A Rabbi Walks Into A Christian University

Inside Higher Ed, A Rabbi Walks Into a Christian University:

Belmont University in Tennessee, which proudly describes itself as a “Christ-centered” institution, has diligently been building bridges with Nashville’s small Jewish community. In a further attempt to strengthen those ties, the university just hired a rabbi.

“We’ve had a longtime relationship with Rabbi Schiftan through our Jewish-Christian initiatives,” Greg Jones, president of Belmont, said of the new campus rabbi, Mark Schiftan. “This seemed like a really good development for our Jewish students and for the larger context of our relations with the Jewish community in Nashville.”

Schiftan, rabbi emeritus at a local Reform synagogue, was tapped for the inaugural role of the Nashville institution’s Jewish student faith adviser. ... “My goals are, first and foremost, that the Jewish students have a place that they can turn to, a person that they can turn to, that can hear their struggles and their questioning about their own faith and about being part of a wider Christian university,” Schiftan said.

Jewish students only make up 1 percent of the nearly 9,000 students at Belmont. (More than half are Protestant, 15 percent are Catholic, 1 percent are Muslim and 8 percent identify as having no faith at all.) But the university has been pouring resources into Jewish-Christian relations and making policy changes to accommodate its still sparse but growing community of Jewish students.

Notably, the university announced plans last year to break with a long-standing tradition of hiring only Christian faculty members and opened up positions in its law school, pharmacy school and new medical school to Jewish applicants. ...

Jon Roebuck, who directs Belmont’s Reverend Charlie Curb Center for Faith Leadership, and Schiftan have been co-leading a weekly online interfaith dialogue group for Christian and Jewish clergy and lay leaders for almost four years. The university also launched the Belmont Initiative for Jewish Engagement in 2021, a slew of programming and events focused on the two groups. Jewish students at Belmont held their first services for the High Holy Days last fall.

“They’re our closest siblings religiously,” said Jones. “Christians can learn better how to live as Christians by deepening understanding of how Jews live as Jews.” He added that it’s “urgently important” for Christians to “resist antisemitism” after a “sad history” of having done otherwise in the centuries leading up to the Holocaust. ...

The interest in Christian-Jewish engagement also seems to go both ways. Yeshiva University, a Modern Orthodox Jewish institution in New York City, launched a new program aimed at Christian students last fall in which they earn a master’s degree in Jewish studies from the university and a certificate in Hebraic studies from the Philos Project, an organization that advocates for Christians in the Middle East and encourages Christians to connect with their “Hebraic tradition.” ...

Belmont’s supports for Jewish students are even more of a rarity among Christian universities of its kind. The institution was formerly affiliated with the Southern Baptists, a prominent evangelical Protestant group, but it became nondenominational after it broke ties with the Tennessee Baptist Convention in 2007. (The relationship ended because the university wanted to be able to choose its own trustees.) ...

Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, an organization focused on fostering interfaith ties, said there is a “pragmatism” to Christian colleges engaging in interfaith work in “the most religiously diverse nation in human history,” especially as Muslim and Hindu populations grow in the U.S. But he more so believes that leaders of these institutions genuinely view interfaith work as a part of their own religious values, and he sees them doing more of it in recent years.

Patel has been invited to speak about religious pluralism at CCCU conferences and about a dozen Christian college campuses. And his organization also developed an interfaith engagement curriculum for Christian college students in partnership with some of these institutions, among other programming.

He noted that some institutions, like Belmont, have started their interfaith work with a focus on Jewish students, in part because historically large percentages of American Jews attend college. But he believes similar initiatives with other minority faith groups will follow.

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