The Torch Passes

Submitted by Jeff Gottlieb on June 4, 2007 - 5:39pm.

Welcome to the next segment in the Beatitudes summer fellows' blog. I’ll be your host for this week and am excited about sharing what’s going on over here at The Regeneration Project in San Francisco. But first of all I’d like to thank Audrey for kicking off this blog with such fantastic posts. Thanks for sharing about yourself, your work and your faith – I really enjoyed reading about what was going on across the bay at CIPL and the work they do with the faith community.

And so the blog torch passes to me. A little bit about myself: I just finished the first year of my MA at the the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of 9 theological schools and seminaries in Berkeley, CA. I’m affiliated with the the Jesuit School of Theology (JSTB) due to the strength of their faculty in my particular area of study, ethics. Because I’m not Catholic, sometimes I feel like a Protestant fish out of water, but my experience at the JSTB has been stellar and extraordinarily valuable.

My faith background began with Reform Judaism but then changed to Christianity via The United Methodist Church. For a couple of years in late high school and early college I held many of the more fundamentalist evangelical beliefs (*gasp!*) but came back around to my moderate-to-liberal roots much to the relief of my family. I am now what I once thought it was impossible to be: a liberal progressive Christian. (That’s the short version of the story.)

My internship is with The Regeneration Project. A little about them from their website:
“The mission of the Regeneration Project is to deepen the connection between ecology and faith. Our Interfaith Power and Light campaign is mobilizing a religious response to global warming in congregations through the promotion of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and conservation.”
Audrey’s work with CIPL is closely tied with the work we’re doing here, the main difference being that she working on the state level (California) and we’re working on the national level with all the state IPL’s. The opportunity to observe and learn from the years of experience and wisdom from the president of the organization, The Rev. Sally Bingham, cannot be measured. My hope is that in the coming weeks here I’ll get first-hand experience and knowledge about what it means to be a Christian leader in the political realm.

I look forward to blogging about the happenings over the course of this week, sharing them with you all and meeting the other fellows out here on the West Coast.

Peace,
Jeff

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