SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: With Korean-American drummers leading a line of professors, a new experiment in American religious education began this fall. This was the opening of southern California’s Claremont Lincoln University, which describes itself as America’s first interreligious school of theology, one that will train pastors, rabbis, and eventually Muslim imams all on one campus. The school’s philosophy was captured in the opening remarks of Muslim-American religious scholar Najeeba Syeed-Miller, a professor at Claremont Lincoln.

PROFESSOR NAJEEBA SYEED-MILLER: The diversity of humankind is not a curse from God. It is a sign of God’s creation, and the beauty of humanity is in our very differences.

GONZALEZ: What do you hope to accomplish here at Claremont Lincoln? What’s the grand vision?

PHILIP CLAYTON (Provost, Claremont Lincoln University): You have to get beyond the point of people defining their religions by the traditional walls.

GONZALEZ: Philip Clayton is Claremont Lincoln’s provost. He sees this school as offering an alternative to traditional religious education.

CLAYTON: When you train rabbis in one school, pastors in another, imams in another, you put them out into communities they create an “us versus them” mentality. What if we do something that’s never been done before? Let’s train them in the same classroom. Let’s let them work out their differences in their day-to-day education. When they go out into their communities you won’t find them doing the “us versus them,” but, we hope, the “we.” What that would for the face of religion in America would be staggering.

GONZALEZ: Claremont Lincoln is actually the creation of a much older institution, United Methodist-affiliated Claremont School of Theology, founded in 1885. It partnered with southern California’s Academy of Jewish Religion and the Islamic Center of Southern California to form this new school. Students attending this school can get master’s degrees in divinity, rabbinic studies, and Muslim counseling.

INSTRUCTOR: I’d like you to stand or to turn in the direction that you normally pray.

GONZALEZ: But all are required to take classes like this one that emphasize interreligious education and understanding. Many of the students feel they couldn’t get this kind of multifaith education anywhere else.

WALLY BURMAN (Student): Most of the reason I’m here is I looked at the other colleges and other programs, and it appeared they were preparing students to be leaders in the church of yesterday, where Claremont is training people to be leaders in the church of tomorrow.

GONZALEZ: This school’s ambition to train Muslim clerics is important to Valentina Khan, a Muslim-American student of Iranian descent.

VALENTINA KHAN (Student): I definitely think that we need to have is a voice that’s an American voice as Muslims. I mean, having somebody in Saudi Arabia telling us how it should be here in America is absolutely, in my opinion, not the way I’d want to be told.

GONZALEZ: However, the creation of this school has also generated some criticism.

CLAYTON: I’m actively involved in blogging and social networking, and I began to find sites that would label what we were doing as the work of the devil, and people absolutely guaranteeing the blogosphere that I was on my way to hell, so that it really drew a hostility. People felt that we were undercutting the way they defined their entire religious tradition, which is this oppositional and exclusionary approach.

GONZALEZ: However, many of the students and faculty at Claremont Lincoln don’t want to ignore the tensions and theological differences between their faiths.

SYEED-MILLER: I actually hope that there is conflict. I often say when we get together in interfaith dialogue we try to “out-nice” each other and say, “Oh, you know, you’re wonderful!” “No, you are wonderful!” If we are truly going to be conversation partners, we need to say, “Look, this is how I view your tradition.” I think we really need to get into conversations about history, because so much of what we carry in interfaith dialogue is about the negative histories that each of our communities has had with one another, so if we are not willing to go there then I don’t think any of us are going to be able to move forward.

GONZALEZ: Beyond America’s changing religious landscape, there’s another reason why Claremont went multifaith: survival. Like other schools of theology and seminaries during these tough economic times, this campus faced a declining enrollment and a tightening budget. Allowing students from other faiths to train here is one way to keep the lights on and the doors open.

CLAYTON: This is an extremely hard time for American theological schools. We could go on with a dwindling number of Methodists students, but we decided we wanted to be ahead of the curve.

GONZALEZ: Well, ahead of the curve because you had to be. I mean, you had to open up this institution to other faiths to keep your head above water.

