Opening prayer: Four Directions Smudging Ceremony: Sister Dolores Cazares' family offered as Welcoming Prayer at her Mass of Resurrection.

Introductions: Ann Marie Joyner, Associate from Tampa. Second grade teacher. Raised in Puerto Rico with an American Protestant father and a Canadian Catholic mother. Even though her father was Protestant, he did not practice his religion and the religion in the home was Catholic. As a consequence she felt she was a product not only of an ethnically different cultural, but also of a different religious background.
Barbara Boudreau lives in LA and is from Southern California. Growing up she had few experiences with inter-religious dialogues. She worked for a parish priest who was involved for the diocese with Jewish-Roman Catholic dialogue. In parish ministry she became a member of an ecumenical council which celebrated holidays, holy days, as well as dialogue and cultures. Jewish-Roman Catholic dialogue with women was important to her. She left the group for community leadership roles but is still vitally interested.
Gail Millholland is an adult convert to Catholicism. She grew up learning lots of anti-Catholic “stuff.” She also grew up in a Seattle suburb that had only one nonwhite family, which was Japanese. Seven years old at the time the Second World War began, she remembers the indignity and injustice that that family went through. One elderly gentleman was not allowed to get medicine, and died. A great-uncle became the superintendent of a one of the internment camps and publicly protested the lack of justice.
Mary C. Boys grew up in Seattle knowing that you could belong to any religion and/or culture. Her own happy, loving parents were of different faiths. She is a professor at a protestant theological seminary and also teaches at the Jewish seminary. Her interest in Jewish -Christian relations goes back many years. She recently led a conference in Rome which revolved around Jewish-Christian dialogue.
Rosemarie Kasper is an enrolled member of the Karuk nation of northern California. She grew up t a time when it was considered shameful to be an Indian However, in the last 20 years the Catholic clergy and people have come to see how the Indian tradition fits in with the Catholic tradition. She is a member of the Kateri Circle in Portland, and they have recently reached out to the larger community in mutual respect.
Fran Kearney comes from a small California town with not many opportunities for getting to know other cultures although they were close friends of Episcopalian neighbors. She never met a Jewish person until she was in the eighth grade. Her own Irish Catholic family was countercultural in that her father, unable to work outside the home because of illness, was the housekeeper and her mother the breadwinner, quite different role models in those days. Teaching in a Pasadena school after the Watts era, she became aware of the international and particularly the Jewish-Christian communities. She works with infants from every kind of cultural and religious background.
Jane Ellen Burns spent 11 years living in different cultures: one in Hong Kong and ten in Japan. She came aware of the great cultural differences and how easy it was to offend through lack of understanding.