The Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas promotes critical, normative and civic approaches to interreligious encounter.

The center is dedicated to a scholar-practitioner approach to cultivating interfaith leadership that promotes basic (inter)religious literacy through lived encounter with people, communities and ideas, and provides opportunities to wrestle constructively with our growing religious diversity. The center recognizes that communities can be healthier when differences are engaged in a sophisticated manner by informed citizens, rather than ignored.

The center partners with the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at Saint John’s University. It shares the common mission to foster understanding, cooperation and friendship among people of diverse religious, spiritual, and secular identities, worldviews and lifeways through academic study and civic engagement.