LEADERSHIP GATEWAY »
Interfaith Explorations
The Interfaith Explorations Gateway offers students meaningful encounters with a variety of religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions and pathways. Through cooperative activities and events, students witness the multiple ways in which people of faith live according to shared values.
Why Interfaith Explorations?
The gateway encourages cultivation, exploration, and challenging students' own spirituality, faith, or no faith while in college. The gateway allows the student to not only think about what she wants to be but who she wants to be. Interfaith Explorations helps students develop relationships with people of all kinds of religious, spiritual, and philosophical backgrounds.
Who may apply?
Like all Leadership Gateways, the Interfaith Explorations Gateway is open to all first-year students in Mary Baldwin’s undergraduate residential college, regardless of her intended major. A curiosity about the variety of global religions, world views, spiritual practices, and faith traditions is all that is required — regardless of whether she is a skeptic, a spiritual seeker, or religiously devout.
Are there required courses?
Students in the gateway take REL 130: Faith, Life, and Service as well as MBC 101: Orientation to College.
Students may also consider completing a minor in religion, philosophy, or ministry (which includes a track for both Christian-based and non-Christian based vocations). Another minor of interest is peacemaking and conflict resolution, which includes a focus on how understanding faiths across cultures can lead to finding and creating alternatives to violence.
What happens outside of class?
Students will also engage in many programming opportunities through the Office of the Chaplain. Examples of events include the Fall Faith Fair, the World Religions and Peacemaking Lecture, and Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week spiritual activities.
What is available beyond the first year?
Students who decide to join the Quest program by the end of their first year, not only will continue explorations into religious, spiritual, and philosophical perspectives, but also have a head start on fulfilling the service and academic requirements for induction into the Carpenter Society, whose members serve as an advisors and mentors for other students.
2013 Draft Orientation Schedule
