S. Simone Campbell with Rabbi Amy Eilberg and Nahid Khan

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., CSB Gorecki Center, Room 204

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. 

Sponsored by the Koch Chair in Catholic Thought and Culture at the College of Saint Benedict in collaboration with the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning, a joint enterprise of Saint John's University and the University of St. Thomas.