Our guest speaker will be Jim Levinson, a longtime friend of ASC. Jim has served as Spiritual Leader of Jewish congregations in New England for the past 25 years. He led the Brattleboro Area Jewish Community (BAJC) until 2009 and was a founder of the social action-oriented Brattleboro Area Interfaith Initiative and, more recently, the Compassionate Brattleboro Committee. Under his leadership, BAJC was nationally recognized for its efforts to facilitate Muslim-Jewish understanding through the Salaam-Shalom Program.

Levinson also was an organizer of the 1995 interfaith commemoration in Poland of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Jim is also a Research Professor at the Tufts University School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Earlier he served as Director of the International Nutrition Planning Program at MIT and of the Office of Nutrition of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Washington. He spends considerable time in Asia and Africa working on malnutrition and public health problems, and does prison ministry at the Franklin County jail in Greenfield.

His sermon is entitled “Gifts to be Shared from Our Spiritual Traditions.”