of specific persons whose religion might be different from ours yet is also distinct within their own tradition.  A theology that is not divorced from living its reality daily now calls for a revitalized understanding of pluralism.

The need to re-examine what my faith says about my new neighbors can lead to clarifying who is in and out of the bounds of a religion, or it can be done by drawing on the sources of a tradition to more fully live out one’s faith.  Sacks contends that the imperative for religious people is “to search – each faith in its own way – for a way of living with, and acknowledging the integrity of those who are not of our faith.  Can we make space of difference?... Can we see the presence of God in a stranger?”[4] The embrace of the religious other is not acquiescence to demands for tolerance or even wise and well-intentioned calls from religious or political leaders.  It is not defended by scouring the crumbs of theology, faith, and history for resources that suggest it as a viable alternative.  A revitalized understanding of pluralism will come from wrestling anew with the depths of our own tradition.

[1] R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), 229.

[2] Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2003), 58.

[3] Diana L Eck, A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, 1st ed. (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 23.

[4] Sacks, The Dignity of Difference, 17.

Dr. Paola Bernardini is Russell Berrie Fellow in Interreligious Studies at the he John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue, St. Thomas Aquinas University (Angelicum), Rome.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School, is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights. Born in Sudan, he moved to the US when his teacher, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was put too death by the Regime of the Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiry. His most prominent publications include Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’ a (Harvard University Press, 2008); African Constitutionalism and the contingent role of Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Towards an Islamic Reformation: Civic Liberties, Human Rights and International Law (Syracuse University Press, 1990).

Click here to read Dr. Bernardini's interView with Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im on Shari'a, philosophy, and the contemporary world.

Atheists are leading the charge for interfaith cooperation. If that sounds contradictory, allow me to confirm: I just saw it with my own eyes.

Last weekend, more than 200 college students and 100 faculty and staff from across the United States converged in Washington, D.C. for five days of interfaith training. Students and campus staff participated in two consecutive Interfaith Leadership Institutes, planned and run by the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), where they received intensive training that prepared them to take the lead in a national movement for interfaith cooperation and social action.

The Interfaith Leadership Institutes, co-hosted by the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, consisted of a series of trainings, speeches and events intended to equip hundreds of student leaders and campus allies with the vision, knowledge and skills necessary to lead interfaith and community service initiatives on their campuses. The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships hosted a session for each institute, and then participants spent two days at Georgetown being trained and equipped.

I was honored to join these students and their staff and faculty allies as a speaker and volunteer IFYC Alumni Coach for the institutes. I was amazed by the enthusiasm and compassion modeled by everyone I met, but as a secular humanist and interfaith activist, the number of nonreligious participants present is perhaps what excited me the most.

Lyz Liddell, Director of Campus Organizing at the Secular Student Alliance, was one of the student allies in attendance. Liddell believes the institutes were a watershed moment for nonreligious participation in the interfaith movement.

"This institute changed perspectives for both theists and nontheists," said Liddell. "Hearing repeated language specifically including nonbelievers -- such as 'people of all religions and no religion' -- made it clear that atheists and other secular worldviews are welcome and needed at the interfaith table. Likewise, having nontheists represented helped religious attendees really understand that nontheists want to be involved and are willing and eager to be included."

As an Alumni Coach, I am working with 20 other IFYC alumni to serve as mentors to the institutes' budding student leaders. One of the students I am mentoring is Michael Anderson, a junior at McKendree University. Anderson sees interfaith work as a pragmatic necessity. "We're all just human beings, and we have to come to a conclusion on how to live together," said Anderson.

Vlad Chituc, a junior at Yale University, was also there to learn more about interfaith leadership. Chituc was surprised and impressed by how welcoming the institute was to atheists and other nonreligious individuals. "I found that the entire conversation stemmed around people saying, 'We really want to include nonreligious people; how the hell do we do that?' Now I don't know why I was expecting the discussion to focus more on whether or not we should even be involved in the movement," Chituc said.

Chelsea Link, a junior at Harvard University, said that she believes that her humanist values require her to find common ground with religious people. "When I found humanism, I felt like many humanists and atheists were detached from religious communities, and many were antagonistic toward the religious," Link said. "Meanwhile, at interfaith events, I didn't see much of an invitation for atheists or humanists. The religious and nonreligious don't know how to deal with each other; I'd like to see more reaching out from both sides. We shouldn't be afraid of each other!"

