For a city of about 75,000, the turnout reflected something real. Congregations from several faith traditions joined three interfaith and civic organizations, including two focused on voting rights, to spend an evening together around shared democratic values. Attendees came from within established networks and brought newcomers along, and many left asking what comes next. The Appleton cluster is a reminder that when faith communities create space for this kind of gathering, neighbors show up.

Participating Congregations

Temple Israel
Temple B’nai Brith
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church
Baha’i Faith
Saints Peter & Paul Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
Church of Christ Uniting

With summer well underway, there’s no better time to learn how faith communities across the country are coming together around America’s founding texts. On Thursday, July 23 at 4pm ET, we’re hosting a live info session where you can hear directly about how faith250 works, ask questions, and find out how to bring a multifaith cluster to your community. Whether you’re a clergy leader exploring next steps or someone who’s been curious about the program, this is the place to start.

The session will walk through the faith250 program including clergy relationship-building and text study, clergy-led multifaith events for neighboring congregations, and a local public civic ritual for the broader community. Communities that begin this work now will have everything they need to bring people together in a meaningful way before the year is out. Share this invitation with a faith leader in your network who needs to be in this conversation.

Register here.

Zoom registration is required for this event. Contact us at info@faith250.org for more information. We hope you’ll join us!

The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently featured faith250 in a piece exploring how multifaith communities are approaching America's 250th anniversary with seriousness and substance. The article profiles clergy and congregants from around the country who are gathering across traditions to study foundational American texts. So many are finding that the act of careful reading together does something political discourse rarely manages: it invites people to actually listen. We're grateful for this recognition, and more grateful still for the faith leaders and congregations doing this work in their communities every day. Read the full piece here.

One of the cluster participants shared, “Through hands-on art making and conversation, participants explored identity, voice, and the power of civic participation. Spread throughout the room were newspapers and magazines, ready to be clipped, cut, and punched. Participants reflected on what words best represented their thoughts on democracy. These cut outs will be included in Niki Johnson's next art installation, one that truly represents democracy.”

What made the night notable was not just its scope but what it set in motion. Several attendees are now planning to travel nearly 90 minutes north to attend the cluster’s next public civic ritual in Appleton on July 7, and are actively promoting it to friends in the area. Meanwhile, the Appleton cluster’s own interfaith gatherings have already drawn 31 in-person participants and another 13 online. That kind of momentum, one community sparking engagement in the next, is exactly what the faith250 public civic ritual is designed to do.

The faith250 podcast is here! In a moment when trust between neighbors is fraying and the moral thread of our democracy feels thinner than ever, faith communities have a role to play as stewards of our civic culture. That is the animating belief behind faith250, and it is the animating belief behind this podcast. You will hear text study sessions, conversations with clergy and scholars, and how-to discussions from faith leaders putting this program into practice. This podcast will not offer news, commentary, or sermons. It is a space for the kind of conversation that makes the real work possible.

And the real work belongs to you.

faith250 equips clusters of congregations across traditions to come together around America’s foundational texts including the Declaration of Independence, Let America be America by Langston Hughes,” Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” “America the Beautiful,” and more. Our work begins by asking what those texts mean for us right now. We hope this podcast will inspire you to do that work through relationships between leaders from multiple faith traditions and their congregations. Subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon/Audible to stay connected to the conversations that are shaping this movement across the country.

If your congregation is ready to be part of that, visit faith250.org to learn how to get started.

The public civic ritual is the third component of the faith250 program, and the Burke cluster’s gathering showed what it looks like when a cluster reaches it. After months of clergy text study and multifaith events with congregations, the relationships in the room were real, and that made the ritual possible. This is not a performance. It is an act of becoming, one that changes the people who take part in it. That is what faith communities are uniquely equipped to create, and it is what faith250 exists to support.

The public civic ritual is the third component of the faith250 program, and what happened in Tucson on June 30 is exactly what it is designed to produce. The singing, the texts on the walls, the questions people left with, the plans already forming for what comes next: these are the signs of a cluster that has done the work. Clergy led. Congregations showed up. And something real took place.

