The annual lecture highlights the work of Jewish and Catholic scholars in an effort to illuminate either the broader history of Jewish-Catholic relations or specific topics that bear on the understanding between the two faiths.

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Past Lectures and Events

Thomas Merton and Abraham Joshua Heschel: Partners in Prayer, Peace, and Interfaith Dialogue

Dr. Mary Christine Athans, BVM, PhD explores how Heschel and Merton integrated spirituality and the quest for social justice.
Co-sponsor: the Iona Spirituality Institute

Merton's extant correspondence with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel from December 1960 - December 1966 offers a brief window into kindred spirits who were deeply committed to prayer, to the efforts for peace, and to the interfaith dialogue. As both mystics and social activists, Merton and Herschel were challenged to integrate spirituality and the quest for social justice. Reflecting on their lives and selected writings can deepen our own insights into what it means to accept that challenge in our own lives.

Mary Christine Athans, BVM, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is professor emerita at the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity of the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota), and currently adjunct faculty at Loyola University Chicago and Catholic Theological Union. She holds a PhD in historical theology from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, an STL from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, an MA in theology from the University of San Francisco, an MA in history from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and a BS in Humanities from Loyola University Chicago.

She is the author of The Coughlin-Fahey Connection: Father Charles E. Coughlin, Father Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp. and Religious Anti-Semitism in the United States, 1938-1954 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); "To Work for the Whole People": John Ireland's Seminary in St. Paul (New York: Paulist Press, 2002); and In Quest of the Jewish Mary (New York: Orbis Press, 2013), forthcoming. She has written chapters in books, most recently in Reclaiming Catholicism: Treasures Old and New, eds. Thomas Groome and Michael Daley (New York: Orbis, 2010), has edited two books as well as two journals, and has written numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals including "Courtesy, Confrontation, Cooperation: Jewish Christian Relations in the U.S.," U. S. Catholic Historian (Spring 2010); "The Jewishness of Mary," New Theology Review (August 2009); and "Judaism and Catholic Prayer: A New Horizon for the Liturgy," New Theology Review (November 2008).

Toward a Jewish Theology of Other Religions

Using Biblical, Rabbinic, medieval and modern sources, Dr. Weissman will explore what traditional Jewish texts have to say about other religious faiths and their adherents. Can Judaism be open to the idea of religious pluralism?  How is each religion's specificity or particularity approached? What are the issues that arise halakhically for Jews concerning Christianity?

Dr. Deborah Weissman, born in New York, settled in Jerusalem in 1972. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MA from New York University, both in sociology, and a Ph.D. in Jewish education from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her main field of academic research is the social history of Jewish women's education. A prize-winning Jewish educator, Debbie has had extensive experience in both formal and informal Jewish education, both with Israelis and with Diaspora youth and adults. She is currently Co-Chair of the Inter-Religious Coordinating Council in Israel, as well as President of the International Council of Christians and Jews (the first Jewish woman to be elected to that post in the Council's more than sixty-year history.)

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Where Christians Misunderstand Judaism, and So Misunderstand Jesus

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