Youth Spirituality Center to Open at SHU After Spring Conference
Planners are focusing on strengthening spiritual engagement, communication and interaction
Sacred Heart University plans to open a new campus center focusing on the spiritual needs of young adults. It will serve as a place for engagement, empowerment and conversation, where young adults can explore their questions, and anyone who is involved with the young can learn how to engage and accompany them on their spiritual journeys.
The youth spirituality center’s opening will coincide with a one-day conference, “Young Adults in the Twenty-First Century: A Conversation on Faith, Religion and Culture,” on March 20 at SHU’s West Campus.
“The vision for the center is to have it serve as a transdisciplinary foundation for conversation, exploration and progress related to young adults, faith, religion and culture,” said Mia James ’13, manager for employee education in the human resources office. James, who oversees leadership development, training and education efforts across campus, will serve as the center’s co-director, along with Valerie Kisselback, campus minister. “We also want to encourage practitioners at colleges, high schools and churches to enter into fruitful dialogue about supporting, shepherding and inspiring young adults in their journey,” James said.
Both James and Kisselback are serving on a committee that is planning the spring conference. Kisselback said the group, which comprises students, SHU staff and faculty and members of the wider Bridgeport diocesan community, “organically” formed to create workshops for the conference. Ultimately, they will help determine the direction for the center, which has yet to be named, pending feedback from conference participants.
“The invitation to participate in the conference quickly evolved into discussions on how best to engage and empower young people in the church today,” said Kisselback. “The assembly of this group of people, several of whom are new SHU faculty or staff members, has the Holy Spirit written all over it. As these projects gradually unfold, my hope and prayer is that they will bear good fruit not only for the students on this campus, but for the broader church community.”
The conference will be open to students, faculty and the local community (participants must be over 18). According to a request for proposals being sent to regional, church-affiliated organizations to solicit workshop ideas, the goal is to encourage young adults to take a place at the table and for the church to hear and respond to their voices. To that end, Kisselback stressed, the conference will emphasize an innovative, moderated discussion format, as well as short talks by invited workshop presenters, and participants will engage in sustained dialogue led by an inter-generational team of facilitators.
General areas of discussion will aim to inspire inter-generational dialogue and ways to engage young people in the church and the University.
Questions related to the conference or suggestions for workshops should be directed to the Office of Mission & Catholic Identity at Sacred Heart University. Email or call Ami Neville at nevillea@sacredheart.edu or 203-371-7904.