Religious Leadership Diversity Workshop at Hartford Seminary: a Review

As I mentioned briefly in my prior post, I spent the week of June 8 through June 14 at Hartford Seminary attending the Religious Leadership Diversity Workshop. The workshop has been running for a few years, and the seminary works to bring together people of various faiths to try and create an experience for attendees that both allows for the sharing of personal stories and points of view and helps to educate them on various faiths and faith practices as well as multifaith chaplaincy, conflict resolution, and religious leadership. In short: it was a moving and intellectually thrilling experience. 

For a week, I worked with Christians, Jews, Hindus, a Muslim (from Singapore), a Jain, a Buddhist, and a variety of people who defied simple classification under a label. Even better, introducing myself as a Witch and a Pagan may have raised a few eyebrows, but it didn’t result in a feeling of being ostracized or excluded from the experience in anyway. In fact, if anything, being upfront about my own personal story opened the door for a variety of learning experiences both for myself and for others as we spoke throughout the week.

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