Jewish-Christian Relations: Peoples, Texts, And Terrain

Program Overview

The Notre Dame de Sion Center for Biblical Formation, in collaboration with the Cardinal Bea Centre for Jewish Studies, Gregorian University in Rome is offering an intensive one-week session of interreligious dialogue. This program invites clergy, seminarians, theologians, and formation leaders to an intensive week of study that explores the complex history of Jewish-Christian relations and contemporary realities of dialogue in Israel and Palestine. This program also will address the main challenges in contemporary Jewish-Christian relations both in global perspectives and in the specific context of Jerusalem.  

Participants will study Jewish-Christian relations from the terrain: walking the Old City, engaging local Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars, and encountering those who live the realities of interreligious dialogue in the Holy Land. The program will examine implications of religious and theological narratives and how these narratives shapes identity, conflict, and coexistence.

Program Objectives and Methodology

The program integrates lectures, field study, and dialogue around four central areas focusing on:

• Texts on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions
• Contemporary dialogue with activist and religious leaders
• Exploring practices in dialogue in shared sacred space
• Interactive learning, sharing and exchange with Jews, Christians, and Muslims exploring the uniqueness of dialogue in the Holy Land

A Formation Experience in the Land

What makes this program distinctive is its insistence on encounter with the text, the people, the land and interreligious dialogue  

A defining feature of this program is structured dialogue with:

• Jewish scholars
• Palestinian Christian theologians
• Palestinian Muslim voices
• Jewish–Arab dialogue practitioners

Participants are invited into careful listening, theological reflection, and pastoral discernment in a context marked by both deep faith and ongoing conflict.