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 [email protected] 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.

By Lucy Soucek

Lucy Soucek

From the first moment I spoke over the phone with Jim Grant to finalize plans for my upcoming trip to Fresno, I instantly got a sense of its welcoming and interconnected religious community. His generosity, openness, and willingness to provide me with guidance foreshadowed my entire experience during my two-week long research project, funded by the Compagna-Sennett Fellowship from Colby College. Through interviews and meetings with interfaith leaders in the area, explored the following research questions. How do the different religious communities work together to create a sense of interfaith understanding and appreciation? What roles do the youth and young adult population play in these different religious communities?

I found that the interfaith relationships in Fresno work to break down misperceptions in order to make positive change and create understanding. Each leader that I met with generously shared information about their belief system and traditions and about what they do to forward interfaith understanding within their own communities. Along with several other organizations, I visited and learned about the Islamic Cultural Center, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Fresno, Temple Beth Israel, the United Japanese Christian Church, the St. Paul Newman Center, and the Selma Gurdwara.

During my experience, I attended a Faith in Community conference and training session, where people of different religions came together to improve working conditions for migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley. I asked one of the leaders of the organization, Andy Levine, how Faith in Community differs from other social justice groups in the area that don’t have the interfaith focus. His response echoes the general sentiment that I experienced on my journey through the faith community of Fresno. He explained that having the interfaith component deeply grounds members, makes the group actually representative of their city and community, and breaks down walls and misperceptions so that they are able to do concrete and effective work.

Throughout my trip, I found a strong sense of community, interconnectedness, and empowerment through the beliefs and traditions that members of each religion hold dear, regardless of the religion. This trip allowed me to explore the different aspects of how many religions in Fresno find commonalities, appreciate differences, and above all, become open-minded about learning the different ways in which people try to bring light into their lives. Throughout today’s divisive political climate, it has become increasingly important to keep working to find commonalities and connections against forces that tend to divide us. This information can serve as a model for others as we work towards more understanding religious communities across the country.

Photos from Lucy Soucek’s Trip to Fresno:

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.