CLAYTON: Sure, but we had a 45-year history of being edgy. We were always sort of pushing the envelope, and so we decided we would push the envelope on this one.

GONZALEZ: To help it go multifaith, this school received a $50 million grant from philanthropist David Lincoln and his wife, Joan. In their honor, the school was named after them. Clayton believes to survive more and more schools of theology and seminaries will have to adopt Claremont’s interreligous approach.

CLAYTON: We’re starting to get visits from academic deans and presidents who say, “Oh, we’ve see where you’re going. Can we talk about this new movement?”

GONZALEZ: But skepticism remains high.

DENNIS DIRKS (Dean, Talbot School of Theology): It’s fine for Claremont. It would not be good for us.

GONZALEZ: Dennis Dirks is the dean of the Talbot School of Theology in southern California, a Christian multidenominational evangelical institution. He says religious clarity, not a mixing of faiths, is essential to a religious school, arguing a multifaith approach could weaken the curriculum and anger alumni and other campus supporters.

DIRKS: We’re frequently asked, “Do you admit non-Christians here?” They want to know. They want to hold us accountable for that, so that’s something that we want to look at very carefully.

GONZALEZ: And they want to make sure that the non-Christians are not here.

DIRKS: Well, yes, not as enrolled students, because they are fearful of diffusion of the curriculum.

GONZALEZ: But do you think it’s easy for faiths to cohabitate like that in theological instruction?

DIRKS: No, I think it’s very difficult. I think there are great challenges.

GONZALEZ: However, at Claremont they think the future is on their side in an increasingly multifaith America.

CLASSROOM SPEAKER: Some of us are looking in a Jewish direction. Some of us are looking in a Muslim direction. Some are looking in a Christian direction. And yet we are all looking in a God direction.

GONZALEZ: Beyond Christians, Jews, and Muslims, administrators here are already talking about enrolling Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

Holocaust survivor Rachel Bodner says the Nazis would never have succeeded in killing so many Jews in Belgium during World War II—the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the number at between 24,000 and 30,000—if only Jews and Christians had talked to one another.

“Why don’t people open their mouths? People didn’t and look what happened—the Holocaust,” says the 83-year-old Belgian Jew. Silence, she explains, was caused by ignorance, and silence and ignorance together led to oppression. Fear of confrontation also played a role.

Bodner, who hid from the Nazis in a Catholic convent and immigrated to the United States in 1947, had an older sister who perished at Auschwitz. This month she spoke about her experiences to Jewish and Catholic students in Baltimore as part of an annual interfaith program of study, dialogue, and commemoration called “Lessons of the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe” used by Jews to refer to the Holocaust.

Led by Jeanette Parmigiani of the Baltimore Jewish Council and Deborah Cardin of the Jewish Museum of Maryland, which cosponsors the program, the purpose of “Lessons of the Shoah” is to help high school students develop respect for and understanding of each other’s faith.

Participants also focus on contemporary genocide, and a survivor of intergroup violence and ethnic hostility in eastern Congo spoke along with Bodner. In addition, students are required to work as a team on a social justice project they choose.

Some religious leaders have observed that interreligious dialogue is losing momentum among new generations of Christians and Jews and that remembering the Holocaust is not as compelling to young American Jews as it was to their elders. But young people are still willing to engage in interfaith dialogue if only given the opportunity, according to Donny Kirsch, coordinator of educational outreach for the Jewish Community Relations Council in Washington, DC who works with “Lessons of the Shoah.”

Kirsch also contacts Jewish congregations to locate Holocaust survivors still willing and able to talk about their experiences. As their numbers dwindle and advancing age makes it difficult for them to travel, Kirsch says it is increasingly important to create local opportunities like the interfaith program in Baltimore for survivors to share their stories.

Among the scholars and religious leaders who participate in “Lessons of the Shoah” are Rabbi Geoffrey Basik, founding rabbi of Kol HaLev (”Voice of the Heart”), a Reconstructionist synagogue community in Baltimore, and Father Robert Albright, a retired Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Baltimore and former university chaplain who speaks to students on the history of Judaism and Christianity and who listened to Rachel Bodner’s testimony about silence and speaking out.

