InterSem

Founded in 1971, the Inter-seminary Exchange Program (InterSem) is a retreat experience for Los Angeles-based Jewish, Christian, and Islamic seminarians to build relationships by engaging in dialogue designed to increase understanding and appreciation for their respective traditions. Since its inception, InterSem has served over 3500 students.

InterSem's goal is to build relationships among emerging religious leaders by sharing experiences from their own lives about religious beliefs and practices. The program provides extensive opportunities to study sacred and liturgical texts. In addition, the participants demonstrate their own religious tradition's daily prayers, rituals, and customs in order for the entire group to gain insight about the other. InterSem provides an atmosphere of openness and trust for dozens of seminary students to gather for a unique program that has become an integral component of their seminary education.

Objectives

• Create positive relationships among emerging religious leaders of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam
• Increase participant's knowledge and understanding of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam
• Encourage participants to highly value and advocate for cultural diversity and religious pluralism
• Promote communication between Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities in Southern California

Partner Institutions

• Academy for Jewish Religion, California
• AJU Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
• Bayan Islamic Graduate School
• Fuller Theological Seminary
• Hebrew Union College
• St. John's Seminary
• Ezzree Institute

Topics of Dialogue

Each year, joint student-faculty planning committees carefully select themes around which to dialogue. Past themes have included:

• The Power of words
• Surviving Empire: Our Tradition’s Relationship to Power and Resilience
• Encountering the Divine: Spiritual Experiences Beyond Our Understanding
• Art in Our Tradition: Implications and Practical Practices
• Dealing with Difficult Text
• Contemporary Values, Religious Values: Culture Today and Our Space in it
• The Good the Bad and the Ugly: Addressing and Understanding the Extremes of Our Faith
• Bible: Battle Ground or Common Ground
• Struggles and Blessings: Encounters Within Our Traditions
• Reinterpreting Discomforting and Non-Negotiable Texts
• Jews and Christians Approaching Israel
• Living Out a Truth Claim: Who Wants To Be Clergy?
• How Does Liturgy Deal with Suffering?
• Interfaith Cooperation in the Alleviation of Suffering and Injustice
• Faith as an Agent for Change

MGI Fellow / InterSem Coordinator

Douglas J. Cremer has served as the Martin Gang Fellow and InterSem Coordinator since 2024, having been a facilitator of InterSem since 2013. He is Professor Emeritus of History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Redlands, Los Angeles (formerly Woodbury University) where he taught for thirty-three years and served as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2006 until 2018. He has lived in Altadena/Pasadena since 1997 with his wife, Phyllis, where they raised their two daughters. He has a PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego (1993) and a Master of Arts in Theology from Loyola Marymount University (2020). His research interests include contemporary theories of race, gender, political violence, and terrorism as well as modern Catholic and Christian theology and history. His recent book, Antiracist Leadership: A Spiritual Approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (PalgraveMacmillan, 2024), combines many of these interests. He was ordained a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church in 2014 and serves at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Altadena. Since 2017, he has taught as a facilitator and faculty member in the Diaconate Formation program for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and has been a member of the Evangelical-Roman Catholic dialogue group since 2020. He is currently finishing a book, Servant Preaching, to be published by Liturgical Press in 2027.

Faculty Committee