The Center for Interconvictional Diplomacy
The Center for Interconvictional Diplomacy began its life in April of 1999 at a founding conference held in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just before the Columbine attacks. The idea of a diplomacy among representatives of varying convictions informed this event, which brought together a number of individuals to consider the possibility of a quality of discourse about conviction itself that might become the basis of a deeper rapprochement among bearers of competing or apparently contradictory convictions than is attainable through conventional ecumenism. Present were impulses connected to the streams that gave rise (in order of chronology) to Mormonism (Joseph Smith), anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), the music pedagogy of Nadia Boulanger, the DeVere Society (dedicated to the dissemination of the idea that Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the author of the works of "Shakespeare"), Scientology (L. Ron Hubbard), Unificationism (Sun Myung Moon), and the Impersonal Enlightenment Fellowship of spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen.