Religious Literacy and Community Engagement: A Virtual Workshop

WIN is excited to host "Religious Literacy and Community Engagement: A Virtual Workshop" with religious literacy specialist Benjamin Marcus. This interactive call will provide frameworks for understanding our complex religious identities, religious literacy, and how these play a role in reducing prejudice and violence. 

Benjamin Marcus, the religious literacy specialist at the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum, will facilitate an hour-long virtual workshop for the Wyoming Interfaith Network. After discussing research about America's increasingly diverse religious landscape, we will analyze frameworks for making sense of changing and complex religious identities. The two primary frameworks covered by the workshop, which come from the field of religious literacy, are designed in part to combat the biases and prejudices that fuel violence. We will use these frameworks to diagram and explain our own religious and non-religious identities. Then we will discuss strategies for dialogue and action that better account for our lived religious experience.

APRIL 15 @ 1 PM

ZOOM LINK: Zoom.us/my/bpmarcus 

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Benjamin P. Marcus is the religious literacy specialist with the Religious Freedom Center of the Freedom Forum Institute, where he examines the intersection of education, religious literacy, and identity formation in the United States.

He has developed religious literacy programs for public schools, universities, businesses, U.S. government organizations, and private foundations, and he has delivered presentations on religion at universities and nonprofits in the U.S. and abroad. He has worked closely with the U.S. State Department, International Baccalaureate, Interfaith Youth Core, the Foundation for Religious Literacy, and the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme in the United Kingdom.

In February 2018, Marcus was accepted as a Fulbright Specialist for a period of three years. As a Specialist, he will share his expertise on religion and education with select host institutions abroad.

Marcus chaired the writing group for the Religious Studies Companion Document to the C3 Framework, a nationally recognized set of guidelines used by state and school district curriculum experts for social studies standards and curriculum development. He is a contributing author in the Oxford Handbook on Religion and American Education, where he writes about the importance of religious literacy education. In 2015 he served as executive editor of the White Paper of the Sub-Working Group on Religion and Conflict Mitigation of the State Department’s Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group.

Marcus earned an MTS with a concentration in Religion, Ethics, and Politics as a Presidential Scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He studied religion at the University of Cambridge and Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude. This fall he will start a JD at Yale Law School.