Retelling Sacred Stories: Our Journeys to a Shared Sacred Story

The culmination of a four-year collaborative project with Fetzer Institute, Retelling Sacred Stories: Our Journeys to a Shared Sacred Story was published by Orbis Books in 2025. Dr. Judith Simmer-Brown was a Buddhist team leader as well as a team leader of the culminating Shared Sacred Story. The project that involved over 150 scholar-practitioners focused on story-telling as interreligious dialogue, recognizing that stories capture the ethos of cultures and communities. Currently, the underlying stories of our time are grim, pessimistic, and hopeless. Fetzer, committed to foregrounding spirituality as a force for good in our world, endeavored in this project to highlight the sacred stories of nine religious traditions that counteract the hopeless narratives with deeper visions for human wholeness.

This book includes the nine stories of the scholar-practitioner teams plus a new, constructed story oriented toward the contemporary experience of living in a world of the climate crisis, political and economic instability, and social fragmentation. The Shared Sacred Story is inclusively oriented toward our common humanity and the well-springs of hope and connection in the midst of crisis.