Building Bridges Across Asia Pacific - June 20, 2024

Students and Universities from across the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and more are participating in Building Bridges Across Asia Pacific. This is a geographically broad and religiously diverse region where approximately 9% of the world’s Christians live. Christians are a distinct minority in most countries (1% in Thailand and Japan) and a significant majority in a few others (85% in Philippines and 97% in Papua New Guinea). This uneven distribution of Christians and the status of the Christian religion itself across the region contributes to remarkably varied experiences among young people of faith.

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Building Bridges Across South Asia - September 26, 2023

Around one quarter of the world’s population lives in South Asia, which is comprised of eight countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This is a densely populated, politically and religiously diverse region where Christians make up barely 2% of the total population. The predominant religious traditions are Hinduism and Islam. This minority status of Christianity throughout the region is an important aspect of the experience of students who are Christian. To form and facilitate student groups for the Building Bridges Initiative, several universities, and religious centers are working together.

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Building Bridges Across Africa

The Second Pan-African Catholic Congress on Theology, Society, and Pastoral Life took place at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya in July 2022. Invited by the organizers of the Congress, Drs. Emilce Cuda and Peter Jones, two of the five organizers of the first Building Bridges Initiative event, attended the Congress. They made presentations and met with leaders from across the continent to encourage and inspire them to help organize a similar event centering the experiences and voices of African students. By the end of the week, a strong group that included theologians, teachers, pastors, media executives, and social media influencers began to advance this work.

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Building Bridges Across the Americas

The Inaugural event of the Building Bridges Initiative brought together 130 students who joined from 58 different universities in 21 countries. They met in regional groups many times during January and February of 2022 in Canada/USA, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, Brazil, and other parts of South America. We challenged students to share with each other their personal experiences with migration and to discuss the factors pushing people to move away, pulling people in certain directions, and what is the experience of the migrant and community.

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