Embracing an Interfaith Future
November 28th, 2007
NAIN Connect will be celebrating its 20th anniversary next summer, hosted by the Interfaith Center at the Presidio (at the University of San Francisco). Paul Chaffee shares more details about the program for this banner interfaith conference.
Embracing an Interfaith Future is the theme of the 20th anniversary gathering of the North American Interfaith Network (NAIN), July 24-28, 2008, in San Francisco. If you care about grassroots interfaith activities in North America, please consider attending.
NAIN had its first conference in 1988 in Wichita, Kansas, drawing 235 representatives from 12 different religions to start an interfaith conversation. The New York Times covered the event. “From Wichita to the World, a Vision” reported that the meeting was “the first of such nature and scope on the continent since 1893, when a World Parliament of Religions was held in Chicago.”
In the 20 years since the Wichita “Connect,” the centennial of the initial Parliament was celebrated, the URI Charter was signed, the Pluralism Project was initiated at Harvard, and thousands of interfaith groups have been organizing across North America and the world.
In 1988, multifaith relationships was a new idea. Today the religious fabric of our neighborhoods and cities is utterly changed. Never in human history have so many followers of so many faiths lived so closely together, or had a better opportunity to understand and get to know each other. How do we live into this challenge? What do we do next?
These questions will be explored at NAIN’s 2008 Connect through three subthemes:
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- Multifaith Challenges We Face
- The Gifts We Bring
- Making a Difference
Two dozen workshops, many of them interactive, will be offered, and an afternoon of Open Space workshops will allow attendees to organize sessions around their own issues. Half a dozen exemplary grassroots multifaith organizations, succeeding in new ways, will be profiled. “How-to” sessions are popular at NAIN and will be available next July as well. Meditation and devotion will be offered by leaders from different traditions.
Embracing an Interfaith Future will be held at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution in the heart of the the city. A program outline and registration forms will be available by this December. And before the end of the year, we plan to have a new website up that features each of the July workshops—with a chance for you to make observations and suggestions, add links, and otherwise respond to the material that will be discussed at the Connect.
For more information or to receive registration forms when they are published, contact paul@interfaith-presidio.org.