Participating Congregations

Congregation Kol Ami
Bet Am Shalom Synagogue
Community Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Calvary Baptist Church
Bethel Baptist Church
Temple Israel
First Baptist Church

America, America: A Midrash

O Beautiful, for spacious skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties,

Across the fruited plain.

America, America,

God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea.

Before the song begins, the musicians, audience, ticket takers, and security guards become one the same way God brought life to a lump of clay in Eden: breath. This is where memory, hope, yearning, and meaning begin, the intake prior to thought. Here, arguments are a whisper, agendas a distraction, parties an absurdity, partisans an affront. Sacred song translates the Ultimate into shared meaning. In breath, we lift our voices.

O: What can be learned from a single letter? To the Jewish way of reading text, everything. Our tradition builds cathedrals of thought on the calligraphic crowns or scribal marks in handwritten Torah scrolls. The scroll even lacks punctuation, turning some sentences into mysteries. When a community names something “scripture,” we cannot disregard even a single letter. The words on the page are too holy to be ignored. We call this practice midrash, the search for meaning from texts we hold dear.

A different view: Over centuries, the midrashim (pl.) have accumulated as editors assembled multiple comments on a single page, an array of ideas, often disagreeing, each one hanging on a piece of the underlying text (the image above is a silhouette of a page of Talmud, with commentaries surrounding the central text). Thoughts collide, until we readers become participants in a culture of respectful dissent. Midrash says, just stay at the table, stay with the text, listen to another voice, then explain what you think this means, from your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience, your soul. Every explanation might be true; no one can claim certainty. Torah teaches that only Moses spoke to God “mouth to mouth.” The rest of us seek together. O . . .

Beautiful: This is patriotism at its most basic desire: to belong to something that adds beauty to the world. Yet beholders disagree. Our visions contradict. Where I see beauty, you see oppression, injustice, thought-control. Soon, we come to see our differences as threats. Arguments harden into ideologies or curdle into contempt. This is the challenge of beauty, to see America’s goodness, and to see your goodness no matter what you see as America’s beauty.

For Spacious Skies: I grew up in the spaciousness of Florida Bay, but you might insist on Montana, or the sliver of blue glimpsed between New York skyscrapers. We could just playfully debate the grandeur of my bays vs. your plains, my burning sun vs. your biting frost, but instead of play, our discourse has lost its spaciousness. We each claim to know the truth of this place, insisting on our specific vision of the sky, forgetting how tiny we are beneath the heavens. Can we rediscover humility?

For Amber: We yearn to capture America in gold sap, locking in a vision of what came before. One half of us longs for the progress of a prior time, the generation of increasing wealth, rights, freedom, or equality. The other half longs for a different prior time, a time before change, a stasis of good and true Americanness. This is the human way, but nostalgia is literally memory-pain. As we stare into America frozen in amber we become frozen and encased. Instead, let us see America through the rippled translucence, and learn from it like a scientist pulling DNA from the past.

Waves: One of my earliest memories is playing in the waves of at my grandparents’ Beach Club on the south shore of Long Island, a place with tiny cabanas just behind the elevated boardwalk, where old Jews, mostly Germans descended from long-assimilated families, ordered lunch from cabana boys, the descendants of Romans or German Crusaders, while drinking Scottish liquor on Wamponomon land, just down the beach from where Robert Moses lowered the overpasses on the access roads to block public buses filled with African Americans. We are the waves crashing against one another.

Of Grain: Bread is the symbol of civilization, hard earned knowledge passed from generation to generation to harvest seeds of the grass, grind it, add water, let it soak up airborne yeast, knead it, let it sit some more, then punch it down, then let it sit again, then bake it. America is built on thinkers, strivers, dreamers and philosophizers. Our civilization makes bread in quantities that medievals and ancients could never imagine, bread with so many zeroes the mind strains to understand. We have inherited the ideas, wealth, and political system, crafted by generations. What can we add?

For Purple: Royalty. We threw off His Majesty, but the human need for Sovereignty did not disappear. Instead of an English King, America made every man sovereign. Liberty!

