Graduate Theological Union

Abrahamic Dialogue

Spiritual Other/Spiritual Self: Models of Transformative Interfaith Work - Surjit Singh Lecture 2013

Submitted by communications on Wed, 07/18/2012 - 10:31am
Thursday, February 21, 2013 - 7:00pm

Jennifer Howe Peace (Ph.D. '05)
Assistant Professor of Interfaith Studies, Andover Newton Theological School (ANTS) and Director of CIRCLE (Center fo Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education)

People of diverse religious backgrounds encounter each other daily in coffee shops, hospitals, classrooms, and around the dinner table. What might these encounters teach us about ourselves, our neighbors, or about God? Drawing on stories from My Neighbor’s Faith (Orbis, 2012), this year's Singh Lecture will explore what these encounters tell us about the nature of transformative interfaith work today.

Responses will be given by Charles Gibbs (Executive Director, United Religions Initiative) and Rebecca Parker (President, Starr King School for the Ministry) with a discussion moderated by Judith Berling (Professor of Chinese and Comparative Religions, GTU). The will be a public reception before the lecture at 6:00PM in the Bade Museum across the Courtyard.

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Cross-Cultural Lens: Using multicultural theory to interpret Jesus

Kayko Driedger Hesslein’s daily life is both multicultural and multireligious: she is Canadian of Japanese and German descent and Lutheran. Her husband is both American and Jewish. Her two children have inherited all of these identities. Both as a pastor and as someone diving more deeply into theology, she has been trying to develop a language that explained her and her family’s multiplicious identities on a theological level.

Interreligious Studies at the GTU

Submitted by communications on Tue, 12/06/2011 - 2:45pm

Something new is happening at the GTU: a new M.A. area of
concentration in Interreligious Studies (IR) will begin in fall 2012.
Applications are due February 15 for the first class of students.

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Resolving Conflict, Creating Dialog through Song

Izak Lattu has been practicing interfaith relations his whole life — literally. In the Indonesian Moluccan Islands (also known as Moluccas, the Maluku Islands, or the Spice Islands), where he grew up, there is a tradition called Gandong, which means there is one womb and one family, even among villages of different religions. For example, although both of his parents’ villages are Christian, they have a gandong relationship of mutual support with other nearby Muslim villages. Lattu’s elementary school was a Christian school, but 80% of the children attending were Muslims; many became his close friends. As an ordained pastor in the Protestant Church of the Moluccas, Lattu brought young Muslims and Christians together to study, dialog, work, and play at a Pesantren or Islamic boarding school.

Alumna Receives Lilly Research Grant to Study Interfaith Theology

Submitted by communications on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 3:36pm

Kristin Johnson LargenMarch 30, 2011 - Kristin Johnston Largen (Ph.D. ’02), Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg (PA), has received a prestigious 2011-2012 Lilly Theological Research Grant for Seeking God among our Neighbors: Toward an Interfaith Systematic Theology.

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Who among us is good? … and who is “us”?

Submitted by communications on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 12:00am

Nargis Virani, Naomi Seidman, Arthur Holder, Munir Jiwa at the Western Wall in JerusalemLiterary critics and theologians often talk about "interpretive communities" and "capable readers." Who has the ability--and even the right--to interpret a text, especially a sacred text that bears authority in a particular religious tradition?

Last month I participated in a weeklong interreligious Theology Conference at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem along with Naomi Seidman (Director, Center for Jewish Studies), Munir Jiwa (Director, Center for Islamic Studies), and Nargis Virani (visiting faculty, Center for Islamic Studies). The theme of the conference was “What makes a good person?” Small groups involving participants from all three traditions studied key sacred texts together, working both in the original languages and in English translation.

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Getting to the Bottom of Politics and Religion

barbed wire

Joel Schalit
 

“I felt the politics of religion
(in Israel) were out of our
control. I wanted to get to the
bottom of it.”

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