Ecumenical and Interreligious Affiliations
The School of Theology and Religious Studies seeks to bring critical inquiry, reflection, and praxis to the Roman Catholic faith tradition. In cooperation with other schools of the University, the School attempts to realize an ideal that the Second Vatican Council proposed for institutions of higher learning, namely, "that the Christian mind may achieve, as it were, a public, persistent and universal presence in the whole enterprise of advancing higher culture" (Declaration on Christian Education, 10). Moreover, the School is committed to investigate and advance ecumenical and interreligious questions and relationships (Sapientia Christiana, 69). Its faculty moves beyond academic study to engage other Christian churches and the religions of the world in dialogue. As a minimum condition for these concerns, the school rejects "every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion as contrary to God's intent" (Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, 29). In 1998, the then School of Religious Studies founded the Institute for Interreligious Study and Dialogue in the area of interfaith dialogue.