IES Faculty Member Honored by King of Jordan and Patriarch of Jerusalem for Interfaith Work

Every year since 2009, with the support of formal United Nations resolution, a World Interfaith Harmony Week is organized every first week of February, under the patronage of the King of Jordan and with the personal participation of His Beatitude Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem. The institution recognized for the first prize by the Jury this year was Euclid University, a distance learning institution for which Fr Cleenewerck teaches several courses, and for which he authored an academic paper dealing with the specificities of the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity as it relates to the shared belief in one God. He also presented a workshop jointly organized with the Religious Studies department of Humboldt State University. For this reason, Cleenewerck was invited to attend the award ceremony which took place at the Royal Palace on Sunday April 17 to deliver a short speech to the distinguished audience. The event was widely featured in the Jordanian media. Also present at the event and as a member of the Jury was well known Melkite Greek Catholic priest Fr Nabil Haddad, founder of the Jordanian Interfaith Coexistence Research Center.