Soul Searching

Promoting Interfaith Dialogue

Allison Stokes, director of the Interfaith Chapel

Since arriving last fall, Allison Stokes says she has felt a special connection to Rochester and its students.

“It feels providential, as if everything I have done in my professional life to this point has prepared me for this position,” says Stokes of the timing as well as the religious and social scope of her appointment. “It is a blessing.”

Stokes, the founding director of the Women’s Interfaith Institute and a pastor for 26 years in the United Church of Christ, in November was named director of the Interfaith Chapel and of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.

As director of the chapel, she oversees the administration of the chapel and its commitment to being a resource for students from all faith communities and to the College’s efforts to promote interfaith dialogue.

“Allison has long experience in interfaith ministry that she will build upon in serving the needs of both long-standing and emerging religious groups, and in strengthening interfaith dialogue on campus,” says Richard Feldman, dean of the College. “With her leadership, the College has the opportunity to become a more influential force promoting dialogue, tolerance, and peace in our community and beyond.”

Stokes’s commitment to interfaith ministry led her to become the driving force behind establishing the Women’s Interfaith Institute in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Established in 1992, the nonprofit activist organization is dedicated to empowering women of all faiths to pursue religious and spiritual leadership roles. The Women’s Interfaith Institute in the Finger Lakes was established in 2002 with the purchase of a historic church in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Her work in the interfaith community led to her participation in the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, in December 1999.

Stokes has also served as Protestant chaplain at Ithaca College, college chaplain at Vassar College, associate university chaplain at Yale University, and pastor for 13 years at the Congregational Church in West Stockbridge, Mass. She received her master’s degree in divinity and her doctoral degree in American studies from Yale.

Her 2006 book about the Abrahamic religious traditions, titled Shalom, Salaam, Peace, examines how competing and exclusive truth claims in all religions can generate intolerance and violence.

—June Avignone