Issue #11
July 2002
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Chautauqua’s Abrahamic Initiative by David Katz The Chautauqua Institution is an idyllic place whose serious accomplishments belie its appearance of being a small Victorian village in Middle America. In truth, Chautauqua's Middle America is to Middle America as Middle Earth is to Earth.
Founded in 1874 ago as a training camp for Methodist Sunday School teachers, Chautauqua today boasts a resident Symphony orchestra, a ballet company, an opera company, a theater group, and an active program of non-denominational religious services, lectures and devotional song.
It is in its main lecture series, however, that Chautauqua makes its greatest contribution. Each week of the summer season is devoted to a different topic, but there is often an overarching theme that ties many of the weeks together. Periodically, this theme achieves international significance.
In the late 1980's, as the Cold War was reaching its climax, Chautauqua sponsored an East-West initiative that fostered dialogue between Russians and Americans. Conferences in the Soviet Union and the United States, and lectures by Soviet and American government officials and scholars during the Chautauqua season helped, in some small measure, to create the conditions under which the Soviet Union could allow itself to dissolve.
Chautauqua has begun another process that, with luck, will play a similar mediating role in the current conflict between Islam and the West. Originally called the Abrahamic Initiative, the concept of a conversation between the representatives of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has evolved in turn into the Abrahamic Community and finally into the Abrahamic Family.
The Abrahamic Initiative was originally a project of the Department of Religion, but the events of the past 11 months has put a different emphasis on this theme. Chautauqua, through its lecture series, has brought together Islamic, Jewish and Christian religious and secular figures to converse and contend in a spirit of peaceful inquiry, with the hope of illuminating the issues that are causing so much death, destruction and suffering in the Middle East, and indeed, throughout the world.
This summer, invited speakers include Karen Armstrong, Gulzar Haider, Azzizah al-Hibri, Laila al-Marayiati, , Vali Nasr, Sister Joan Chittister, Rabbi David Hartman, Fasial Abdul Rauf, Vincent J. Cornell, and others. These speakers include representatives of several branches of Islam, as well as non-Muslims of varying viewpoints.
The Chautauqua Abrahamic Initiative may serve the same hopeful purpose as the Cold War dialogue of the '80s: to explain the Other to an American audience, and let others know that we are, at least, listening.
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