For Religious Leaders in Training
The Emerging Religious Leaders Intensive (ERLI)
The Emerging Religious Leaders Intensive (ERLI) is a week-long residential immersion experience in interreligious learning and dialogue for Christian, Jewish, and Muslim students training for leadership roles.
ERLI fills a key gap in seminary education as few institutions offer such in-depth interreligious experiences. The program schedule is filled with full days of discussion and study, interreligious experiences (such as prayer or worship services) and informal conversations.
ERLI 2025 was held June 9–13 at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Reisterstown, MD.
I am leaving this program with a deep sense of holy discomfort. Few experiences so intentionally and gently, yet assertively, challenge people of faith toward actual transformation like ERLI does.
Building Bridges Through Dialogue: Reflections on the ERLI Interfaith Workshop
A beautifully insightful recap of the Emerging Religious Leaders Intensive (ERLI), where Jewish, Christian, and Muslim student leaders came together in June 2025 to engage in meaningful dialogue, build lasting connections, and foster mutual understanding.
Over the course of five days, I came to see that human-to-human connection through honest dialogue and shared experiences is essential to building understanding between people of different faiths.
Emerging Religious Leaders Intensive Roster
It’s not always easy to come to places where you’re not sure if you’re going to be targeted. There was a great deal of effort in this organization to really create safe spaces for everyone.
Rabata
Two of us had to leave the room, we needed a break. The other person was in tears. I asked her, ‘May I hug you?’’ And she asked me why? And I said, ‘Because you are in pain.’ She said that was the moment that she realized that I, too, was feeling what she was feeling. That was a sincere experience for both of us.
To hear the whole room filled with each of us taking on the other people’s perspectives, it really moved me because it made me feel like interreligious dialogue was really possible, even on the hardest things. That if we could actually take the perspective of someone else, the person who’s not us, then maybe we could actually work for peace together
Not only is the work of ICJS essential; it is crucial to the fabric of our society. In a world often divided by religious differences, their efforts to foster understanding and collaboration are vital to realizing the American dream of unity in diversity. Now more than ever, we must come together to shape a future that embraces all faiths, perspectives, and communities.
It’s good to be in a space where the discomfort can happen and you can know that ultimately you are safe and that it’s going to be okay.
It’s been transformational. To quote from Plato’s dialogues, in a book called the Symposium, Socrates says, ‘Let’s exchange beauty for beauty.’ And in this space, this is what we were able to do, exchange beauty for beauty, see each other’s tradition, and then turn ugliness and whatever was perceived as ugly into beauty.