“If we as kids had a program like they have now,” he said, “this world would be a different place.”

Matt Boivin is an intern at Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly and a student at Spring Arbor University in Michigan.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile now of a man who has spent most of his life working for better relations between Christians and Jews. He is Rabbi James Rudin, for many years until his retirement the head of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. Rudin has a new book out called “Christians and Jews, Faith to Faith.” One reason he wrote it, he says, is his fear that the cause he has served so long is losing momentum.

We met Rudin at a retreat center near his home in Florida. Once, he promoted better interreligious understanding with top US and foreign leaders. He had 11 meetings with Pope John Paul II and then with Benedict XVI. Rudin may be retired officially, but he is still busy writing, speaking, and leading interfaith meetings, this one of Catholics and Jews.

RABBI JAMES RUDIN (speaking at interfaith meeting): Is it possible to be a faithful Catholic and a faithful Jew, very deep in your soul, in your heart, and still have mutual respect and understanding for the Other, capital O, the Other who is not of our faith?

ABERNETHY: Rudin says the Nazi Holocaust of the 1930s and ’40s taught his generation what can happen when bigotry goes unchecked.

RUDIN: To me it’s a pathology, it’s a cancer—that is anti-Semitism or any religious hatred—and if you don’t treat it, if you don’t treat it as a pathology, it can fester and can be quiet for a while, and then it explodes.

ABERNETHY: Pope John Paul II, along with many others, led the postwar attack on religious prejudice, especially on anti-Semitism. In the year 2000, John Paul prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism’s holiest site. The note he left asked God’s forgiveness for all those who had caused Jews to suffer. I asked Rudin if he blames Christians for the Holocaust.

RUDIN: I don’t hold today’s Christians guilty, not at all. Most of them were born after ’45. But there is a responsibility to teach it to young Christians growing up today. In Christian Europe, in a Christian society mass murder took place of a religious community, and how did that happen?

ABERNETHY: In churches, synagogues, and schools, often with carefully prepared courses and videos, dialogues explore the issues that separate the two religions, one of them—the words “Old Testament.”

RUDIN: It’s not accurate because it puts Judaism as if it were something old-fashioned, not up to date or, as many Christians believe, has been replaced by Christianity and that the New Testament is superior to the Old Testament, and that’s my beef with it.

ABERNETHY: And what about the understanding many Christians have that the Hebrew Bible foreshadows the coming of Christ?

RUDIN: I want Christians to take the Hebrew Bible or, it’s called, the Old Testament or the Tanakh on its own terms. Do not imply that it was written six- or seven-hundred years before an event and was already predicting an event.

ABERNETHY: What then should evangelical Christians and others do about their conviction that the whole Bible is literally true—God’s word?

RUDIN: Well, that’s not the way Jews and other Christians read the Bible.

ABERNETHY: And the ancient accusation that Jews killed Christ?

RUDIN: That’s one of the most insidious and odious charges, and everybody knows, or everybody should know that Jews under Roman occupation in the land of Israel at that time had no power to execute anybody.

ABERNETHY: Another issue—Jesus’ “Great Commission” to his followers to make disciples of all nations.

RUDIN: Well, I respect that and I understand it, but Jews are already with the Father, already with God—the Covenant—and are not in need of any intermediary.

ABERNETHY: And attitudes toward Israel? I asked Rudin whether he thinks some Jews are so supportive of the state of Israel that they can’t criticize its government’s policies.

RUDIN: There are many Jews who are very unhappy with the various policies of the Israeli government and have expressed it. However, there is one thing that the overwhelming number of Jews agree—that Israel must survive as a Jewish state.

ABERNETHY: Rudin says the best results from interfaith dialogue come when participants honestly identify their differences as well as common ground.

RUDIN: I’ve found after 40 years of this that Jews and Christians who really engage one another come out better Christians and better Jews.

ABERNETHY: Rudin preaches a theology that accepts the validity of all religions, all different approaches to the transcendent.

