Ecumenical center serves faith leaders for today
By Marijke Fakasiieiki
Michael Trice, as founding director, is in his third year of leading the regional Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement (CEIE) at Seattle University.
The center draws faith leaders and lay leaders to courses they offer for students to study on their own time online or to attend in person. Students come from Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia.
Michael said the school's mission is rooted in a Jesuit and Catholic commitment to ecumenical and interreligious engagement, spiritual and indigenous pathways and cultural wisdom.
In 2020, the School of Theology and Ministry (STM) announced it would close over the next three years.
"It was painful for faculty, staff, students and faith leaders. Northwest leaders had worked hard to establish the STM, so there was much grief when it could not be sustained through the changing times," said Michael.
Shane Martin, then the provost of Seattle University (SU), was asked in 2021 to begin the CEIE. Fr. Stephen Sundborg, SU president until 2021, agreed, along with his successor President Eduardo Peñalver. The trustees voted in 2021 to start the center on July 1, 2021.
The Center for Ecumenical and Interreligious Engagement takes the word "engagement" seriously, Michael said.
Both the Society of Jesus General Congregation 34 and Vatican II promote collaboration and structural unity, he explained, even though the ecumenical spirit is more about how communities and individuals can thrive and flourish, especially when alternating ideologies suggest they shouldn't.
The university's programs, scholarship, relationships and curricula for community and classroom helped it realize it was entering an era when conflicts are national and geopolitical, and when authoritarianism is rising, he added.
Michael, who was first hired as the assistant dean for ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and assistant professor on tenure track at SU's School of Theology and Ministry, gained tenure in 2017.
Born in 1969, he grew up in an Episcopal family that joined a Lutheran community when they moved to Albuquerque N.M. There, he was surrounded by people from different cultures, contexts, communities, ethnicities and religions.
"My experience of diversity as a young kid was tactile. I saw it in my friendships, my neighborhood and my community. I was drawn to positive examples of people living together in spite of differences," said Michael.
He attended Bethany Lutheran Liberal Arts College in Kansas from 1987 to 1991, studying philosophy and theology with an English literature minor. From 1993 to 1994, he studied at North Carolina Central University, an historic black university, majoring in English literature with a focus on the Harlem Renaissance. He earned a master's in systematic theology at Duke University Divinity School in 1995.
Duke faculty were interdisciplinary, with some students focused on law and theology, and others on social theory and theology.
"I thought the best questions we have in theology were rooted in other disciplines," he said.
While at Duke, he clerked at a law firm, working on racial gerrymandering and capital punishment. One professor, Robinson Everett, was the chief justice of the military court of appeals for the armed forces. The firm addressed historical discrimination in voting districts, presenting at the U.S. Supreme Court from 1994 to 1996.
Michael also worked on death penalty appeals related to several clients who were executed in North Carolina.
"Our work in the "oikoumene," the whole inhabited house, is with a sense of the community rooted in the need to care for one another and that requires laws and policies that govern human life to be just and fair," he said.
These experiences motivated him to work towards a doctorate on the origins of discrimination and on building communities based on unity.
"I was interested in how cruelty shows up in systems, how communities address and respond to it, and how they unify so they are not diminished by structures bathed in cruelty," he said.
Michael pursued studies and experiences focusing on injustice and life in a unified community. He believes interreligious and ecumenical dialogue and engagement are rooted in a context where people live lives of integrity in community with each other.
After earning a master's of theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, he completed a doctorate there in constructive theology, followed by an executive leadership master's in business.
Starting his doctoral work in 2001, a month after 9/11, he learned a client was executed in North Carolina Central Prison. Considering it a travesty of justice, Michael, then 28, decided to continue doctoral classes in constructive theology at Loyola University in Chicago from 2001 to 2006.
For the first four years of those studies, Michael studied at the Ecumenical Institute at Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich, Germany. There he wrote his dissertation "Encountering Cruelty."
"In Germany after World War II, libraries contained texts about the Holocaust, genocide and structural prejudice," he said.
He did research from the viewpoint that the theological discourse of sin was inconsistent with his experience of his client's execution and the plight of others on death row. Michael saw a thin line between when justice is served institutionally, and revenge becomes a state-sanctioned means of resolving conflict.
Through the pandemic, he applied to the CEIE much of his study on cruelty in the context of racial divisions in this country based on zip code and freeway exit area.
"We want to engage individuals and communities in the midst of these challenges," he said.
The center has created courses and is creating flexible certificate programs for continuing education to meet people where they are. It includes Ignatian discernment and assessment to help local leaders be effective in their context, Michael said.
"We are in constant discussion with religious leadership, who are the eyes and ears in local communities naming and addressing challenges," he said.
The CEIE relates with the Lutheran World Federation and the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights and High Commission on Refugees.
Its staff serve on national bilateral dialogues between Christians and Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist communities, along with the UN's Interfaith Commission.
The center plans to hire regional faculty for certificate programs.
With a commitment to be egalitarian, the center's 32-member advisory council includes varied religious and cultural perspectives.
"Centers or institutes dedicated to virtues of religious systems, philosophical worldviews and indigenous pathways cannot afford to become politically partisan because it would cloud our vision for achieving a healthy balance in the future," he said.
Michael cited a recent Pew Research Forum poll that found hate speech to be a major problem. The center pays attention to data that shows Americans divided.
"On the one hand, we are too sensitive. On the other hand, we may be too critical, but we know there is too much hate speech," Michael said.
"Centers like this must resource leaders so they know how to address cultural and societal division. I'm inspired by the vitality of ecumenical and interreligious circles happening around kitchen tables as well as international conferences," Michael said.
"The centers are connected, and their creative soul-searching is as close to the heart of God as I've been," he said.
For information, call 206-206-5332, email tricem@seattleu.edu or visit seattleu.edu/center-for-ecumenical-and-interreligious-engagement.
