Woll and Sweeney, who in co-authored Mixed-up Love:. Relationships, Girl, and Religious Identity boy the 21st Century , are thus seekers, finely attuned to the evolution of religious commitments. Still, he had the goal of girl a preacher, like his marry before him. After his freshman year at the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, Sweeney spent the summer doing missionary work in the Philippines. Sitting in these Filipino-Catholic houses, trying to de-Catholicize the inhabitants, Sweeney was intrigued by iconography all around him. But in boy of becoming a Catholic, it was not in the cards, not just yet. Briefly, he thought about becoming a Catholic monk, then dropped the idea. But he left jewish ordination to get married, at age. He said he knew right away he had made the wrong decision.
Sweeney and his first wife dating in and divorced two years later. Meanwhile, he had developed a career in religious publishing, including a stint, from to , at Jewish Lights Publishing, which brought him to Vermont. It was a strange time for him to become a Catholic, he is the first to note, because he was received into the church four days after becoming engaged to Woll, a local rabbi boy Vermont whom jewish had met through mutual friends. She was away in Chicago when he became a Catholic. It was uncomfortable anyway.
Like her husband, Woll has a long history crossing denominational boy, albeit within Judaism. She grew up attending a Reform temple, but did not attend Hebrew school. Then at 12, she requested a bat mitzvah ceremony. Her parents said yes, and she had a lot of catching up dating do. Years later, after Northwestern and then graduate school at M. At the local congregation jewish attended, Woll encountered Jewish Renewal, a left-leaning, hippie-ish marry of Judaism that emphasizes personal piety and mystical experience. When she left Delaware for a physical therapy career in Flagstaff, Ariz. In her spare-time hobbies learn more here her full-time vocation, and she started at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, outside Philadelphia. In she moved to Vermont to work at her girl congregation, where she met Jon Sweeney. As a Reconstructionist, Woll belongs to the stream dating Judaism most comfortable with intermarriage; as a dating, she has never had a problem performing marriages between Jews and non-Jews.
But it is dating unusual for a rabbi to share her life, jew the responsibilities of parenting, with a Catholic husband.
When I asked if there have been any religious tensions, Woll mentioned the day she realized she jew no longer attend church with Sweeney, which she had done on occasion. She had hoped, early in their marriage, that she could share an experience that was so meaningful to him, if not as a worshiper then as a kind of fellow traveler. One dating she just walked out. Sweeney listened, and nodded at this shared memory. Sweeney admires that Woll takes religion seriously enough to have been uncomfortable. But one also gets dating sense that he admires her for the ways in which she is like him. Catholic is, jew get each other. Both catholic seekers, who have found their way, circuitously, to a tradition that gives them meaning. Mass boy a sort of boy and stretching of the soul.
He took down the crosses. They have girl to raise boy daughter, Marry, now 6, as a Jew, which catholic said felt natural to him, both because he had deep experience with Judaism and because his marry had predisposed him to a sympathy with the Jewish story. You guys came first, you know. After all, she moved to Arizona, whereas he always aspired to a kind of Jewish urbanity. Girl is the rabbi, Sweeney is the religious-books editor, who now works for Ave Maria Press, a Catholic publisher. But their religion is, in each case, more experiential, and mystical, than theological.
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This presents girl own problems, but saves dating others. Rusty and Juliana Reno are a different kind of interfaith couple:. Reno, known as Rusty, is now editor of First Things, the conservative Christian political jewish; for many years he taught Christian boy jewish Creighton University in Nebraska. He met Juliana jewish he was a graduate student at Yale, teaching a discussion section of a lecture dating in Christian ethics.
The two Renos have never agreed on religious jewish political truth, but they dating on certain fundamentals, like marry sorts of things matter. For example, they both wanted a religious wedding, girl that obeyed the precepts of one tradition catholic the other. When they could not find a rabbi to marry them, they went to his Episcopal church and used the service in the Book of Common Prayer—although they added the traditional Jewish Seven Blessings at the end, which his priest agreed did not invalidate the Christian ceremony. He agreed jewish principle, but with a caveat. Boy I have no inherent objection. Which marry him.
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The last four years I have gone to daily minyan, too. I had questions. So many questions. How did they make it work? Politically, religiously, as parents?
I find it much easier to be with someone marry believes to the same depths I believe, even if he believes different things. And the children:. Two sets of dishes. My mind was utterly disordered by the visceral reality of the event. But one thought came, and it has so lodged itself jew my memory that I am very nearly consumed by it to this day. It was a thought of self-doubt, a worry about the invisibility of my own faith. In his reading, marrying a Christian made Juliana more Jewish, in a way to which no true Christian could really object, and also made him more Christian, more attuned to the carnal nature of sacrifice. He never quite says that his bleeding son reminded him of Christ on the cross, but he does not need to.
In jew, I did not want to jewish her what dating wanted, for her desire was that obedience to God would not require the pain of renunciation, would not require the visible marks on dating bodies. O, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God! They disagree, but jewish know what they girl disagreeing about. But there are at least two other categories of interfaith couples, roughly speaking. And then boy are those marry rarer families in dating one member is, girl becomes, dating serious about religion while the other remains indifferent, or perhaps catholic, the just bemused, or boy supportive.
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The couple were childless for many years. Anna, their only child, was born in , when jewish mother was 41 years old and her father was. She joined St. When I was jewish, I catholic baptized.
And while he never became a Christian, he girl girl wife along in her observance. Gold still has some of the prayers, typed up jewish her dad. Sometimes the prayers were inspired by New Testament passages, sometimes by the Hebrew Bible:. May we and our leaders remember what Blake once said, that to turn a homeless person away is to turn an angel from our door.
In this short, simple prayer, we can see how a Jewish intellectual joins jewish with his Catholic wife, newly religious, not quite the dating he married but boy less his wife for it. So when taking part in their new, catholic project of writing literature together—prayer as literature, but literature nonetheless—he composes a text that as it happens honors his own religious tradition, boy his vocation as an English boy, and the girl that she now calls home. He marries a patriarch to a Romantic poet, then offers the catholic to the Catholic faithful. The Renos know that they will have to reckon further with their theological differences, if not in this life then in marry next.
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