Click Image for our Latest E-Newsletter

​The Role of Mary in Christianity and Islam
December 15, 2020 @ 7 pm

Picture
​Join us during this celebratory time of the year as members of Hartford Seminary’s Macdonald Center for the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations explore the role of Mary in the Gospels and the Qur’an, and in Muslim and Christian belief.
Mary, mother of Jesus/’Isa, plays a prominent role in the Gospels and in the Qur’an, having a complete chapter named in her honor. During December, the Annunciation of the birth of Jesus by the Angel Gabriel and the birth of Jesus is read in Christian communities during the Advent and Christmas seasons. However, the Qur’an also provides a record of the Annunciation and birth of ‘Isa, which is an important sign of God’s message and an inspiration for Muslim belief.
Our speakers include:
  • Chaplain Aida Mansoor, Coordinator of the Islamic Chaplaincy Program, who will speak about Mary from a Muslim woman’s perspective. Muslims see Mary as the most important woman, chosen by God for her faith and piety to have Jesus (pbuh).
  • The Rev. Carl Chudy, Catholic priest, a member of the Xaverian Missionary order, and Hartford Seminary Doctor of Ministry student, who will speak on the principle shift  of Catholic mariology since Vatican II, as a movement away from honoring the privileges and splendors of Mary for their own sake in what has often been called an ‘isolated mariology,’ to an emphasis on Mary as one with us.
  • Dr. Hans Harmakaputra, Visiting Assistant Professor in Comparative Theology and Muslim-Christian Relations, who will draw primarily from the Gospels’ depiction and the ways in which Mary inspires Protestants in piety.
  • Dr. Hossein Kamaly, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies, who will talk about the Advent in the Masnavi of Rumi, and the presence of Mary in public piety.
The session will be moderated by Dr. David D. Grafton, Professor of Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations.

​Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe & America

Picture
St. Paul's Cathedral in London
The time has come to examine Gothic in the same way, since Cram never realized, along with Americans and Europeans in general, that key elements of Gothic architecture — the pointed arch, the trefoil arch, ribbed vaulting, and many other features — were born, not in Europe, but further east, often evolving from styles that were associated with a completely different religion.
Even Eurocentric architects cannot deny that the pointed arch had its origins in Islamic architecture. It appeared in the 7th century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built as the first Muslim shrine by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, and was then further developed under the Abbasids in Baghdad

Fr. Tomas Keating - A Life Surrendered to Love

The Virgin Mary: Bridging Muslims and Christians

Carl Chudy, SX
Xaverian Missionaries USA

The Journal of Social Encounters has published Fr. Carl’s comparative study on the description of Mary in the Gospels and the Qur’an that “opens us up to the profound mystery of God that transcends the boundaries of both of our faiths…” Access the Journal here.
DOWNLOAD THE ARTICLE HERE

Journal for Interreligious Studies

The Journal of Interreligious Studies (JIRS) is a forum for academic, social, and timely issues affecting religious communities around the world. Published online, it is designed to increase both the quality and frequency of interchanges among religious groups and their leaders and scholars. By fostering conversation, the Journal hopes to increase religious and interreligious literacy, and address the issues surrounding interreligious relations, dialogue, theology, and communication. It is a publication of the Boston University School of Theology, Hebrew College and, Hartford Seminary. For regular updates, we invite you to follow the Journal on Facebook. 

Serving a Wounded World in Interreligious Solidarity

A Christian Call to Reflection and Action During COVID-19 and Beyond Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue World Council of Churches
​The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the global community with unavoidable immediacy and with little preparedness on our part. It has dramatically altered everyone’s daily life, and powerfully exposed the vulnerability that all humans share. Alongside the millions who have been infected physically, many more have been affected psychologically, economically, politically and religiously; all have been deprived of public worship. People have struggled to cope with death and grief, especially with the inability to be with their loved ones at their deathbeds, and perform their last rites and funerals in a dignified manner. The lock down has brought the world economy to its knees, and global hunger could double due to this catastrophe. It has also contributed to an increase in domestic violence. The requirements of physical and social distancing have meant isolation for many people. Despair, anxiety and insecurity have come to dominate human lives. The coronavirus has affected all – rich and poor, the elderly and children, persons in cities and villages, farmers and industrialists, workers and students.  Download to read more...
servingwoundedworld_cov_int.pdf
File Size: 509 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

Dialogue Between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: It's Joys and Challenges

A moral theologian in the Anglican tradition, Dr Lucinda Allen Mosher is Faculty Associate in Interfaith Studies at Hartford Seminary, where she teaches courses on America’s religious diversity, comparative theology, chaplaincy in multifaith contexts, and Christian-Muslim relations.

Dehumanizing and Demonizing Language and How to Confront It

​France’s ‘hip’ female rabbi draws Muslims, Christians and Jews in a time of crisis

Religious News Services (accessed June 30, 2020)
RNS) — On Tuesday nights at 8:30 p.m., tens of thousands of people throughout France — believers and non-believers, Jews, Muslims and Christians — log on to Facebook to hear the nation’s foremost female rabbi discuss the intersection of racism and anti-Semitism and help them make sense of a modern plague.
“We are in a moment of extreme vulnerability when life and death hold hands,” said Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, known for her original interpretations of Biblical texts, psychoanalytic thought, art and poetry. “Some people will use this moment to create a bubble of protection, to close borders and embrace ideologies of contamination that demonize people. But what is the meaning of my life if confinement makes me blind to the other?”
Horvilleur, 45, who has been called a rock star in a leather jacket, is a former model who has appeared on the cover of French Elle. The wild curls framing her face have been compared to the sidelocks of Hasidic Jews. She finds the descriptions amusing insofar as they counter stereotypes and help her reach audiences across cultures.
“I’m trying to create bridges between worlds that have stopped talking to each other,” she said. “I’m trying to create links between words and worlds.”
Horvilleur is also known as the rare public intellectual who has brought faith into the conversation in a country committed to laicité, or secularism. And though she is also one of the few progressive rabbis in France’s overwhelmingly Orthodox Jewish community, she has become a leader of a growing movement of Jews from all denominations. Less an activist who urges congregants to take to the streets to protest injustice, she is a purveyor of ideas and a presenter of possibilities in the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Holy Envy


The tensions of our time are well-known. But there are stories that are not being told, because they are not violent and not shouting to be heard. One of them is that all over this country, synagogues and mosques, Muslims and Jews, have been coming to know one another. There is friendship. There are initiatives that are patiently, and at human scale, planting the seeds for new realities across generational time. As part of the Civil Conversations Project, a live conversation at the Union for Reform Judaism’s General Assembly in Boston between Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Sarah Bassin.
ON BEING with Krista Tippet