Upcoming Public Events

From Enemy to Friend: Jewish Reflections on Everyday Peacemaking
Lecture by Rabbi Amy Eilberg

Monday, February 4, 8:00 p.m.
Quad 264, Saint John's University

Why does conflict arise among individuals and among religious, political and ethnic groups?  What contributes to the resolution, even transformation, of conflict in the world and in our lives?  How can each of us serve the cause of peace?  Rabbi Eilberg will explore these questions through the lens of Judaism's rich body of sacred texts on peace and peacemaking.

In 1985 Rabbi Amy Eilberg became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in Judaism's Conservative Movement.  Soon after that she found her vocation in the work of healing.  A co-founder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, where she directed the Jewish Hospice Care Program, and a founding co-director of the Yedidya Center for Jewish Spiritual Direction, she is nationally known as a leader of the Jewish healing movement and in the field of Jewish spiritual direction.  From 2007 to 2011 Rabbi Eilberg served as coordinator of the Jay Phillips Center's Interfaith Conversations Project, fostering interfaith learning and friendship among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Twin Cities area.  Currently she is the center's interfaith conversations special consultant, works with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs on its Civility Campaign, and serves on the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations.  She is also deeply engaged in the work of peace and reconciliation, particularly in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lecturing and writing on this topic as well as on the art of compassionate listening, healing, and spiritual direction.  Rabbi Eilberg is at work on a book titled From Enemy to Friend: Jewish Reflections on Everyday Peacemaking.

Co-sponsored with the CSB/SJU departments of peace studies and theology

Free and open to the public

Koch Chair Lecture and Interfaith Colloquium 

The U.S. Economy and "The Faithful Budget"
Lecture by Sister Simone Campbell
Other Faith Perspectives by Rabbi Amy Eilberg and Nahid Khan

Wednesday, March 6, 8:00 p.m.
Gorecki Center 204, College of Saint Benedict

Sister Simone Campbell has been a principal spokesperson for "Priorities for a Faithful Budget," a document born of interreligious collaboration that promotes comprehensive and compassionate budget principles for restoring economic opportunity, ensuring adequate resources for the country's fiscal needs, providing true security, reducing poverty and hardship, caring for the environment, improving access to health care, and taking responsibility for future generations. She will explain how this budget reflects Catholic social teaching and why and how it can be promoted by Americans of different religious traditions and secular humanists alike. Following the lecture, Rabbi Amy Eilberg and Nahid Khan will offer brief responses to "Priorities for a Faithful Budget" from their respective Jewish and Muslim perspectives.

Sister Simone Campbell is executive director of NETWORK, the Washington-based Catholic social justice lobbying group. She is an attorney and a poet with extensive experience in public policy and advocacy for systemic change related to immigration reform, health care, peace, and economic justice. A member and former general director of the religious community Sisters of Social Service, Campbell led the "Nuns on the Bus" tour through nine states this past summer to educate Americans about current economic injustices and to encourage governmental officials and other citizens to embrace the ideas in the document "Priorities for a Faithful Budget" as a means of promoting greater economic justice for all. In the process, she and her companions on the tour highlighted the work of Catholic sisters in serving the poor and advocating for social justice. Cited for her "distinguished advocacy and commitment to economic justice and peace building," Campbell was awarded the 2012 Defender of Democracy Award by the Parliamentarians for Global Action, an international organization of legislators from 120 parliaments.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg is interfaith conversations special consultant for the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning. In 1985 she became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in Judaism's Conservative Movement. A co-founder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, where she directed the Jewish Hospice Care Program, and a founding co-director of the Yedidya Center for Jewish Spiritual Direction, she is widely known as a leader of the Jewish healing movement and in the field of Jewish spiritual direction. She serves on the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, works with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs on its Civility Campaign, and is deeply engaged in the work of peace and reconciliation, particularly in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Nahid Khan is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, with a religious studies graduate minor. Active in community interfaith dialogue since the 1980s, with a particular focus on Muslim-Jewish dialogue, she was a Muslim delegate at the North American Interfaith Colloquium held at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in 1999 and 2000 and she served for eight years on the board of the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition, an interfaith advocacy group addressing social justice issues in Minnesota. She is also a trained guide for the Collection in Focus program at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and a board member of Mizna, an Arab-American cultural and arts organization based in the Twin Cities.

Co-sponsored with the Koch Chair in Catholic Thought and Culture at the College of Saint Benedict

Free and open to the public 

Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joseph's Dream
Lecture by Avivah Zornberg 

Wednesday, April 17, 7:30 p.m.
Gorecki Center 204A, College of Saint Benedict

In the Book of Genesis, Joseph dreams provocative dreams; his brothers' hatred grows because of them; Jacob apparently dismisses them.  But according to Freud, all dreams contain a "navel," a spot that defies understanding, that "reaches into the unknown." According to a classic rabbinic interpretation, that unfathomable element in the lives of Jacob and his son Joseph is represented by Rachel, the "unknown woman" in their narrative.  Avivah Zornberg, one of the world's most captivating teachers of Torah, will draw on literature, film, and psychoanalytic thought to inform her literary analysis of this narrative, exposing the complex interplay between conscious and unconscious levels of experience reflected in the narrative's message about what it means to be human.

Avivah Zornberg earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Cambridge University and holds a visiting lectureship in the London School of Jewish Studies.  After teaching English literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Zornberg turned to teaching Torah in a number of venues in Jerusalem where she has drawn thousands of students to her lectures.  Employing insights from rabbinic literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, she advances highly original literary analyses of biblical texts. She is the author of three books that have been widely acclaimed as masterpieces of biblical interpretation: Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Jewish Publication Society, 1995), renamed The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (Schocken, 2011), which won the National Jewish Book Award; The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (Doubleday, 2001; Schocken, 2011); and The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious (Schocken 2009).

Co-sponsored with the Literary Arts Institute of the College of Saint Benedict

Free and open to the public