By Tracy Mitrano. My spouse is the Director of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Rochester. She received her doctorate of divinity in interfaith studies from Princeton. Her dissertation, Many Faces of God, has become a curriculum for a program that she has offered to as varied of groups as local townspeople and parishioners in a small, western New York town (Penn Yan), seminary students at Rochester, Colgate, Crozier Divinity School and for the Rochester Episcopal Diocese. Invariably an initial concern is whether the study of other religions will result in conversions. In ten years of the program, that result has occurred only once, and with an individual who came in search of a faith, not from one faith or denomination particularly (so, in fact, it was not really a conversion, except by default of an estranged Christian family background.)  What almost equally invariably occurs instead is that students report a deepening of their own, original faith by virtue of learning about and respecting the traditions and devotions of the faithful in other beliefs. Read more...