Message from ICNY Executive Director
Dear Friends,
Our 30th Marshall Meyer Retreat, held on September 22, brought diverse faith leaders together with healthcare professionals to discuss end of life care. Some of the speakers included Pamela Brier, President and Chief Executive Officer of Maimonides Medical Center, Dr. Brad Stuart of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care, Randye Retkin of New York Legal Assistance Group, and Reverend George Handzo from the Health Care Chaplaincy. Additionally, in a roundtable called “Religious Communities & Experiences with End of Life Care,” Dr. Khalid Rehman (Muslim), Baba Antonio Mondesire (Afro Caribbean), Venerable Khenpo Pema Wangdak (Tibetan Buddhist) and Dr. Uma Mysorekar (Hindu) offered faith leader perspectives on the subject. This retreat powerfully evinced the role that faith plays in the care of terminally ill patients.
ICNY is proud to recognize the work of Sherry Sheppard McIntyre, a graduate of our National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Teaching Religious Diversity in Schools. This past September the California Assembly recommended that her World Religions course be considered by school districts statewide. The course, already being taught and currently required for high school students in Modesto, California, has been credited with reducing bullying of Sikh children and other faith groups, and increasing students’ understanding of world events. This is an exceptional initiative in California and the United States.
In the area of prison reentry, volunteers from churches and mosques around Harlem continue to offer hospitality to parolees at the Harlem Community Justice Center this past month, several returning citizens graduated from a 12-week long public speaking class and are available to speak about their experiences coming back into the community. If you would like a member of this speaker’s bureau to address your house of worship, please contact Theo Harris at Theo@interfaithcenter.org.
Looking ahead, ICNY’s Education Program Director will be speaking at Hofstra University on Inclusion and Exclusion through Interfaith Dialogue: Lessons from Crown Heights and The Interfaith Center of New York. Also, Dr. Sarah Sayeed is organizing Strengthening Muslim Families Through Child Welfare Partnerships: A workshop for Muslim community leaders. The workshop will provide information on 1) The definition of child abuse 2) How ACS hears about cases and how it investigates & refers families 3) Foster parent recruitment and support and 4) How families can be better supported & how religious leaders can work with ACS. To learn more contact Malik@interfaithcenter.org.
Finally, we are confronted with news of religious conflict and peacemaking around the neighborhood and the nation every day. ICNY commends to you two articles along these lines: “Anti-Muslim Ads Could Threaten Lives,” by Rajdeep Singh, and an article from Reuters entitled “Muslim scholars present religious rebuttal to Islamic State.”
Our newsletter for October is available here.