A different view: They meant “man” literally — and not even all men at that — simultaneously claiming and denying the divine right to sovereignty. Complicating their cries of “freedom” is the reality that in a democracy we all must accept the possibility of loss in the next election. This is a strange kind of sovereignty, one whose very power lies in its limitation. The One made each one equal, unable to dominate any other one. This is our noblity. Black, White, Red, Blue, we must all be a little purple.

Mountain Majesties: When Katharine Bates, a devout Christian, gazed out from Pike’s Peak, surely she thought of the high places where Abraham proved his faith, Moses received the law, Elijah heard the still small voice, Jesus gave his famous sermon, and Mohammed ascended to heaven. The mountains testify that beyond human events lies Eternal Truth. Her lips burned with awe and the potential of the American project.

A different view: Staggering beauty into which we punch holes to extract riches.

Above: This place was meant to be above all others, the “city on a hill,” that Jesus predicted. Salem, is one of the most common place names in America, a land meant to be Jerusalem. We are to elevate humanity, transform history, climb up to a moral purpose. When George Washington assured the Jews of Newport, RI, that they were indeed the very America from which they sought welcome, he ended with the vision of Prophets, “that all men shall dwell in peace beneath his vine and fig tree.” Our prophets proclaim, “All men are created equal”; “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union”; “Government of the people, by the people, for the people;” “Give me your tired, your poor,” “I have a dream!” “Tear Down this Wall!” States are mere human things, the tools of group survival. This place is supposed to be different, above the normal ways of statehood.

Fruited: Fruit brings nourishment, but it can also rot and smell. In East of Eden, Steinbeck’s paean to California, the place at the far end of the American rainbow, fertility burdens us with choice. Beneath our parking lots and skyscrapers lies the soil of spruce-covered Cascades, southern Pines, fed by roaring Colorados and whispering Shenandoahs. A fluttering Presence dwells in this land, its Truth unaffected as we gorge ourselves on the fruits of our history. Now, that Presence speaks, testifying to the generations of violence done here, and the stench of rot rises around us. We write our destiny in how we face this past and chose our future: Timshol.

Plain: Nothing about this place is plain. Beneath every story, every song, lies another layer of meaning. We have inherited an entity, a state, a commonwealth, almost a quarter millennium old. Common sense tells us that what got us here will surely not bring us forward, yet what got us here built a wonderous place, even if immense suffering abounds in this land, grievance and resentment pinging Hamilton-Jefferson-like from either side of the political spectrum. We continue to hold certain truths as self-evident, while generation after generation of ever-more-diverse peoples arrive and thrive. We endeavor to create here something that has never been done before in human history: a truly multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial, potentially a multi-lingual democracy spanning an entire continent. And we do so by standing on the shoulders of people to whom we owe gratitude, and from whom we have inherited grave injustices. Nothing about this place is plain. So if we are to take one more step forward, given all this complexity, we will need a language, a vocabulary, a vehicle capable of carrying intricate conversations and audacious aspirations. Screens and apps will betray and manipulate us toward the simple binaries that feed their algorithms. To imagine the America we want requires us to invent (or, perhaps, reinvent) a technology of thought and method of finding shared truth, one worthy and able to contain our multitudes and contradictions.

America! America!

Like the angel who called, “Abraham, Abraham,” this song calls to us to wake up, repeating our name twice, and asking us to put down the knife hanging over the future’s neck. We are so entranced with our idolatries. We believe so firmly in our economic survival that we skip family dinners with our children. We believe so firmly in our right to bear arms that elementary schools are now high-risk zones. We believe so firmly in our capitalism that we accrue personal, national, and ecological debt like children collecting candy on Halloween. The angel may have to shout at us, “America! America!” to penetrate our airpods and casino machines so we can face the choices before us. The question is how.

A different view: There never was and never will be only one way to understand America.

God: Put aside specific dogmas or assertions of belief or disbelief. See God simply as ineffable Oneness (Deuteronomy 6:4). A Unity we cannot entirely understand. Everything else is fragmented. The next line of Torah (6:5) begins, “And you shall love . . .” This American project relies upon God because in our massive diversity we argue over the truth. Yet, we must love. We disagree about what just happened or will happen or is happening right now. Yet, we must love. To decide what sacrifices we must make to keep America going (because everything costs something, and somebody, somewhere pays the bill), we must bridge division without erasing it. Even if division is or feels existential, a threat to the survival of one’s children or grandchildren, we must love. The bridging is an act of massive devotion to the other with whom one disagrees. We must reserve, even in our most passionate arguments, the possibility that the other is right. We start with love.

