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Rebecca Alpert Jim Biechler Marcus Braybrooke Ellen T. Charry Leobard D'Souza David Efroymson Gabriele Feyler Stefan Feyler Eugene Fisher Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer Krystina Gorniak-Kocikowska Yitz Greenberg Wan-Li Ho Sanaullah Kirmani Reinhard Kirste Hans Küng Lihua Liu Jack Malinowski Patricia Martinez Sergio Mazza Alan Mittleman Ronald Modras Paul Mojzes Malcolm Nazareth Angelika Quade Ida Raming Virginia Kaib Ratigan John Sahadat Simone Schaupp Ingrid Shafer Shu-hsien Liu Thomas Thompson Catherine Berry Stidsen
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Eugene Fisher I would like to join my voice to the chorus singing in praise of the Swidlers and thanking them for their long service to the ecumenical, Christian-Jewish, and interreligious dialogues. Len & Arlene, you have made the Catholic Church & the world ever so much better through your efforts! May you go from strength to strength! I have known Len and Arlene Swidler since the early 1970's and the beginnings of the National Workshops on Christian-Jewish Relations. I got to know them quite well beginning in 1978 when Sargent Shriver called me up and asked me to lunch to discuss Len's proposal for a Jewish/Christian/Muslim "trialogue" on the national level, such as the ones Len was already pioneering in Philadelphia. Needless to say, as a fresh kid (35 is young!) from Detroit with a new doctorate still drying on the wall, I was absolutely thrilled. It seems that Len Swidler, then (and still today) to me a magical name to conjure with, had approached Sarge with the idea of having a national level "trialogue" of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and he wanted a contact with the Church. I agreed, especially since the Conference at the time had no formal relations with the US Muslim community. I also agreed to serve as project coordinator since the meetings would be held in Washington at the Kennedy Center, which was sponsoring the dialogue. We had many a great moment in that group over the six years of its existence. Once, we were invited, courtesy of Sarge, to a dinner at the Austrian Embassy with Cardinal Franz Koenig, of blessed memory. It was to be a formal affair. Len and I, quite independently decided to buy rather than rent our tuxedos. We chose exactly the same one, he in Philly, and myself in DC. The reason in both cases was the same--it was the cheapest one on the market. I still have mine and wear it occasionally, thinking of Len every time I put it on. The tuxedo coincidence was almost as amusing as the time in Vienna when my wife and the Cardinal showed up wearing exactly the same shade of red dresses, which fortunately amused the Cardinal. On another occasion, the whole group of scholars was sitting down to dinner in the faculty dining room at Georgetown University listening to the students in their lounge next door raucously cheer on their basketball team to yet another victory (this was in the glory years of John Thompson), when from around the tables, in accents ranging from Eastern Europe to the Indian subcontinent, I heard voice after voice call out plaintively, "What is that pink stuff in the middle"? I had, I thought, carefully gone over the menu with my secretary. Neither Muslims nor Jews will eat pork, of course, so I had told her to order chicken. She did. Chicken Kiev! Fortunately, there were and are many Jewish (and now Muslim) students and faculty at Georgetown, so it was not difficult to round up some packaged kosher meals. We had some serious discussions over the years, going rather deeply into our respective theological visions of God, Creation, Revelation, and the Role of Women in our respective communities. We spoke candidly of how each of our traditions views the other two and how each can change from a negative to a positive portrait and still remain true to what is of the essence of our religious beliefs. We applied this joint searching also to what our religious communities have contributed to the current problems in the Middle East and how we all might make a more positive contribution to their solution. Through Sarge again, we were asked by the Carter White House to prepare some thoughts and some citations and prayers for peace from our perspective that the president might use on the occasion of the signing of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. We did, with the result that much of what the president said on that hope-filled day was originally drafted by our group. The group ultimately broke down when it came time for it to put some of those substantive discussions in the form of a formal statement, and over Middle Eastern politics. I was greatly honored in the early 1980?s when Len and Arlene asked me to serve as editor of the Ecumenical Events section of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, a happy task which I still perform for the journal. Len and Arlene's vision has always been a pioneering one, on ecumenism, Christian-Jewish and interreligious amity, on social justice in general, and feminism in particular. He has been one of the Church's leading lights for decades, and a guide and mentor to many of us in these movements. I can only say to Len and Arlene what our Jewish colleagues say, Yasher Ko'ach: May you go from strength to strength! Ad Multos Annos! Dr. Eugene J. Fisher, Associate Director
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