AU Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action

Monthly Musings

April 2006

At the beginning of this academic year, the university president appointed a task force to make recommendations to her about the future of the Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action, of which I am the Executive Director. The task force has now made its recommendations. They include, for example, creating: a religion major in the near future; programs on our Wisconsin campus; retreats and also occasional lectures for local clergy but also for other interested people; a summer camp for high school students, in which they would have practical experience of religious pluralism.

It is likely that, in the medium term, the Center will remove to refurbished and more extensive premises. I shall have a Wackerlin fellow to help me accomplish these projects. Also: Joe Dunham, who has taught philosophy at AU for (shall we say) a number of years, will become a senior fellow of the Center this Fall, which is wonderful news for, as many of you know, he is a person of much wisdom, humor and insight.

These opportunities make me ask myself: what sort of center should an interfaith center be? As it happens, I have recently spoken to a meeting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday (you can read my contribution here). Shortly, I shall say a few words at our local Temple B’Nai Israel on Holocaust Remembrance Day. I do such things as a committed Christian, not as some wandering, unrooted interfaith person who has seen though the charade of particular religions and has some higher wisdom to impart. There are several such people, who make a comfortable living by speaking from their superior vantage point. There are also others for whom every religion has something good in it except for the one in which they grew up and from which, often understandably, they’re in full flight. Well, God bless them and what they say, for all of us deserve a fair hearing. Still, I’m inclined to think that most of us have to work from where we are and how it’s shaped us, in order to embrace the world with a generosity of spirit. I’m grateful that I’ve worked with Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and many other people of faith who have interpreted their traditions liberally and open-mindedly.

Since I’m Christian and work within a university that was founded by Christians, it seems right that the Wackerlin Center for Faith and Action should (to quote part of one recommendation to the president) ‘have a strong interfaith component but also take seriously the university’s Christian heritage’. The future could be very exciting.

— Martin Forward