Adam Garner, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, agreed with her. "I want to make the world a better place through service and I want to fight religious intolerance. The IFYC, and especially our Interfaith in Action group here on campus, allows me to accomplish both goals in one fell swoop."

I have been working for several years now as a secular humanist promoting interfaith and nonreligious understanding, so I was honored to receive an invitation to share my story and my message at a reception following the White House session, hosted by the El-Hibri Charitable Foundation in celebration of the launch of the Interfaith Leadership Institutes. Speaking before a group of policy and philanthropic professionals, I explained that there are many atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious individuals like Anderson, Chituc, Link, Garner, Liddell and others at the institutes who wish to seek understanding, respect and collaboration with their religious neighbors.

After my speech, I got the opportunity to talk with many of the policy and philanthropic professionals at the reception, and they affirmed my belief that the nonreligious are an essential asset in this movement.President Obama has spoken frequently of the role that the nonreligious play in American pluralism, so I was both pleased and unsurprised to hear that those involved in the current administration's efforts to ensure interfaith cooperation agreed.

The IFYC Interfaith Leadership Institutes proved that the interfaith movement has hit a critical mass. The student-led, national Better Together" campaign is at the forefront of an emerging societal shift toward inter-religious tolerance and cooperation. Including the nonreligious only strengthens these efforts. Atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and the like have a vital stake in ensuring that America's promise of pluralism is realized, and it is exhilarating to see more of us decide that collaboration is more important than division.

"Some of the best interfaith leaders I know are not people of faith, but their understanding of secular humanism inspires them to create bridges of cooperation between people from different backgrounds," said IFYC Founder and President Eboo Patel. "They recognize that religious tolerance is a 'public good,' which benefits everybody, including the nonreligious. They also recognize that perhaps the greatest interfaith divide in our society is between 'believers' and 'nonbelievers,' and that they have a special role to play in bridging that divide. And from what I have experienced myself, I believe that as well."

With more than 300 students and staff equipped to make interfaith cooperation through social action a reality on their campuses and in their communities, they now know that the nonreligious will be there working and engaging in dialogue alongside them for the public good.

When I first started doing interfaith work, I didn't see many other nonreligious people involved. Now we're impossible to miss.

Chris Stedman is the Managing Director of State of Formation, a new initiative at the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. Chris received an MA in Religion from Meadville Lombard Theological School at the University of Chicago, for which he was awarded the Billings Prize for Most Outstanding Scholastic Achievement. A graduate of Augsburg College with a summa cum laude B.A. in Religion, Chris is the founder and author of the blog NonProphet Status. His writing has also appeared in venues such as The Washington Post On Faith, Tikkun Daily, The New Humanism, and more. Previously a Content Developer and Adjunct Trainer for the Interfaith Youth Core, Chris is a secular humanist working to foster positive and productive dialogue between faith communities and the nonreligious. He is currently writing a book on this topic and speaks on it regularly both by invitation and as a member of the Secular Student Alliance Speakers Bureau. Chris also serves on the Leadership Team of the Common Ground Campaign, a coalition of young people standing up in response to the recent wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence in America. Portland, Oregon's GLBT newspaper Just Out called his work "brilliant" and labeled him an "emerging... vibrant and youthful queer voice for the secular humanist movement."

This fall, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian leaders from North America gathered at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) to begin an unprecedented conversation.  On October 25 and 26, JTS, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Hartford Seminary convened a workshop on “Judaism and Islam in America.”  Participants discussed the ways Jews and Muslims could learn from one another about the experience of religious minorities in the United States.  Although political questions affecting relations between Jews and Muslims worldwide helped form the background of the meetings, all present agreed that there was a more productive kind of discussion to be had—one that focused on how American Jews and Muslims could see one another as partners instead of enemies.

