Starting This Month: Virtual Spirituality Group 

In partnership with the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University, ICJS recently conducted a survey that paints a portrait of chaplaincy in Maryland. The results of the survey made a few things clear: chaplains are searching for connection with each other, opportunities for professional development, and interreligious learning.

ICJS is responding to this discovery by creating a space that addresses these three needs—an interreligious spirituality group for chaplains and spiritual caregivers.

Contact Alisha Tatem, ICJS Program Director for Religious Leaders, for more information: atatem@icjs.org.

Nine monthly sessions beginning April 27, 2023
Online via Zoom

Recap | Holy Envy: Writing in the Jewish Christian Borderzone

Maeera Shreiber spoke at the March ICJS Online Event about how literature touching on Judaism or Christianity, particularly poetry, can cause a “radical disorientation” that can draw a reader or listener into seeing the other with new interreligious eyes. “Poems are often the place where self discovers itself by being in relation to an other: a divine other, a human other,” she said. “But it is a place of meeting. And so poems themselves perform the kind of interaction, encounter that I think can advance interreligious conversations.”

Staff Spotlight | Heather Miller Rubens on Faithful Politics

In this podcast, Heather talks about her vision of the interreligious society as a hopeful and constructive framework to both dismantle religious bias and to inform and inspire civic conversations. Heather highlights two dominant paradigms of public religion: Christian Supremacy, which holds that Christianity should be privileged and dominate the public square; and Secular Supremacy, which argues the public square should be a “religion-free” zone. As an alternative, Heather believes we must envision and build a flourishing Interreligious Society.

Scholar Highlight | Zeyneb Sayilgan Podcast 

In her podcast series, “Islam, Death and Child Loss: A Muslim Mother’s Journey Through Grief,” Zeyneb Sayilgan, ICJS Muslim scholar, offers a series of theological reflections on Islam and the Qur’an in the wake of the loss of her daughter, Meryem.

Staff Pick | Teaching Plato in Palestine

ICJS Jewish Scholar Benjamin Sax recommends this intriguing work that he says has much to teach us about dialogue. Philosopher Carlos Fraenkel describes his experiences of meeting with students at Palestinian and Indonesian universities, lapsed Hasidic Jews in New York, teenagers from poor neighborhoods in Brazil, and the descendants of Iroquois warriors in Canada. They wrestle with weighty questions using texts from philosophers including Plato and Aristotle, al-Ghazālī and Maimonides, Spinoza and Nietzsche, creating a “culture of debate” in a common search for truth.