David Crawford Elected Vice President of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago

04-03-2023

McCormick Theological Seminary President David Crawford has been elected to serve as Vice President of the Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago (“CRLMC”.) David first joined the Council in 2017 and has served on CRLMC’s Executive Committee since 2020. “I am very pleased that David Crawford is serving as Vice President of CRLMC,” said Council President Barbara Abrajano. “David’s insight and expertise have been integral to our efforts since he joined the Council. I am delighted that I can rely on his good counsel as we conduct our work to advance interreligious cooperation,  understanding,  and collaboration in Chicago and the metropolitan area.”

“I am honored and humbled to serve in this role on the Council,” said President Crawford. “It has been one of the great joys of my tenure at McCormick to meet and work with so many extraordinary leaders from across Chicago and beyond. I am grateful to Rev. Dr. B. Herbert Martin, the Council’s former president, for inviting me to be part of this important work in 2017 and especially grateful to our current President Barbara Abrajano whose visionary and dedicated leadership has inspired us all.”

About the Council

​The Council of Religious Leaders of Metropolitan Chicago, an inter-religious community of leaders from diverse faith traditions, serves the purposes to come together to know each other personally, professionally, and in their faith commitments and communities; to create opportunities to join together in sharing the prayers and spiritual practices of their traditions in the presence of each other and with the wider public; to expose shared and distinctive dimensions of their faith traditions; to engage in discussions about intra-and inter-religious and civic issues; to provide support for one another and their religious communities when subject to religious prejudice, discrimination, and persecution; and to take action, as people of faith and a community of conscience, on public issues that advance the common good. The Council was created in 1984 by Cardinal Joseph Bernardine who served as the Council’s first president. CRLMC was the successor group to the Chicago Conference on Religion and Race which was formed immediately following the meeting of the National Conference on Religion and Race held in Chicago in January 1963 at which Rev. Dr.  Martin Luther King spoke and later described as “the most significant and historic [meeting] ever held for attacking racial injustice.” For more, see, www.crlmc.org

David Crawford