Arnold Eisen, Chancellor of JTS, and Ingrid Mattson, immediate past president of the Islamic Society of North America and professor at Hartford Seminary, organized the workshop with the goal of initiating honest exchanges about what Muslims and Jews in America share—as well as what they do not.  To this end, Eisen and Mattson decided to close the workshop to non-participants, limiting the group to twenty-five professors, religious educators, and presidents of seminaries. Eisen and Mattson wanted to ensure that people in the room felt comfortable speaking their minds with the reassurance and understanding that the conversation couldn’t be hijacked for personal political purposes by outsiders less committed to the work and dialogue. A number of participants noted how glad they were that Eisen and Mattson had created a space that was safe enough to bring all of the issues onto the table.  The intimate setting encouraged participants to bring up complicated and often difficult issues that too often get swept under the rug in other avenues of inter-religious dialogue.

In addition to the closed sessions, workshop participants attended a panel discussion held at JTS which was free and open to the public.  The roundtable included Chancellor Eisen, Professor Sherman Jackson, who teaches Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, and the Reverend Doctor Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary; Mattson served as moderator.  Over five hundred people attended the event, and many more saw the webstream on the JTS website (www.jtsa.edu).  The audience included Muslims, Jews, and Christians ranging in age from college students to retirees.  The public event’s success testifies to the burning urgency of the question of Judaism and Islam’s future in America.

An important feature of this workshop was the commitment to starting a conversation, rather than arriving at solutions.  The hope was that honest conversations would open up possibilities for further cooperation, and that relationships begun in October 2010 would flourish into partnerships in the coming years.  The palpable excitement among participants during the concluding discussion around considering next steps suggested that Eisen and Mattson successfully planted seeds in fertile ground.

During the two days of sessions, discussion ranged from questions of law and scripture to gender and assimilation.  The workshop was divided into six panels including: the history of Judaism and Islam in America, interpretation of scripture, adaptation of law, assimilation and authenticity, Christian perspectives, and the education of Jewish and Muslim clergy in America.  Each panel was structured as a discussion; panelists gave short introductory remarks, after which the floor was open to all participants.  Although the organizers allotted an hour and a half to each topic, there was never enough time to finish the conversation or to even come close to exhausting the issues that had been raised.

The first panel sought to ground the workshop in a discussion of history that introduced the arc of Jewish and Muslim experiences in America.  In outlining the often very distinct evolutions of Islam and Judaism in America, a number of unexpected points of common interest arose.  Participants wondered together about the importance of Jewish and Muslim causes outside the United States in the formation of the American Jewish and Muslim communities.  Navigating the balance between investment in religious life at home versus solidarity with coreligionists abroad was one of the many challenges that Jews and Muslims had both faced (and continue to face) in America.

In subsequent panels, a number of issues arose repeatedly in different contexts.  Issues such as gender equality and women’s role in public religion proved to be common challenges for Jews and Muslims.  Jews discussed how questions of gender equality had caused deep divisions among Jews, resulting in significant differences among denominations.  Muslim scholars noted the challenges Muslim women faced in becoming accepted as religious authorities in America.  Even though there are few legal barriers to women’s assumption of religious authority in Islamic law—in fact, much less than in Jewish law—some Muslims said that many of the informal channels through which Muslim men acquired authority were closed to women.  Other Muslim participants disagreed with this analysis, however, arguing that the majority of American Muslims were open to accepting women as authority figures.

Related in many ways to the issues of gender was the question of assimilation into the surrounding American society and the fine line between “assimilation and authenticity,” as Eisen and Mattson put it.  A number of Jewish and Muslim participants voiced their strong desire to be part of American society, and yet expressed fears that doing so would mean losing touch with their religious and cultural beliefs.  Timur Yuskaev, professor and director of the Islamic Chaplaincy Program at Hartford Seminary, suggested that Muslims’ authenticity enabled their assimilation into American culture.  On the other hand, David Myers, professor of Jewish history at the University of California at Los Angeles, questioned whether such a thing as “authenticity” even existed in Judaism, an historically diaspora and minority religion that absorbed elements of whatever cultures Jews lived among.

One topic that ignited a fascinating conversation on the limits of assimilation—or acculturation, as many participants preferred to think about it—was the timely question of trick-or-treating on Halloween.  Was it a betrayal of Judaism or Islam to allow one’s children to trick-or-treat?  Sherman Jackson mentioned the difference between whether an American custom like trick-or-treating was technically allowed under religious law, and whether one would actually allow one’s children to take part in such a custom.  Riv-Ellen Prell, professor of Jewish studies at the University of Minnesota, noted that the topic of assimilation and authenticity was rich enough to merit a conference of its own and suggested such a meeting as a way to continue the conversation in the future.

