The Center for Faith and Public Life’s Strangers as Neighbors on Long Island project is helping to shape a new model for bringing people together on contentious issues such as immigration reform within a faith-based framework. The project, funded by the Hagedorn Foundation on Long Island and the Washington-based Jesuit Conference, and with the full support of the Bishop of Rockville Centre on behalf of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, is holding gatherings at two Roman Catholic parishes in the Diocese of Rockville Centre in New York, in 2013.

This current project is a follow-up to Fairfield University’s Strangers as Neighbors: Religious Language and the Response to Immigrants pilot project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, conducted from August 2008 to July 2009. The project aimed for faith communities to agree on common language for speaking about migration, drawing upon some of the shared sensibilities of religious language - words like “neighbor,” “brother,” “sister,” “pilgrim,” and similar concepts that have more nuanced and welcoming connotation than “migrant” or “newcomer”.