RUDIN: I really believe that God’s plan for the human family is that there are many, many paths to God, and there’s not just one path and one way and one truth, and that’s the hardest thing for Christians and Jews to accept. They can accept neighbors, they can accept working together, marrying one another, they can do all kinds of things, but when push comes to shove they’ll say “my faith is the truth,.” But when you say “my faith is the truth” you are excluding 98 percent of the rest of the world.

ABERNETHY: The interfaith group Rudin spoke to was the board of directors of the Center for Christian-Jewish Studies at Florida’s Saint Leo University. Some of the members spoke of the progress they have seen:

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: I go back to my own childhood, where my schoolmates would call me a dirty Jew, and now I have a beloved Catholic son-in-law, and we’re sitting in this group. It’s like day and night.

RUDIN: That’s in one generation

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: In one generation—well, a long one.

ABERNETHY: Others emphasized their concern for the future.

INTERFAITH MEETING PARTICIPANT: My fear is that we have peaked. Now if I’m wrong in this tell me, because a lot of the folks that are engaged in our work here are not necessarily going to be around the next 10 years. The challenge for us is how to bring folks who aren’t 60 years old into this game, right?

ABERNETHY: Rabbi Rudin, too, sees work left to do and not enough younger people interested in doing it.

RUDIN: I think the initial enthusiasm, the first flush of excitement—gee, Christians and Jews meeting together in America and dialogue or in Israel or Europe either—that’s over. And you have a whole new generation of Jews and Christians for whom all this either seems old-fashioned or unnecessary or the job has been done. There’s nothing more to do. Maybe they think we’ve succeeded, but we haven’t.

ABERNETHY: If younger generations feel better relations between Christians and Jews are no longer a top priority, surely one of the reasons is the great improvement in those relations that Rabbi Rudin helped bring about.

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KATE OLSON, correspondent: On a recent Saturday morning at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, church members and neighbors gathered to hear Brother David talk about living “a spirited life.”

Church group singing: Viva, viva la musica…

OLSON: For Brother David, it is grateful living that makes everything come alive.

BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB: The practice of gratefulness that I’m concerned with is grateful living. That means every moment of your life you practice gratefulness. You practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. We forget that, and so gratefulness can help us see that, can help us realize that.

OLSON: Though Brother David acknowledges there are many things for which we cannot be grateful, he encourages people to be open to the opportunity being given in every situation.

BROTHER DAVID: We cannot be grateful for war. That’s an unmitigated evil. We cannot be grateful for exploitation, for untimely death. But we can be grateful in every situation. The key word is “opportunity.” If you catch onto that, then if we are in practice, when something comes along for which we cannot be grateful, spontaneously we will—our mind will say, “Well, what’s this the opportunity for now?” And there’s always an opportunity for something positive, usually the opportunity to learn something new, even in the worst situations, or for the opportunity to do something. If we learn of an injustice we have the opportunity to stand up and to speak up and to do something.

OLSON: During the day, people reflected on moments of ‘epiphany’ in their lives – what brother David calls mystic or peak experiences, which often include an experience of profound gratitude.

BROTHER DAVID: The mystic is not a special kind of human being, but every human being is a special kind of mystic. We all have mystic experiences, and in these peak moments, in these peak experiences, all of us have this experience of being one with all. Those are the moments in which we feel most alive, most truly ourselves.

OLSON: Grateful living is something you can practice moment by moment in your daily life, he says, and like other spiritual practices, such as Zen meditation, its goal is to live in the present moment, to see everything as “word of God.”

BROTHER DAVID: “Word” is not just vocabulary, but “word” is everything that speaks to us, and in this sense a flower can be a word that speaks to me. A poem as a whole can be a word that speaks to me, a piece of art, everything. It speaks to me. It tells me something, it tells me something about ultimate reality. That’s a mystic insight that every human being can appreciate, I think, and experience, if we only allow ourselves.

OLSON: Cultivating this aliveness in life is central to Brother David’s vocation as a monk and to his message. Born in Austria, he immigrated to the US in 1952 and joined Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.