Although the workshop focused on Judaism and Islam in America, Eisen and Mattson made sure to include the voices of Christian leaders with long experience of inter-religious dialogue.  In addition to Serene Jones, Heidi Hadsell, president of Hartford Seminary (a co-sponsor of the workshop), and Katharine Henderson, president of Auburn Seminary, joined the workshop and provided insight into the role of Christians in facilitating Jewish and Muslim cooperation.  Hadsell noted the importance of Christians working within the Christian community to promote the importance of inter-religious dialogue, something which often involved helping the majority religion to “see” non-Christians in the first place.  Echoing Hadsell’s call, Henderson described the need for a “conversion to multi-faith.”

Something that Jewish and Muslim participants reached consensus on early in the workshop was the fact that it was impossible to talk about Judaism and Islam in America as if each religious community were a monolith.  Rather, American Jews and Muslims came from a wide range of cultural, social and religious backgrounds, and these differences had to be taken into account in discussions about convergences and divergences of Jewish and Muslim experiences.  One of the topics that arose in the concluding conversation asked participants to consider who had been left out of this dialogue, and how those voices could be included in the future.  Participants seemed to agree that they came from a relatively narrow range of viewpoints—since they were all interested in dialogue in the first place—and that this was a good place to start the conversation.

In the concluding discussion, participants suggested ways in which they could build on the foundation laid at JTS.  One suggestion for practical cooperation between Muslims, Jews, and Christians addressed issues raised during the last panel on education.  Safaa Zarzour, the secretary general of ISNA, emphasized the need for founding an Islamic seminary in America.  Zarzour and others expressed how helpful it would be to talk to Jewish and Christian leaders of seminaries as preliminary plans for a Muslim seminary were laid.  Eisen emphasized that such a conversation would equally helpful for Jewish seminaries, noting how much he had already learned from hearing about the experience of Muslim educators in North America.

Another idea about how to continue the conversation was to hold a conference on contemporary interpretation of Jewish Law and Islamic Law.  Jonathan Brown, professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown University, noted how much Jews and Muslims in America had in common when faced with adapting their respective legal systems to modern phenomena.  He proposed a topic of mutual concern, such as bio-ethics, around which Jewish and Muslim legal scholars could discuss the process of contemporary legal interpretation.

Other participants suggested how helpful it would be for Jewish and Muslim clergy and educators of clergy to meet on a more regular basis to talk about the challenges of shaping the next generation of religious leaders.  Benjamin Sommer, professor of Bible at JTS, noted that the opportunity to spend longer periods of time with clergy and educators of the other faith would enable the development of deeper ties across religions.  A number of participants echoed Sommer and expressed their interest in having more time to engage with one another as partners committed to a number of shared goals.

Perhaps the most unusual element of the workshop was the spirit of excitement and openness which reigned from the first moment to the last.  Participants repeatedly remarked on how different this workshop was from others they had attended; most said they had learned an enormous amount, and that the workshop had made them hungry for more.  The palpable excitement in the room reflected the urgency of these issues.  Faced with increasing hostility between Jews and Muslims not only in America but in the world, the organizers and participants affirmed how crucial it was to build alliances across religious lines.  All present expressed the hope that the energy and cooperative spirit of the workshop will translate into a continuation and deepening of the conversations started there.  If the discussions about next steps are any indication, this workshop was truly just the beginning.

As many participants put it: God willing, in sha’ Allah, b-ezrat Hashem.

Photos: The Jewish Theological Seminary

Photo by Katya Dreyer-Oren

How should future religious leaders be trained so that they can at once be rooted in their traditions and equipped to work with people of others? This question has been asked with increased urgency, as American theological seminaries have tried to adapt to what has become the most religiously diverse country in history. Answers have proven somewhat elusive.

This week, from April 14 – 16, a group of remarkable visionaries and emerging inter-religious leaders convened at Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College to discuss potential answers during the pioneering CIRCLE National Conference 2010. Participants included Brad Hirshfield, co-Founder of CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, Ingrid Mattson, Director of the Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary and Executive Director of the Islamic Society of North America, and Stephen Graham, Director of Faculty Development and Initiatives in Theological Education at the Association of Theological Schools.

