Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies

The Jay Phillips Center engages campus and community in many ways.

Public Events

We serve the campus community and the public by hosting events that promote the public understanding of religion and interreligious relations.

Conferences and Symposia

We host conferences and symposia organized around timely questions, relevant events, and innovative ideas in the area of interreligious studies, interfaith leadership and civic pluralism.

Bridge Building

The Jay Phillips Center promotes interfaith community relations by bringing together people of different religious, spiritual, and secular identities to learn from, and serve alongside, each other.

Our seminars and lecture series invite scholars, leaders, practitioners, and community members with various religious, spiritual, and secular identities together for conversation around important topics and issues. Past seminars and lectures have focused on topics such as Muslim identities in Minnesota and North America, Hindu-Christian encounters in India, and interfaith leadership in business education.

This program, formerly known as Rabbis-in-Residence, funds speakers from the many religious, spiritual and secular traditions of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Minnesota to serve as guest speakers in St. Thomas classrooms. It provides faculty an opportunity to supplement their curriculum with voices from the local traditions as they are lived. Although the speakers are readily equipped to teach about religion as defined by religious organizations, experts, and texts, they also bring unique perspectives on how religion is lived out in people's everyday lives, especially in our local communities.

For a list of available speakers and topics, faculty should contact Hans Gustafson at hansgustafson@stthomas.edu.

*A guiding criterion for this program requires that the speakers' classroom visits and presentations facilitate significant interreligious learning and encounter.

The center sponsors conversations, often focused on books, films or current events, among groups of students, faculty, and people from the wider community. While fostering friendship, these conversations also promote understanding of the complicated religious identities of those represented in the group.

The Jay Phillips Center offers a variety of resources that support research and scholarship in the field of interreligious studies, including the Jan Phillips Database.