DI Founder and President Leonard Swidler will be one of the featured panelists at the upcoming conference, Nostra Aetate and the Future of Interreligious Dialogue, October 11-13, 2015, at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
Professor Swidler will participate in the final panel of the conference, titled "Nostra Aetate and the Future." He has devoted much of his scholarly and personal life to the explication and development of the new directions and wider Christian thought within the Roman Catholic Church set forth at Vatican II. Professor Swidler has written extensively on reform within the Catholic Church, fully a third of his 70-plus published books, including Freedom in the Church (1969), Women Priests: Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration (1977), A Catholic Bill of Rights (1988), and the more recent Democratic Bishops for the Roman Catholic Church (2011).
The conference is sponsored by the Lubar Institute, working "to create better understanding of the Abrahamic traditions and their interrelationships by encouraging ongoing discussion of these traditions." To mark the Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary, the conference will reflect upon the global significance of Nostra Aetate, examining its past—and potential future—from multiple perspectives, primarily from outside the Roman Catholic Church. Plenary speakers include the Most Revered Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, and Dr. Paul Knitter, Professor Emeritus at Union Theological Seminary.
The conference is free and open to the public.
