Designed and hosted this spring by the University of St. Thomas, the 2025 Culture of Encounter Ideas Festival wasn’t just a campus event series — it was a public humanities experiment rooted in the late Pope Francis’s call for a “culture of encounter.”
From sacred soundscapes to shared meals, interreligious scholarship, and a stunning photovoice gallery, the festival offered a roadmap for building spaces that welcome tension, celebrate differences, and move beyond tolerance toward transformation. As Hans Gustafson, University of St. Thomas’ Director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies reflected, “the festival was an invitation to stretch beyond the comfortable edges of sameness and enter the sometimes challenging, always necessary terrain of difference.”
A festival like this can be adapted to any campus, congregation, or community center. Here are five steps the festival’s planning team followed:
Step 1: Lead With Embodied Celebration
Why it matters: Joy is connective. Celebration softens defensiveness and invites openness.
What we did: We launched the festival with Meet You at the Crossroads, a sold-out concert fusing Somali blues and Black gospel. Anchored by Somali poet Ahmed Ismail Yusuf and music legend J.D. Steele, the evening was a living icon of interfaith friendship and cultural pluralism. Voices rose, drums pulsed, and a young soloist moved the crowd to tears with “Man in the Mirror.”
What made it work:
- Programming opened with emotion, not debate.
- The event embodied diversity (age, race, religion, genre).
- The evening’s design emphasized shared humanity over shared belief.
Step 2: Co-Design with Young People
Why it matters: Interfaith engagement needs to be generative, not performative. Students, not just professionals, should shape the agenda.
What we did: As Interfaith Fellows, we helped lead the planning from the beginning. Our student priorities shaped the festival’s themes, partnerships, and pedagogy. The result wasn’t a passive lecture series, but a living lab of student-led programming.
What made it work:
- Our leadership was not symbolic—it was structural.
- Fellows helped plan not just content, but flow and accessibility.
- We paired student energy with institutional wisdom.
Step 3: Diversify the Mediums of Encounter
Why it matters: Dialogue is not the only form of interfaith work. Movement, music, ritual, and silence carry meaning too.
What we did:
- In “Experiencing a Calm Body,” participants practiced Sufi dhikr, Buddhist mantras, and Gregorian chants to connect across traditions through sound and breath.
- At the “Mindful Labyrinth Walk,” silence itself became the shared language.
- In “Theology as Embodied Practice,” students explored religious meaning through movement rather than speech.
What made it work:
- These sessions were multisensory, accessible, and deeply human.
- Participants didn’t need to be religious to benefit.
- Each medium honored a different way of knowing: intellectual, emotional, somatic.
Step 4: Create “Brave Space” for Complex Conversations
Why it matters: Encounter isn’t comfortable. Interfaith engagement must make space for disagreement — not erase it.
What we did:
- The film screening of Abraham’s Bridge sparked raw dialogue on the fragility of cooperation in the face of global trauma.
- At the Mahle Lecture events at Hamline, we practiced Scriptural Reasoning — studying sacred texts from different traditions not to agree, but to understand.
- A virtual panel explored moral disagreement in pluralistic classrooms, modeling how to disagree with intellectual humility.
What made it work:
- We trained facilitators to guide hard conversations without controlling them.
- Food, music, and shared rituals helped “hold” emotional weight.
- Academic and personal insights were given equal footing.
Step 5: Name the Systems, Not Just the Stories
Why it matters: Personal stories build empathy, but structural awareness builds justice.
What we did: The keynote by Dr. Marianne Moyaert called out how even inclusive dialogue often centers Christian or secular norms, pressuring others to translate. Her talk reminded us that true encounter requires historical reckoning, not just emotional openness.
What made it work:
- We included global voices who challenged our assumptions.
- We didn’t just ask “What’s your story?” We asked “What shaped your story?”
- We leaned into discomfort as a necessary path to growth.
“Hope must be paired with honesty. Empathy must be sharpened by self-examination.”
Final Thought: Encounter Is a Practice, Not a Product
The late Pope Francis urged us to build a culture “capable of transcending our differences and divisions.” The 2025 Culture of Encounter Ideas Festival was one way of saying yes to that call. Whether you’re starting small or planning big, this is your invitation: don’t just host events — co-create encounters.
Naomi Peters is a rising senior, majoring in Finance and Entrepreneurship with minors in Catholic studies and Interfaith Leadership at the University of St. Thomas.
The 2025 Culture of Encounter Ideas Festival was organized by the Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, in collaboration with the Minnesota Multifaith Network and with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Festival contributors and event co-sponsors included the University of St. Thomas’ Department of Theology; Department of Music, Film, and Creative Enterprise; College of Arts and Sciences; Center for the Common Good; Claritas Initiative; Chapel Arts Series; Scene Setters; Cultural Fluency Initiative; Melrose & The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership; Campus Ministry; VISION Program; and Tommies Together Volunteer Center. Off-campus partners included Hamline University’s Wesley Center for Spirituality, Service, and Social Justice, with additional support from the Stephen and Kathi Austin Mahle Endowed Fund for Progressive Christian Thought; Saint John’s University’s Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning; St. Olaf College’s Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community and Interfaith Fellows Program; Augsburg University’s Interfaith Institute, Religion and Philosophy Department, and Campus Ministry; Interfaith America; Niagara Foundation–Minnesota; Interfaith Photovoice; Rabata; Catholic Charities of St. Paul and Minneapolis; the Pluralism Project at Harvard University; and the Center for Working Families in Quito, Ecuador. The festival’s opening concert, Meet You at the Crossroads, was curated by David Jordan Harris and co-produced by Beck Lee and the Cultural Fluency Initiative. The festival was co-led by student Interfaith Fellows from the University of St. Thomas in partnership with faculty, chaplains, and community leaders.