Brother David singing: Alleluia …

OLSON: For decades he has lived part of his life as a hermit, in prayer and contemplation and writing books. The other half he travels the globe lecturing and leading retreats, helping people discover this “aliveness” in their own lives. Finding the deeply shared personal experience is at the heart of Brother David’s work in interreligious dialogue.

Brother David speaking at retreat: “…always checking it back with your own experience, always checking it back against your basic faith…”

OLSON: A pioneer in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue, he returns frequently to Tassajara, a Zen monastery in California where he lived for several years. As part of the dialogue with Buddhism, Brother David trained in Zen meditation and joined in Buddhist rituals. He says the task of interreligious dialogue today is to understand the meaning beneath the words of particular creeds or beliefs, to discover the faith that underlies these words that we all share.

BROTHER DAVID: Deep down there is only one faith that all human beings have, and that is that deep trust in life. Even our body expresses that trust in life by always taking another breath. We can’t even stop it. We can’t stop breathing. So that deep trust in life—that is what all humans share, and that expresses itself, then, in a Buddhist way, in a Christian way, and even in ways that we don’t recognize as explicitly religious. Many atheists have a deep faith. They all have that deep faith, but they express it very differently.

OLSON: Beliefs are not faith, he says. Faith is deep trust. And the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.

BROTHER DAVID: The one most frequently repeated command in the Bible is not “love your neighbor,” but “fear not.” And if there is one thing that we need in our world, if there’s one thing that we should write on our mirror and see every morning when we look into the mirror, it’s “fear not.” If we went into the day with that command deeply tattooed on our heart, “fear not,” we’d be completely different people and create a completely different world—a world of faith.

OLSON: This deep trust in life is at the heart of what he sees as “the round dance of grateful living.”

BROTHER DAVID: So we participate in this tremendous dance in which the gift comes forth from the source and through thanksgiving returns to the source, where the word comes out of the silence and through understanding returns to the silence. Gratefulness is not just saying “thank you.” It’s acting. It is being your self. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science. That is what the Bible calls “in God we live and move and have our being.”

Church group singing: “Viva, viva la musica…”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Kate Olson reporting from San Francisco.

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Rabbi RON KRONISH (Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel): Every step that the pope takes in every place he goes, including the Temple Mount or the Western Wall, is a gesture of reconciliation to both sides, and he’s tried during the week he’s here to play a balancing act, and it never quite works out perfect for everybody.

LAWTON: Pilgrims came from around the world to be part of the pope’s visit here, but his main focus was on the local Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The visit certainly encouraged the region’s shrinking Christian population. In 1948, Christians made up about 20 percent of the population here. Today, because of emigration and declining birth rates, they represent less than two percent.

Reverend IBRAHIM FALTAS (Latin Parish of Jerusalem): We are worried about the Christians here in Jerusalem and all the Holy Land. To be here is our mission, to be here, to continue to be here in this land.

LAWTON: Benedict urged the Christian population, predominantly Palestinian, to persevere. His support meant a lot to local Christians.

HANAN NASRALLAH: He is the big man, the holy — well, you consider the holy man and representing the Catholic Church over the world, so for him to come in an area where there is a conflict — a very small country, but it’s a big issue here, I think it’s very important for his visit.

KHALIL ANSARA: The talk is always about the relationship with the Muslims and the Jews, but it’s very important for the pope to come here too with the relations with the Christians.

LAWTON: Meanwhile, many Jewish leaders had high expectations that this visit would be a visual demonstration that their community still has strong relations with the Vatican, despite recent tensions after Benedict lifted the excommunication of a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust.

Rabbi DAVID ROSEN (American Jewish Committee in Israel): Most people don’t know about statements and declarations. Most people don’t read properly, but nevertheless people do view the visual images.

LAWTON: Benedict met with Israel’s chief rabbis and visited the Western Wall, where he left a prayer for peace in the Middle East. He also visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. But his speech there generated controversy. Some Israelis were upset that he did not acknowledge the role Christian anti-Semitism played in the Holocaust, and he did not refer to his own background as a German growing up in the Nazi era.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the pope had addressed those points before and didn’t feel the need to repeat them.