Shed: A place to store tools for yardwork. Whether ancestral, immigrant or enslaved, America began with tools, hands and muscle. Labor gets us out of our heads, to a confrontation with our shared reality, into work with each other. We will need that kind of collective physical exertion to untangle the political and philosophical knots we’ve created in this place.

A different view: Shed is a pandemic word: the way I spread noxious particles to the world around me. We shed ideas as well. Cynicism, despair, anxiety. (Can we shed the positive particles too, like the happy pheromones that pass between lovers? Hope, duty, devotion, pride, belonging.) Despite our addiction to the mirage of absolute independence, we are always shedding. We accept interdependence.

His: The present-day conversation about pronouns, one that has turned into mockery of the “woke,” is really a question about the power to define the self. We cannot escape the truth that certain men have hoarded power and some continue to wield it to define others. The ripples of 1619 and 1776 crash over us. Oppression is part of what made this amazing place possible. That is the hard problem we must eventually face. Mockery is avoidance.

Grace: If we are to be patriotic, to love our nation with integrity, what we love will, at times, put us at odds with one another. Bates wrote “America, the Beautiful,” in living memory of Civil War. Carnage was real. The song poem does not ask God to shower us with grace, that is, underserved blessings, but rather to shed upon us the power to offer grace to each other. As political violence grows around us, can we instead, when faced with our differences, choose grace?

Crown thy good: This phrase rejects the nihilism of our age, the product of relentless online disorientation, social alienation, cultural deterioration, worship of celebrity and influence, postmodern relativism, and institutional collapse. To reclaim our crown, we will have to rebuild our belief in goodness. In all my work as a local neighborhood clergyman, I find a universal hunger for the good. It crosses all boundaries. A rebirth of American civic life starts in the conviction that we must work for the good, and especially when our definitions of goodness differ, we cannot be afraid to seek and sustain it.

Brotherhood: The original, 1893, version of this poem concludes the first verse with, “Til souls wax fair as earth and air.” Note the focus on personal salvation. In 1911 Bates changed the words to shift emphasis from individual to collective redemption. Brotherhood. We cannot allow our quests for self-help, personal growth, or even theological absolution, to overshadow our obligations to restore the American whole.

From Sea to Shining Sea: Immigrants have crossed the sea dreaming they would find streets of gold. An African American therapist once told me of clients who dreamt of ancestors drowned in the Middle Passage. Generations have come by choice or by force. The ocean deep holds billions of dreams. We must confront these varied realities if we are ever to find brotherhood, grace, fertility, nobility, and beauty. We are both the voices lost beneath the waves, and the droplets of light shining on the horizon.

America, America.

With July 4th just days away, there’s no better time to learn how faith communities across the country are coming together around America’s founding texts. On Thursday, July 2 at 4pm ET, we’re hosting a live info session where you can hear directly about how faith250 works, ask questions, and find out how to bring a multifaith cluster to your community. Whether you’re a clergy leader exploring next steps or someone who’s been curious about the program, this is the place to start.

The session will walk through the faith250 program — clergy relationship-building and text study, clergy-led multifaith events for neighboring congregations, and a local public civic ritual for the broader community. There is still time to get started, and we’ll show you exactly how. Communities that begin this work now will have everything they need to bring people together in a meaningful way before the year is out. Share this invitation with a faith leader in your network who needs to be in this conversation.

Register here.

Zoom registration is required for this event. Contact us at info@faith250.org for more information. We hope you’ll join us!

When we began discussing the need for multi-faith, congregation-based, local celebrations of America’s 250^th, we had no idea what kind of response we would receive. The initial conversations were with a handful of local clergy friends, and Reform rabbinic colleagues around the country. When we launched on July 4^th, 2025, we hoped to attract maybe 10 clusters, or 25 if we were wildly successful. As I write this we have 41 clusters including 261 congregations around the country.

