Mission:
To guide, nurture and enhance spiritual, religious and ethical life within the Stanford community.
The Office for Religious Life strives to:
- Encourage and foster individual and communal faith and observance
- Affirm community by connecting people through dialogue, education, ritual and interfaith appreciation
- Create a sacred context for rites of passage, and services of worship and celebration
- Provide attentive, thoughtful and respectful pastoral presence and care
- Wrestle with issues of ethics and values
- Challenge bigotry and injustice
- Engage ourselves and others in the sacred duty to repair the world
- Blend intellectual life and spiritual journey
We are collectively committed and devoted to ensuring lively, thoughtful and supportive contexts for Stanford students, faculty and staff who wish to pursue spiritual interests. We recognize that a spiritual/religious journey can be an important, balancing complement to the numerous challenges one faces in the pursuit of academic and career goals.
Our office: Come and meet our multifaith team!
While each one of us participates in and leads worship and study in her/his own religious tradition, our primary objective as a staff is to collaborate as a multi-faith team and work with all constituents of this dynamic university. Our aim is to promote enriching dialogue, meaningful ritual, and enduring friendships among people of all religious backgrounds.
To address these objectives, some of the initiatives our staff has taken are:
- “What Matters to Me and Why” seminars
- Explorations in spirituality and service
- Interfaith study groups
- Grief and bereavement workshops
- Contemporary and traditional readings of religious texts
- Feminist approaches to religion
- Seminars/discussions in residences on a number of spiritual/ethical issues
- Formal and informal classes on a range of topics, including women’s spirituality, business/social ethics, and the intersection of sports and spirituality.
One of our greatest joys as a team is to create multifaith worship opportunities for significant events in the life of the Stanford community. This includes campus-wide Welcome Back events, Parents’ Weekend Service, Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration, and Baccalaureate.
We are also committed to developing an awareness of social and global justice and strive to maintain a close working relationship with the Haas Center for Public Service on campus.
Stanford’s establishment of the Office for Religious Life is remarkable evidence of the historical commitment to education of the whole person for the common good. We are unequivocally committed to supporting that endeavor!