Reverend FEDERICO LOMBARDI (Vatican Spokesman): He had already spoken many times about these problems.

LAWTON: Rabbi Ron Kronish of the Interreligious Coordinating Council of Israel said he believes, overall, the visit was a positive thing for the Jewish community.

Rabbi KRONISH: It strengthens Israel’s place in the family of nations and in the world community. So I think that people are going to be happy about it when they look back. He went to Yad Vashem; he went to the Western Wall; he went to all the right places. He’s made all the right gestures that count for both peoples, and I think we ought to not focus on all the things he could have said or not said.

LAWTON: Benedict also did some fence-mending with the Muslim community, where tensions linger after his controversial speech in 2006 where he quoted a Byzantine emperor who linked the Prophet Muhammad and violence. Benedict was the first pope to visit the compound of Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam and a place of deep contention between Muslims and Jews.

Muslim leader Issa Jaber is an Israeli Arab who helps coordinate interfaith dialogue.

ISSA JABER (Association for Jewish-Arab Coexistence in the Judean Hills): We believe that His Holiness’ visit to the Mosque of Al Aqsa and the Dome Rock was very important and may open new dimensions of dialogue — a new dialogue between the different religions, especially Islam and Christianity.

LAWTON: But the complexities of interreligious dialogue here were also evident. At an interfaith gathering, Sheikh Taysir al-Tamimi, an Islamic court judge in the Palestinian Authority, made an impromptu 10-minute-long diatribe against Israeli occupation, prompting some of the Jewish representatives to walk out of the meeting.

Mr. JABER: Maybe it was not exactly on the agenda of the program, but for Sheik Tamimi it was very important to show the pope and to let him understand the painful — the pains of the Palestinian people in Jerusalem and outside of Jerusalem.

ELANA ROZENMAN (Trust-Emun Group): It demonstrated our reality here, and if things were simple and the religions could easily get together and meet together without any problems we would already have peace.

LAWTON: Elana Rozenman is part of an interfaith movement called the Abrahamic Renunion, which seeks to build personal relationships and trust among people of the three major religions.

Ms. ROZENMAN: Yes, the reality of conflict and war and killing exists daily. Right now people are being victims of violent acts here. We know that, but also there is another level of reality that exists of peaceful, harmonious, loving relationships between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

LAWTON: She works closely with her friends, Eliyahu McLean, a fellow Jew, and Ibrahim Ahmad Abu El-Hawa, a Muslim.

IBRAHIM AMAD ABU EL-WAWA: We are stubborn people. We are the children of Abraham. We are from the same seed. Okay?

ELIYAHU MCLEAN (Jerusalem Peacemakers): This is a point that Ibrahaim always makes, that God chose two of the most stubborn people in the world, the Arabs and the Jews, to live in this land, and it is actually God’s decision, and this is why it’s also so difficult to make peace, because we’re both very stubborn. But at the same time we need to be stubborn to be peacemakers.

LAWTON: The three say the pope’s visit encouraged them in their work.

Mr. MCLEAN: I really felt personally empowered when the pope gave a specific blessing to the peacemakers, to the Jews and Arabs, Israelis and the Palestinians who are working to make a better future for the children of Abraham in the land of the prophets, in the Holy Land.

LAWTON: The pope may have urged the religious community to be a force for peace, but many leaders in the movement for interfaith dialogue acknowledge that politics can’t be separated out.

Rabbi KRONISH: The road ahead is bumpy. It’s not a smooth road, because we are linked to the political processes. We try to keep a flicker of hope alive in a sometimes desperate situation, and we believe that when the peace process moves forward, we will be able to move, in cooperation with governments, in bigger and more systematic ways in the future.

LAWTON: Benedict prayed for peace at every stop in this week-long Holy Land pilgrimage, and in spite of everything else, Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike said they hope that message of peace is the ultimate legacy of this trip.

I’m Kim Lawton in Jerusalem.