On Friday, May 16th, two leading faith-based social activists and educators will speak with Regis students about their efforts to build understanding, and foster collaboration, across religious lines. What, they will ask, do their own Muslim and Catholic traditions have to say about religious pluralism and interfaith relations? How has their participation in interfaith coalitions for social justice helped to shape, and perhaps deepen, their personal faith? What do they see as the most important issues calling for interfaith collaboration in today’s New York? How can young New Yorkers help address these issues?
Our speakers will open the program with brief remarks, and leave plenty of time for questions and conversations with Regis students. The speakers will be:
Dr. Mehnaz Afridi is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College. The Center’s goal is to promote dialogue among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, based on the educational mission of the Lasallian Catholic college. Dr. Afridi’s deep commitment to interfaith understanding stems from her own background as a Pakistani-American Muslim woman, and from her academic research on the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Muslim-Jewish relations, and contemporary Muslim identities. Her book, The Shoah through Muslim Eyes, is forth¬coming in 2014. In addition to her research and teaching, Dr. Afridi works with a number of organizations promoting social justice and interfaith understanding, including the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Ethics, the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Woman’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality.
Tom Dobbins, Jr. is the Justice and Peace Coordinator in the Department of Social and Community Development of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York. In that role, he has worked in partnership with numerous parishioners of the almost 400 parishes in the Archdiocese – educating them in the social teachings of the Church, and connecting them with opportunities to put these teachings into practice. Tom also teaches courses on Catholic social thought and social justice in the ongoing formation program for the permanent diaconate at Saint Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie. He is the producer and on-air personality of the JustLove radio program on the social mission of the Church, which airs nationwide on the Catholic Channel (Sirius and XM channel 129) every Saturday at 10 am, and he also blogs about his work at http://www.archny.org/ news-events/columns-and-blogs/on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven.
The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Henry Goldschmidt, the Director of Education programs at the Interfaith Center of New York.
