Nouwen to Keynote Unity Workshop
Episcopal News Service. March 12, 1981 [81086]
BOSTON -- Dr. Henri Nouwen, well-known author and professor of pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School, New Haven, Conn., will keynote this year's National Workshop on Christian Unity being held May 4-7 at the Park Plaza Hotel here.
Nouwen is expected to address some 350 Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican and Roman Catholic leaders, lay and clergy alike, at what has become one of the most representative interdenominational gatherings in North America. He will speak at Trinity Church at 7:30 p. m. on May 4.
His National Workshop address will be one of the last major appearances Nouwen has scheduled in North America. A leading interpreter of spirituality in the contemporary world, Nouwen, a native of The Netherlands, is leaving Yale Divinity School this summer to take up work with poverty-level parishes in Lima, Peru. He will remain there indefinitely.
A large majority of the participants at the Workshop will be Episcopalians and Roman Catholics. Special programs and annual business meetings of the Roman Catholic National Association of Diocesan Ecumenical Officers and the Episcopal Diocesan Ecumenical Officers will take place throughout the four-day meeting. The Rev. Alex Brunett of Livonia, Mich., is president of the Roman Catholic organization and the Rev. William B. Lawson of Lynn, Mass., heads the Episcopal group.
Now in its eighteenth year, the National Workshop is sponsored by ecumenical officers of major Christian groups as a place to meet, exchange ideas and "celebrate the degree of unity which already exists among the people of God," notes workshop chairman, the Rev. James A. Nash, director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, here.
"One spirit, many gifts, one body" is the theme being explored by workshop leaders who include Dr. Walter G. Muelder, dean emeritus of the Boston University School of Theology, speaking on barriers to Christian unity, and Dr. Gayraud S. Wilmore, professor of black church studies at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, Rochester, N. Y., addressing race and Christian unity.
The Moral Majority and the New Right Religious Movements is the topic for a joint plenary to be held by Protestants at 7:30 p. m. on May 5. Peggy Shriver, an official of the National Council of Churches who has just completed a book to be published by Pilgrim Press this summer, is the speaker.
Daily Bible studies followed by round-table discussions are slated to be led by the Rev. Stephen Doyle, O. F. M., professor at Pope John XXIII National Seminary, Weston, Mass.; Dr. Esther C. S. Stine, director of leadership development for the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., New York City; and Bishop Demetrius Trakatellis of Vresthena, Greece, who is visiting professor at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Brookline, Mass.
A broad spectrum of seminars and denominational programs run throughout the National Workshop schedule. Topics slated include "Islam in the Contemporary World," led by Dr. Byron L. Haines of the Christian Islamic Center, Hartford Seminary Foundation, Hartford, Conn.; "The Coming Great and Holy Synod of Orthodox," led by the Rev. Stanley S. Harakas, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology; and "Faith, Science and the Future," led by the Rev. Scott Paradise, chaplain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; as well as liturgy, the eucharist, refugees, Latin America, and world ecumenism.
"Ecumenical marriages" between persons of different faiths will also be explored in a joint Roman Catholic-Episcopal workshop slated for 3 p. m. on May 3.
The National Workshop was first organized under the sponsorship of Roman Catholic Cardinal Lawrence Shenan in 1964, and is now jointly planned by national ecumenical groups and a local arrangements committee. This year's local sponsor is the Massachusetts Council of Churches.
The 1980 workshop in Seattle, which drew over 300 persons, underscored the continuing reality of Christian unity and pinpointed local level ecumenism as an area to be strengthened.