ISW 2021 Webinar Series

Bearing Witness from
Fresno’s Mason-Dixon Line

Invitation

During this pandemic–as alternative to our usual in-person weekend event–Interfaith Scholar Weekend invites you to join us for six weekly interfaith Zoom conversations, when we will consider what it means to “Bear Witness” to Fresno’s history of racism and redlining. All sessions are free!

Time and Dates:

We start each Zoom session at 4:00 pm on six consecutive Mondays from February 15^th to March 22^nd. All sessions are free! Registration required for each session  [link coming soon]   You can attend one or six sessions.

Friday, February 21

Fresno City College, Old Administration Building, 1101 East University Ave., Fresno Ca, 93741

7:30 pm Free Opening Lecture “Truth in an Age of Untruth”

Saturday, February 22

Temple Beth Israel 6622 N. Maroa Avenue, Fresno, CA 93704

• 8:00 am – 3:00 pm Registration & Kosher/Vegetarian Breakfast
• 9:00 am Torah Reflection
• 9:15 – 10:30 am Gandhi & South Africa’s Blacks
• 10:45 am – 12:00 pm The Partition & Violence of 1947
• 12:00 – 1:00 pm Kosher/Vegetarian Lunch
• 1:00 – 2:15 pm Gandhi’s Hinduism & Today’s Hindutva Ideology

Sunday, February 23

Fresno State University Peace Garden and Wesley United Methodist Church

• 9:00 am Meditation
Fresno State Peace Garden

10:30 am Sermon: “Reverence for all Faiths”
Wesley United Methodist Church 1343 East Barstow Ave., Fresno Ca, 93710

Rajmohan Gandhi, who is the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi, is a historian, journalist and peace builder in the non-violent tradition of the Mahatma. His topic will be announced shortly.

Read more about Rajmohan Gandhi

The Interfaith Scholar Weekend in 2020 will be held February 21-23, 2020. Online registration has not yet opened.

Our ISW 2019 scholar, Rev. Dr. Thandeka, has recently published her newest book: Love Beyond Belief. For this new book, there is a book study open and available on Thursdays at 6:00-7:30 PM at Community United Church of Christ, 5550 N. Fresno St. The book study will begin on Thursday, January 17th and concluding on February 28, the Thursday preceding our Interfaith Scholar Weekend.

Call 559-435-2690 or email faithgrowth@communityucc.com to reserve a spot,
or schedule your own Book Study if that would be easier for you and your community.

Books were ordered through Amazon at $20.75 per book or purchased for a kindle.

Download Book Study Flyer

Our featured speaker for Interfaith Scholar Weekend 2019 is the Rev. Dr. Thandeka, a Unitarian Universalist Scholar.

Thandeka is the creator of the Love Beyond Belief™ initiative for moderate, liberal, and progressive congregations and the founder of Contemporary Affect Theology, which is designed to explain emotional development in religious settings and terms. Polebridge Press published her new book, Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness, in 2018.

Thandeka, Affect Theologian and President of Love Beyond Belief, Inc., is author of The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self (1995), Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America (1999, German edition 2009), and Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness (2018). Her essays include work in The Oxford University Handbook on Feminist Theology and Globalization (2011), and The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher (2005).

Her books and essays have helped secure her place as a “major figure in American liberal theology,” as Gary Dorrien notes in The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2005  (John Knox Press, 2006).

Jaak Panksepp, the founder of affective neuroscience, commends Thandeka’s “decisive historical-philosophical analysis” as work that can provide “a universal substrate for nondenominational religious experience” (The Archeology of the Mind, 391).

Thandeka received her Ph.D. in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University. She was given the Xhosa name Thandeka, which means “beloved,” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984. She is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and congregation consultant, and formerly an Emmy award-winning television producer.

Thandeka has taught at Andover Newton Theological School, Harvard Divinity School, Lancaster Theological Seminary, Meadville Lombard Theological School, Williams College, and she was a Fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology in California, and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She is a Fellow at Westar Institute.

We are pleased to announce that our featured scholar will be Dr. Christiana Peppard, Assistant Professor of Theology, Science, and Ethics at Fordham University in New York, where she is also affiliate faculty in Environmental Studies. Her scholarship focuses on global environmental ethics and religion and science in a pluralistic era. She is the author of Just Water (Orbis Books, 2014) and co-editor of Just Sustainability: Technology, Ecology and Resource Extraction (Orbis, 2015)

Dr. Peppard will open the weekend on Friday, January 19 at the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, and on Saturday, January 20, will deliver 3 more lectures at temple Beth Israel round the issue of water. She will be open to speaking at a local Church on Sunday morning January 21, and could offer a lecture at a local University or College or community sponsored event on Sunday afternoon or evening if a school or local environmental group would contract her for that engagement.

ISW is pleased to announce that the Interfaith Scholar Weekend Speaker for 2017 will be Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina, Professor and IIIT Chair in Islamic Studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His interests include Classical Islam, Islam in the Modern Age, Democracy and Human Rights, Islamic Bioethics and Muslim Theology.

Abdulaziz Sachedina was born into an Indian Muslim family in Tanzania in 1942. He received BA degrees from Aligarh Muslim University (in Islamic Studies) in Aligarh, India, and Ferdowsi University (in Persian language and literature) in Mashhad, Iran. In addition, he studied Islamic jurisprudence at the Madrasa of Ayatollah Milani in Mashhad. He received the MA and PhD degrees in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto. His doctoral dissertation was entitled The Doctine of Mahdiism in Imami Shi’ism: A Study of Doctrinal Evolution in the 9th and 10th Centuries.

He is a core member of the Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism Project in the CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) Preventive Diplomacy Program and a key contributor to the program’s efforts to link religion to universal human needs and values in the service of peace-building. He serves on the board of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy.

Professor Sachedina has also served on the advisory board of the Center for Bioethics of the University of Virginia, on the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics, and as director of the Organization for Islamic Learning. He was recently elected honorary professor at the Shahid Behishti Medical University, Tehran, Iran.

Mark your calendar now to join us on February 24-26, 2017!

Prepare for Interfaith Scholar Weekend with Dr. Nikky Guninder K. Singh (April 8-10) by coming to this class on Saturday, April 2, 10am-12noon, in the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno sanctuary.

The class will include an overview, about the religion and the people who practice it. Have a discussion about the challenges facing Sikh people in this country, particularly in the Central Valley. The class will be taught by Naindeep Chann, co-founder of the Jakara Movement.

Contact Katie Hymans, Interim Director of Lifespan Religious Education at UUCF, via email or (559) 322.6146 to register. Please indicate if you need childcare.

Interfaith Scholar Weekend 2016 will be held April 8-10, 2016. Our speaker will be Dr. Nikky-Guninder K. Singh, Professor of Religion at Colby College, Waterville, ME.  Her interests focus on poetics and feminist issues, and she has published extensively in the field of Sikhism.

Her topic for the weekend will be: “Navigating Religious Identity in Our New World”.

We will for the first time, have one of our events at a Sikh Gurdwara, traveling to Selma for our Friday night event. This will be a great opportunity to experience the hospitality of our Sikh community!

Saturday’s presentations will be at Temple Beth Israel, and Sunday morning, Dr. Singh will be presenting at the Unitiarian Universalist Church of Fresno.

View the complete schedule here.