Dear Friends from Niagara Foundation, Congregation Beth Judea and St. Mark Lutheran Church,
With great excitement, we are pleased to share with you a new, collaborative and interfaith effort to help build, strengthen and grow relationships within the greater community entitled Living with Courage: Messages of Unity. Our goal is to create a safe and sacred space in which members of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths can develop and deepen personal and communal relationships based on shared values such as love, justice and peace. Over the past year, we have stood by each other’s sides in the wake of the shooting at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh and after the massacre in mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. We have shared meals together for Inclusion Shabbat and during Ramadan. We have visited each other’s houses of worship. We have learned from and with each other and grown together in our desire for a better and more tolerant world.
Please join us – and members of our religious communities – on Monday evening, September 23, 2019 at 7:30 p.m. for our first program in the Living with Courage series – Voice of Courage: Living in America Today. At this event, we will be joined by Arizona State Representative Daniel Hernandez Jr. and learn about his experiences in America today from surviving a mass shooting, to facing hatred and prejudice in America, to rising to become a leading member of the Arizona legislature. During the program, Representative Hernandez will be interviewed by members of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths. It will be an incredible and inspiring evening – something not to be missed. Please see the flyer attached to this note for more details.
We learn from Scripture that we are to love our neighbors. We teach that in all of our sacred communities. Now is the time for us to live that teaching, model that teaching and build a more loving and tolerant community together.
With many thanks and much respect,
-Niagara Foundation
-Congregation Beth Judea
-St. Mark Lutheran Church