The ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship is a year-long intensive program in which leaders—both ordained and lay leaders—within religious communities come together across traditions to promote interreligious understanding, deepen relationships, and cultivate spaces of belonging in order to combat religious bigotry and hatred.
I am proud of my Judaism, but I wear it quietly. In the USA I have had years of developing an understanding of my identity as a minority outsider—years of growing up with the view that religious belief belongs in the private sphere, shared gently and carefully among those of one’s own faith. I am…
I surround myself with creative people, but I usually do not consider myself to be creative. So I was shocked that I volunteered to work one-on-one with a storyteller to tell my Teachers Fellowship cohort a story at our Fellowship retreat. I am a preacher and a teacher, but I have never done something like…
My paternal great-grandfather emigrated from Germany in the mid-to-late 19th century. From an early age, I was told by my father that we had Jewish “roots” but were not actually Jewish. That line of heredity had been broken sometime in the distant past. However, my feelings towards Jewish people were always positive and remain so.…
In the midst of a global pandemic, a national reckoning with racism, and increased political and religious polarization, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious and lay leaders from nine religious communities committed themselves to building interreligious bridges as the inaugural cohort of the ICJS Congregational Leaders Fellowship. The goal of the year-long fellowship is to build…