A freshly retired pastor who works with the survivors of people killed in gang violence; two men exploring the confluence of Catholic spirituality and the spirituality of the men’s movement; the founder of an innovative network of Jesuit high schools for students of severely limited financial means; a Christian theologian and the Muslim chaplain at DePaul, the nation’s largest Catholic university; a woman, once homeless, who underwent an Ignatian-style retreat with a woman who has become a retreat master . . .

These are some of the people who told their stories in conversation as the American Pilgrimage Project went to Chicago for two days last week.  They are Susan Johnson; Joe Durepos and Tom McGrath; Fr. John P. Foley; Scott Alexander and Abdul-Malik Ryan; Amanda Asque and Renate Reichs …

And that was just day one, held in the StoryCorps booth in the Chicago Cultural Center – a grand building, once the city’s public library, at the corner of Michigan and Washington.  

The American Pilgrimage Project is a Georgetown partnership with StoryCorps – the acclaimed Brooklyn-based documentary outfit – devoted to gathering, archiving, and sharing everyday Americans’ stories of the ways their religious beliefs have shaped their lives at crucial moments.   The Project will go to Charleston, West Virginia, and to Baltimore before returning to Chicago in May.  

For day two in Chicago, we were hosted by the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in its gorgeous building on Michigan Avenue.  The “fit” between the American Pilgrimage Project and Spertus is such that Spertus’s Mark Akgulian and I found ourselves discussing the prospect of holding another day of conversations at the Institute during the May visit.  

I spent all day Friday there, and it was really something to sit in one of the Institute’s media centers and see the people come in to tell their stories:

Peter Bensinger, a Spertus trustee, and CEO Hal Lewis; Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persch, Sisters of Charity – and friends for sixty years – who lead a weekly vigil for immigrants without documents who are facing deportation; Mark Vargas and Jazmin Fermin, graduates of Cristo Rey – that Jesuit high school network; Bill Creed and Marty Kelliher – partners an Ignatian retreat designed for people struggling with homelessness or addiction; Olga Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, and Arielle Weininger, a curator at Spertus; Rev. Neichelle Guidry, a prominent young African-American pastor, and Sarah Thompson, director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who does strategic non-violent intervention in areas of lethal conflict and structural violence.  

A first principle of the StoryCorps approach is that the conversation “booth” is protected space, with only a StoryCorps facilitator present alongside the conversation partners.  So I had the strange experience of meeting all those amazing people and learning more about them without actually getting to hear the stories they told at the microphones.

I’ll hear those stories digitally in the coming days – and then share them through StoryCorps, the Berkley Center website, and other media.