Experiments in Meaning Making Among Multireligious Groups
Publication information:
Abstract
What makes belonging possible in multireligious spaces—and what makes it fail? This workshop shares findings from a three-year pedagogical experiment in multireligious meaning-making, using a case-based course that brings inherited resources (texts, practices, stories) into deliberate dialogue with lived experience. Participants will engage a “micro-case” process used in the course, exchanging cross-tradition “gifts of wisdom” while attending to power, difference, and the paradoxes of inclusion. The session offers a transferable facilitation design for classrooms, chaplaincy cohorts, and spiritual communities that seek belonging without erasing difference or bypassing harm.
Presenter Biography
Monica Sanford is the assistant dean for multireligious ministry and instructor in ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her students are of all religious (and non-religious) traditions. Trained in Christian practical theology and Buddhist practical integrative methods, she produced the first textbooks for Buddhist chaplains: Kalyāṇamitra, vol. I & II.