August 10, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
The E Pluribus Unum Project: Exploring Religion, Social Justice, and the Common Good in an Interfaith Context, edited by Dan Napolitano, is an overview of a three-year program for teenagers administered by the Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, and financed by the Ford Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, and the Righteous Persons Foundation. In the summers of 1997-99, precollege students from across the country gathered for a three-week seminar at American University, in Washington, where they applied the lessons of their spiritual faiths to community-service projects that focused on human rights, poverty, and the environment. The groups included roughly equal numbers of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. This report includes a look at the program’s methods and reflections from former students; one of them, a Catholic woman, went on to establish a social-justice organization with other alumni of the program. This publication also contains the Ford Foundation’s official evaluation, which, among other favorable findings, reports that the intensity of the program led to high scores on tests that measure intellectual and ethical development.
Publisher: Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, 6101 Montrose Road, Suite 200, Rockville, Md. 20852; (301) 770-5070; fax (301) 770-6365; epu@epu.org; http://www.wijlv.org; 87 pages; $10 plus $2 postage and handling.