While we are still collecting feedback, and it is too soon to draw conclusions from this experience, we have learned a few definite lessons. First, local clergy find deep spiritual meaning in connecting with the colleagues in fellowship. Second, studying our nation’s shared “sacred” texts has a unique power to strengthen relationships between clergy and between members of various congregations. Third, Americans are ambivalent about the meaning of this historic birthday, and anxious about the nation’s future.

None of these lessons will change after July 4^th, which means we have an opportunity to continue healing our nation’s civic health beyond this summer. For those of you running congregations, and working on your program calendars for 2026-2027, now is the time to think about how to incorporate this inspiring work into your community’s spiritual life. To help, here are some tools that can jump start your preparations.

• Check this 9-minute video about faith250 which serves as an easy introduction for staff, colleagues, and lay people. Forward it to potential partners in your congregation and neighborhood as you propose a faith250 cluster.

• Take a look at our fall 2026 programmatic timeline which centers Thanksgiving as a time for shared civic reflection.

• Attend one of our info sessions this summer to learn about the program, meet colleagues, and ask questions. We, the people running faith250, are ordinary neighborhood clergy just like you. Register here for July 2 @4:00PM EDT, or here for July 23 @4:00PM EDT.

• Start your learning: our website contains step by step resources to guide you through our three components—clergy relationship building, congregational gathering, and hosting a public civic ritual. All of this is a methodology designed to help you and your neighbors express hopes, anxieties, inspiration, struggles, and collective commitment to the project of American democracy.

The work of healing our civic life is not a summer project; it is a calling. We’re convinced that clergy and their congregations are uniquely positioned to answer that call. This is the perfect time to bring this work to your community. Now is the time to gather people, open a text, and together ask hard questions about the future of our democracy. together. I hope you will join us.

Join us on June 23 at 4pm ET for a conversation on Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Rabbi Michael Holzman will facilitate a discussion with Rev. Vernon Walton, Rev. Latricia Scriven, and Derrick Scott III, exploring what Douglass’s words meant in his time and what they ask of us now. This text study models the kind of conversations has by faith250 clusters, opening space to listen across difference and find shared values rooted in America’s founding ideals. The event is free and registration is required.

Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/p0hLesqGSHGTRPsY4gcsGA

Participating Congregations

Temple B’rith Kodesh
First Unitarian Church

Participating Congregations

Temple Shomer Emunim
Jewish Community Relations Council of Jewish Federation of Greater Toledo

faith250 seeks to bring clergy and congregations from multiple faith traditions together; gathering across differences, breaking bread, and studying America's foundational texts. Participants describe discovering that their shared civic values run deeper than the distinctions between them. Houses of worship are among the few places where neighbors, friends, and newcomers regularly meet face to face, study text, and seek truth together. Faith communities are uniquely positioned to be stewards of America's civic culture. Learn more at faith250.org and share this video with friends and neighbors.

Special thanks to the Einhorn Collaborative for their support in creating this video.

When faith250 began, the idea was simple: bring clergy and congregations together across faith traditions to study America's founding texts and engage honestly with what those texts ask of us as citizens today. We believed that if we started locally, something larger could grow.

It has.

We now include over 254 congregations in 39 clusters across the country. That number represents dozens of clergy who picked up the phone, reached out to a colleague, and said: let’s do this together. It represents multifaith gatherings where people who might never have spoken instead shared a meal together, read Frederick Douglass side by side and asked hard questions about what it means to be an American right now.

We’re not stopping here. Our goal is to see many more clusters of congregations doing this work in communities across America. Could we get to 250 clusters?!

If faith250 has meant something to you, share it. Forward this post. Tell a clergy colleague. The next congregation to join could be the one down the street from you.

Learn more and register your cluster at faith250.org.

Participating Congregations

Grace Episcopal Church
Providence Presbyterian Church

Participating Congregations

Trinity Episcopal Church
St. John’s Episcopal Church
Covenant Presbyterian Church
First Presbyterian Church
St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church
Temple House of Israel
Shenandoah Association, Central Atlantic Conference, UCC