Susan Katz Miller's Blog, page 15

Interfaith Families in the Pews: Q & A with Reverend Vicky Eastland

Photo: Susan Katz Miller

While reporting my recent article in The Washington Post on Brookville’s Multifaith Campus on Long Island, I ended up with a lot of material that did not make it into the story. As an unofficial historian of the interfaith family communities movement, one of my goals is to record and preserve as much of our ongoing story as possible. Below, I share an extended interview with the minister at Brookville Church, Reverend Vicky Eastland. Here, she discusses her role as...

Interfaith Sunday School, on NPR

I was glad to add my voice to an important piece this week on NPR’s All Things Considered, entitled “With Interfaith Sunday Schools, Parents Don’t Have To Choose One Religion.” Introduced by my favorite host, Michel Martin, the story was reported by Rami Ayyub, who visited the Sunday School at the Interfaith Families Project (IFFP) in order to talk to staff, parents, and students. He also stopped by my house to record an interview.

Rami comes from a background that includes Muslim and Christ...

Gay, Interfaith, Marriage: “Grace and Frankie”

Photo: Melissa Moseley, Netflix

The best television comedy featuring interfaith families right now has to be “Grace and Frankie,” with the seasoned powerhouse quartet of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston. Netflix released the second season last week, and a lot of us have been bingeing . Sheen and Waterston play business partners who carried on a secret love affair for decades before coming out to their wives. Fonda and Tomlin play those wives, an odd couple (a country-c...

7 Ways to Support Interfaith Families

I celebrate the profusion of conferences, workshops, and organizations dedicated to interfaith couples, interfaith families, and those who experienced “growing up interfaith.” Unfortunately, some of these efforts do not provide resources and equal support for both religions or partners in the family. So I have drafted a list of tips for creating inclusive interfaith family programming. While most programs focus on Jewish and Christian families, these guidelines could apply to programs for a...

Interfaith Artichoke on the Seder Plate?

Artichoke Photo by Susan Katz Miller

An orange? A beet? An olive? A tomato? And, new for this year, a banana? Contemporary Jewish thinkers have encouraged us to innovate on Passover, to push the boundaries of the seder plate, to incorporate new objects and themes, and expand on the idea of the “we” in the Haggadah text.

But an artichoke on the seder plate? Not for me. As much as I appreciate the proposal to acknowledge interfaith families, I reject the nomination of the artichoke for this r...

Long Island’s Multifaith Campus

Multifaith Campus at the Brookville Church, photo by Susan Katz Miller

Recently, I returned to the Interfaith Community of Long Island, for the first time since Being Both was published. IFC Long Island is affiliated with the original Interfaith Community founded by Sheila Gordon and Lee Gruzen in Manhattan in the 1980s. I first visited IFC Long Island in 2011, when I was researching and reporting on interfaith education programs for interfaith children across the country for my book. Since...

Raising Interfaith Children, and Letting Them Go

I want to give a thorough response to a recent Washington Post blog post (printed in today’s edition of the paper) entitled, “Not what I expected from my interfaith marriage.” The piece re-enforces some misconceptions about why parents choose to raise children with both religious traditions. In short, raising kids with both religions does not mean they will always claim “both” as a lifelong identity. Nor should it.

The author, Susan Sommercamp, states that she and her (former) husband w...

A Spring Quilt of Interfaith Connections

Glorious Color quilts by my cousin, Liza Prior Lucy

In seven years of writing this interfaith blog, I have posted many essays on a number of spring Jewish and Christian holidays: Purim, St Patrick’s Day, Passover, Easter. But the complex, interlocking quilt squares of Generation Interfaith now go far beyond Judaism and Christianity. Speaking in Chicago this week, I met a woman from a Jewish and Christian interfaith family with a Hindu partner, and a man from a Jewish and Christian interfaith...

Generation Interfaith: Harrisburg, Chicago, Long Island

The Jewish Museum, NYC

Is this truly year three of the Being Both book tour? Somehow, I am still traveling around the country, speaking at museums, universities, conferences, synagogues, and churches. I continue to draw new energy and ideas from my conversations with all of you at these events. And, I am even more passionate now than I was three years ago about listening to your stories, and exploring the experiences of interfaith families in our culture and our world.

If the time seemed rig...

Interfaith Family Lens: Obama at the Mosque

President Obama gave a moving speech about inclusion and preventing extremism at the Islamic Society of Baltimore yesterday. I saw this event, his first visit to a US mosque, through the lens of an adult interfaith child, a lens that President Obama inevitably shares. Every interfaith child (actually, every human being) has the right to choose a religious identity, and Barack Obama made a clear choice to be a Christian. As someone born into an interfaith family, as someone who has had to de...