It seemed fitting to hold the conference jointly at two of the few seminaries to cohabitate the same campus and maintain a close administrative and curricular relationship. Students at Hebrew College and Andover Newton can cross-register for courses, while several classes are team-taught by professors from both institutions. The campus also houses the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE), whose “mission is to nurture a new generation of moral and spiritual leaders equipped for service in a religiously diverse world” through a fellowship program, leadership training, and inter-campus initiatives and programs. Its administrators, Dr. Jennifer Peace and Rabbi Or Rose, saw the conference as a natural extension of their work.

What became clear during the conference were areas that seminary education often fell short. Many schools offered only minimal courses on other religions and few made such courses a degree requirement. Fewer still provided inter-religious experiential learning opportunities to their students and faculty.

Yet there was also a sense of opportunity and momentum, not only to redesign seminary curricula but pioneer a new theology, capable of recognizing a place – and a positive one at that – for other religions within a nuanced and affirming vision of one’s own. Scholarship, inter-religious education, experiential learning, and dialogue could redefine seminary life. Leonard Swidler, Professor of Catholic Thought and Interreligious Dialogue at Temple University, reflected on this trend with optimism, noting, “We always needed dialogue as a species, but now we are aware of it. These are times like no other in human history.”

Also apparent during the conference was the extent to which several key funders had fostered inter-religious studies and action, and particularly seminary life. The Henry Luce Foundation came up repeatedly in discussions as an organization that had underwritten crucial inter-religious efforts around the country and beyond. (It also sponsored the conference itself.) Its Program Director for Theology, Lynn Szwaja, was also credited with helping inter-religious relations grow from a nascent to a robust field through thoughtful allocations and the mentorship of grantees.

To many, the conference was among the most fulfilling of their careers. “It feels like the start of something big,” remarked Janet Penn, Executive Director of Interfaith Action. A number of participants spoke of the possibility for follow-up conferences and meetings. But still more spoke of the significant transformations that had already taken place at the conference itself. Paul Knitter, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology at Union Theological Seminary, who was honored during the event along with Rabbi Irving Greenberg and Professor Diana Eck, cited his mentor Raimon Panikkar: “To answer the question 'who am I,' I have to ask the question 'who are you.'" While both could take a lifetime to answer, the conference helped reframe the search.

Joshua Stanton is co-Editor of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue and a Rabbinical Student at Hebrew Union College.

interView with Rev. Paul Raushenbush

Response by Anna DeWeese

Listening to Paul Raushenbush, it was very encouraging to hear him speak on ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as two distinct, yet related, ideas. Often these words are used interchangeably, as if to believe in something is to have faith in that thing. But these words are much more complex than the above statement assumes, and each word has different meanings to different people.

This is why I have studied and continue to engage in interfaith work. I have struggled with the questions of ‘what do I believe’ and ‘do I want or need to have faith’, and have learned to embrace these questions in a way that opened me up – opened me up to my self and my tradition of Christianity, and to others and their traditions. These questions have opened me up to concepts and ideologies I would never have considered worth my while, but have come to enrich my life in fascinating ways. It is through these questions that I will continue to grow and learn, so that every encounter I have with another person helps us discover more deeply what our faiths and our beliefs mean.

Response By Freeman Trebilcock

When Rev. Paul Raushenbush asks us to think about how we find interfaith inspiration within our various traditions he is emphasising personal inquiry, getting us to look to the core of our own personal experience as people of faith living in a diverse world. As he says, this is the first and most important step towards developing a deeper understanding of where we stand and how we might contribute to the broader dialogue between faiths.

The point that Rev. Raushenbush makes that "we don't want all-liberals talking to all-liberals" is a good one.  This is because those people who may not normally be drawn to engage others from a different faith may in fact be the ones with the most to gain from it.  Also in terms of normalising interfaith engagement to become something more than a peripheral curiosty we cannot go on simply preaching to the converted.  I'm often asked why I do interfaith work, usually in a way that implies that this is a strange thing indeed. Why on earth would people from such different places, with such different ways of looking at the world even bother with one another? One goal world would certainly be to change the common sentiment, to prove that there is nothing strange about collaborating with people who share similar values –  values such as service, compassion and respect – and enacting these values co-operatively.

