Mission
For over 40 years the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, founded in 1967, has been reconnecting the broken threads of Christian tradition and community. The Institute, a residential research center, brings together well-trained, creative, articulate women and men for careful thought and dialogue within a community of inquiry. Wounds that are sometimes centuries old cannot be healed by scholarship alone, but they cannot be healed at all without patient study by people who are learning to live together.
The Institute depends on people who understand that innovative research is crucial for the church, and who know that quick results are not always the best. In the words of one former resident scholar, the Institute fosters "a deepening personal grasp on the important things that so often must be sacrificed to the merely urgent elsewhere."The mission of the Institute links past and present for the sake of the future.
The Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research seeks to discern the meaning of Christian identity and unity in a religiously and culturally diverse nation and world, and to communicate that meaning for the mission of the church and the renewal of human community. The Institute is committed to research, study, prayer, reflection, and dialogue, in a community shaped by the Benedictine tradition of worship and work.
The mission is to encourage research.
- Because the quality of research in any field depends on the quality of the people who do it, the Institute admits and invites to its programs people who mix learning, curiosity, tenacity, and originality.
- As in any field, the research sometimes has immediate effect and application and sometimes has results that first become visible in the future.
The mission is ecumenical.
- Ecumenical (from a Greek word meaning "the whole inhabited world") defines a new way of being faithful Christians today.
- Ecumenism says: Pay attention to unfamiliar parts of the tradition. Listen to voices you have not heard clearly before. Search together for common themes, a story that all can claim as their own.
The mission is cultural.
- The search for Christian unity takes place in a complex world of many beliefs, many styles of life. The combination of "ecumenical" and "cultural" makes the Institute hospitable to adherents of other faiths and cultures.
- The Institute encourages constructive and creative thought not only in theology and religious studies, but also in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences as they relate to the Christian tradition and include the interplay of Christianity and culture.
- Books, articles, reports, conferences, and the influence of participants when they return home make the Institute's findings available "for the mission of the church and the renewal of human community."
The Institute each year affects scores of people directly and many more indirectly. The Institute's size, style, and scope have proven right for the work it has set for itself. Innovation comes from gathering bright, committed people to search together for new modes of cooperation.