Religion@Fordham

Religion@Fordham serves as a platform and a portal to the many ways in which the Jesuit University of New York engages with the varieties of contemporary religious experience: it highlights and amplifies our ongoing push for a distinctive excellence that will generate energy, insight, and creativity both within the University and beyond.

Fordham is home to a number of divisions with discrete but related missions advancing our understanding of religion.

They include:

• Mission Integration and Planning
• Department of Theology
• Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education
• Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies
• Center on Religion and Culture
• Jewish Studies
• Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., Chair in Religion and Society
• Orthodox Christian Studies Center
• Institute on Religion, Law, and Lawyer’s Work

Attentive to shared interests and concerns, these units mutually encourage efforts that enhance Fordham University’s capacity and reputation for engaging with various religions in all their manifestations.

This partnership stands committed to advancing religious scholarship and the contemporary lived experience of different religious traditions. Additionally, it aims to facilitate communication among participating units (and with their respective constituents inside and outside the University), collaborative planning of events and initiatives, and shared thinking about future directions.

By virtue of its institutional identity rooted in the Ignatian tradition of Catholicism -- and by drawing on the wider stream of Christian faith -- Fordham’s mission calls for a radical openness to all the ways of religious knowing and spiritual belonging.

Indeed, the University’s strategic planning framework articulates the aspiration to “position Fordham as an institution known internationally for its expertise regarding the centrality of faith in human culture and the emerging questions of global religious conflict.”

This aspiration is "grounded in the University's longstanding strengths in the study of religious ideas and texts, languages, and cultures.”

Moreover, much of the activity at Fordham is premised on the commitment to dialogue and reconciliation articulated over fifty years ago in the seminal declaration of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate. Such dialogue was to be grounded in mutual knowledge among religious traditions and encouraged at every level.

Religion@Fordham is both evidence and an expression of our ongoing dedication to that mission.