In response to Rev. Raushenbush first question I'd say that my own religious tradition explicitly calls for interfaith engagement. Within the Buddhist tradition there are teachings that liken the diverse spiritual traditions to a range of medicines that can be prescribed to a person afflicted by disease.  Different medicines are needed for different people.  It seems to me that we are fortunate to live in a world today where the spiritual medicine-cabinet is brimming full. Viewing this great diversity as an asset makes much more sense than searching for contradictions. And by coming together with others to collectively put into practice our various prescriptions of faith, we are all the more effective in healing ourselves and this world we share.

Response By Liane Carlson

Rev. Raushenbush begins by asking why the bloggers have become invested in inter-religious dialogue, and ends by urging all people, regardless of affiliation, to “learn their traditions,” in order to have a firm place from which to argue.  Rather than answer with an anecdote or quotation, I want to question the assumptions structuring his request.  Such a question privileges the text and the personal experience as granting a particular authority or right to speak.  That this dual emphasis on text and interiority are paradigmatically Protestant Christian preoccupations goes without saying.  That it also assumes something like a common set of experiences which might unite us – exposure to relatives, friends of different faiths, belief in the heterogeneity of the canon – seems equally obvious.

But is this really the best place to start thinking about inter-religious dialogue, or is it, instead, symptomatic of the assumptions that make dialogue so necessary and so difficult?  In responding by turning inward, both textually and personally, are we attempting to found dialogue on fundamentally incommensurable, unsharable, radically private experiences?  So, rather than beginning with confession, might it not be better to start by turning outward, to a common world with common problems?

Response By Leigh Rogers

Rev. Raushenbush clearly explained why inter-religious work is important to him: he was raised in a Christian tradition that held these values, and he was shaped by experiences in an interfaith family. These two elements, tradition and experience, gave him a sense of why it is so important to get “explicit” about why inter-religious work matters: if we don’t know where we stand, as he puts it to his students, where will our voices be around the circle?

Being around the circle and including all voices is what makes inter-religious dialogue so important. Raushenbush said he wanted “as wide a spectrum of talking to one another as possible,” because its purpose is a shared dialogue answering two questions: What do I believe, and what does my neighbor believe?

I like that he said it doesn’t matter what level of orthodoxy your tradition is, or whether you’re conservative or liberal. For me, it reaffirmed my fears of being perceived as too “wishy-washy” as a spiritually promiscuous person from an agnostic household. I may still be figuring my spirituality out, but I can still know my values.

What matters is that you have something to say, and you’re willing to listen and learn about what the person next to you is saying. We have to understand our own values and our neighbor’s. Not only did Jesus teach the parable of the Good Samaritan as a Jew; he taught it from the perspective of the Samaritan.

This is the religious literacy that Raushenbush refers to, where the purpose is to “[be equipped] with language and knowledge of other religious traditions- to be respectful and aware of others’ beliefs but also our own beliefs.”

Finally, to answer Raushenbush’s question, I do interfaith work because I need to learn from others to really know where I stand. As an aspiring theologian, I have to be literate of others’ religious values, listen and reflect, then balance it with my own.

Response By Anthony Paz

The Catholic Christian tradition does not, as part of its everyday operation, promote interfaith understanding as central to its message. It seems that few religious traditions do. For Catholics, thinking about other religions has never happened except because of experience.  Today's Catholic, especially in America, is constantly confronted with other worldviews.  Raushenbush asks, “why are you doing this?” My answer: The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the conquest of the New World, the Troubles in Ireland. My tradition has, almost in secret, grown more interested in tolerating and understanding other faiths. I had to seek the 20^th Century pronouncements that quietly declare that non-Christians can, in fact, make it to heaven. So, while the tradition has a varied and mostly disturbing history of Raushenbush's “this,” I would not have known about it if not for my own experience of September 11, 2001, which triggered a desire to understand other religious and to be understood by them. Raushenbush hits on one of the great truths of religious belief, one that is central to our dialogue: the difference between tradition and experience. I may identify with a 12^th Century Catholic, but my experience creates an individual with a strikingly different set of values and beliefs. It is essential to understand individuals as representing only some of their tradition, since it is all filtered through experience.