The Past, Present, and Future of Inter-Faith Relations: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of Nostra Aetate.
Cosponsored with the Religious Studies Department
When: Thursday, October 15, 2015 at 5 p.m.
Where: Shotel Dubin Auditorium in Steinhardt Hall (Penn Hillel), University of Pennsylvania
Issued in October 1965, Nostra Aetate was the Second Vatican Council’s seminal declaration on the relationship of the Church to other Faiths. Situated two weeks after the historic visit of Pope Francis and two weeks before the visitation of the Dalai Lama, this special event presents an opportunity for the university to take stock of the transformation of inter-faith relations ushered in by this pivotal church document and to consider what still lies ahead.
Featuring:
Dr. Philip A. Cunningham is Professor of Theology and Director of the Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, PA. He also serves as president of the International Council of Christians and Jews, secretary-treasurer of the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations, and has been a member of the Advisory Committee on Catholic-Jewish Relations for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is also webmaster of the CCJR’s online resource supersite called Dialogika. Interested in biblical studies, religious education, and theologies of Christian-Jewish relations, he is the author of numerous books and articles on these subjects. His most recent book is Seeking Shalom: The Journey to Right Relationship between Catholics and Jews (Eerdmans, 2015).
Dr. Daniel Mark is Commissioner of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. He is also an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. He teaches political theory, philosophy of law, American government, and politics and religion. At Villanova, he is a faculty associate of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good and serves on the Jewish Religion and Culture Lecture Committee and the Graduate Committee of the Department of Political Science. Dr. Mark works with the Tikvah Fund in New York and the Hertog Foundation in Washington, DC, and he has taught at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
Dr. Heather J. Sharkey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University after conducting research abroad on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. Before joining the Penn faculty in 2002, she taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Trinity College in Connecticut. She is the editor of Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia (Syracuse University Press, 2013). Dr. Sharkey is writing a book for Cambridge University Press about the history of intercommunal relations in the modern Middle East.