What We Do
The Seminary Project
In cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memo-rial Museum, the ICJS has secured initial funding to design, develop, and implement the Seminary Project. The Project’s first phase will be a three-day conference, scheduled for May 30-June 1, 2001, that will bring to-gether faculty and administrators from Jewish and Christian seminaries in the North East and Mid-Atlantic regions. The ICJS anticipates that the conference will, in turn, generate a second phase to the Seminary Project that will consist of a series of post-conference consulta-tions among and between participating seminaries and the ICJS to continue the work of the conference.
The impetus for the Seminary Project grew out of the recognition that in ever-increasing numbers, students who present themselves to seminary faculties constitute both a blessing and a challenge. They are a blessing be-cause, unlike previous generations of seminarians, they bring with them rich and diverse backgrounds. They pre-sent a new and daunting challenge, however, because, unlike their counterparts of previous decades, these men and women oftentimes possess a limited knowledge of their religious traditions. Increasingly, seminaries are faced with the challenge of educating students in their own religious traditions. One consequence of this is that the challenge of preparing future rabbis, ministers, and priests for leadership in a religiously plural world often-times goes unattended. Although clergy have enormous potential to be real agents for change, newly ordained clergy are all too often ill-equipped to deal creatively and faithfully with the challenges of religious pluralism, and as a consequence, miss important opportunities to educate their congregants regarding attitudes and per-ceptions about the religiously "other."
The challenge thus facing both Jewish and Christian seminaries is twofold: first, to provide a theological edu-cation that forms women and men in a religious identity that is both authentic and adaptive, and second, to educate seminarians so that they are both rooted in their respective faith traditions and open to the challenges of providing religious leadership in an ever-increasing pluralistic world. The Seminary Project Confer-ence is designed to provide a forum wherein seminary faculty and administrators can discuss and develop strategies to address this challenge. Its goal is (1) to help identify and address ways in which theological edu-cation can be more self-conscious and self-critical in its attention to the Jewish-Christian encounter; (2) to help identify and address the challenges of re-forming semi-nary education such that the blessing of the religiously other may be seen as a vital force in the formation and education of seminarians; and (3) to help identify which aspects of theological education will better prepare women and men for leadership in a post-Shoah, reli-giously plural world.
Seminaries that have already agreed to participate are: Andover Newton Theological School, Boston; General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, New York City; Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion, New York City; Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York City; Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Phil-adelphia; St. Mary’s Seminary & University, Baltimore; Union Theological Seminary, New York City; Union Theological Seminary/Presbyterian School of Christian Education, Richmond; Washington Theological Consor-tium, Washington, D.C.; and Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C.
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