About the Sophia Center

The Sophia Center is a very personal work in progress which I hope will become a place of welcome, offering other people the chance to enter the mystery of being human which has been the singular gift of my own life as a priest. The “place” of the Sophia Center is not fixed, but occurs anywhere that people find it possible to pay attention to one another, and to talk with one another the way friends talk to friends. This realization, that friendship is the place of revelation of the sacred, is at the heart of the most authentic spiritual response to the secular gift of pluralism.

I have been a Catholic priest for more than forty years. I have had the chance to live both at the heart of the Catholic community, teaching in a seminary for ten years, and in the creative secular communities of great universities. For seventeen years I had the privilege of entering the profound human world of the sick and those who accompany and care for them. For many of those years I was the companion of physicians, nurses and medical students as they tried to discover and integrate in their own lives the human dimensions of their technically demanding profession. For more than twenty-five years I have known as friends the Brother of Taize , an ecumenical community in France that is one of the most vital centers of spiritual life in Europe. At the human and spiritual core of these experiences was the gift of friendship; not in some sentimental way, but as the imaginative encounter which allows each of us to sense the depth and horizons of human experience.

The Sophia Center projects are an attempt to pass on to others this gift that has been my own experience of the priesthood. They are meant to embody in different ways the core of this revelatory encounter with others: the attention which allows us to enter the world of the other and then return to our own. The framework within which these personal encounters take place is the meeting between contemporary culture and the religious traditions: full of challenges and possibilities.

Thus, all the projects of the Sophia Center have one goal: to help participants to develop an imaginative attention over time to the possibilities in contemporary and secular culture for living more authentically human lives within one of the great traditions of Faith: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All the projects have one central means for pursuing this goal: conversation in the way friends talk to friends. The projects of the Center are organized around those aspects of contemporary culture which are significantly involved in creative contacts between religious and secular ways of being human.

Thus we have projects concerned with film, creative writing and visual art because all three contain expressions of contemporary life which deepen our attention and which invite personal reflection and conversation. We also have projects which develop interfaith conversations on the participation of believers in public policy discussions, and projects for conversations among scientists and theologians on issues of ethics and fundamental understandings of reality. Details about these, and other projects, can be found in this issue of the newsletter, Conversations.

Rev. Robert Smith