Letter to my friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators,

During the last several months I had the opportunity to meet, learn from, and collaborate with Michael Margolis, the founder of Get Storied Inc. These experiences have led to my acceptance of an offer for a full-time position as a Strategy and Operations Lead at Get Storied. This is an incredible match for my passion, background, skills, personality, and needs.  I am excited, scared, and at peace, all at once!

I also want to update you on the status of my involvement with Faith House Manhattan, Citylights Community, and my independent consulting and speaking work.

Faith House has been undergoing a transition. As you might know, we have conducted our pilot immersion event this Summer and it has been a great success. We want to expand the program which, for now, we call Faith House Institute, taking groups of 10 to 15 people through an intensive 48 or 72 hour experience of religious life in New York City. We are about to offer custom made programs to institutions and groups. I would like to talk to you if you are interested to bring a group (more info HERE). Union Theological Seminary has offered us space for an office and partnership. My role at Faith House has been evolving from Founder, to President of the Board, to Executive Director. With this change, I will serve on the board and stay engaged for maximum impact, particularly in helping design and guide the immersion events. I hope you can participate! And thank you for your continual support.

In terms of my work with Cityligths Community, I will stay in the role of coordinator/director until the end of December. After that I will serve on the Citylights Leadership Team, fully invested in our growing community that is a lifeline for me and my family. I also hope to take up more volunteer teaching/preaching and service opportunities at Citylights.

My diverse consulting and speaking engagements will now almost exclusively serve the mission and calendar of Get Storied. I hope our paths will keep crossing. I will be adding inter-religious and cross-cultural aspect to its portfolio of engagements, expanding the work with non-profits in general and religious organizations in particular. Below is the summary of what we do.

Thank you for being an inspiration over the years,

Samir Selmanovic, New York City

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ABOUT GET STORIED INC.

Get Storied is a training and advisory company devoted to transformational storytelling. We work as trusted advisors to CMOs, CEOs, and leaders who need to reframe and redefine their message. As story architects we help clients accelerate their marketing and innovation efforts. As a learning institution, we teach thousands of change-makers the principles and skills of narrative intelligence.

Get Storied is devoted to the most important stories of our time — the cultural inflection points where change is inevitable. Every institution and industry now faces reinvention and has to learn to anticipate and align with its emerging future. We manage a growing portfolio of high-stakes engagements that touch on variety of themes including:

• The humanization of business
• Technology and global financial reform
• The future of information and learning
• Corporate social responsibility
• Re-defining the language of philanthropy

For a free e-book “Believe Me: A Storytelling Manifesto for Change-makers and Innovators” by Michael Margolis you can go to www.getstoried.com.

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Several months ago I had a privilege to preview an important new movie, Hellbound? directed by Kevin Miller, exploring the concept of Hell in Christian text, story, and life.  The most interesting question that has transpired for me is “Can Christian story, minus Hell, capture human imagination?”  This question does not have a simple answer.  The breath and depth of commentary in the movie is immense and I highly recommend it to all Christians and their concerned friends or family .  This coming Friday, Sep 21, at 7pm, there will be New York City premiere in Village Cinema followed by a panel that I will be moderating.  You are invited!  Here are the interlocutors for the post-projection discussion:

KEVIN MILLER is an award-winning filmmaker who has applied his craft to documentaries, feature films and short film projects. Recent credits include spOILed, Sex+Money, With God On Our Side and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Kevin’s work has taken him to over a dozen countries across five continents and has involved everything from urban spelunking under the streets of Moscow to interviewing war-criminals-at-large in the dusty, fly-infested markets of Sierra Leone. In addition to making films, Kevin teaches screenwriting at a number of film schools and conferences across North America and around the world. Kevin lives in Abbotsford, BC with his wife and four children.

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BEING MAD AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT:

What the Occupiers and the Occupied

Can Learn from Interfaith Dialogue

Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Stierle meditates

as police surround the Occupy Oakland encampment

on Monday, Nov. 14, 2011 (Photo: Noah Berger)

——————

Thursday, April 26, 7pm

James Chapel, Union Theological Seminary

3041 Broadway, NYC

Dr. Samir Selmanovic, Christian pastor, activist, community engagement consultant, and author will reflect on the current negative experience of capitalism in the United States. He will share his experience and philosophy of religious pluralism and discuss how it demands progressives/liberals such as himself to engage “the other.” This will be followed by a panel discussion with diverse interlocutors and by sharing by all. The evening will be hosted by Paul Tillich Professor Paul Knitter.

Guest Panelists:

Monika Mitchell, CEO of Good-b (Good Business Int’l and co-author of “Conversations with Wall Street: The Inside Story of Financial Armageddon and How to Prevent the Next One” (2011)

Allison Burtch, Occupy Wall Street Journal, contributing editor

Rev. James H. Cooper, Rector of Trinity Wall Street Church

Join our discussion on Twitter at #BeingMad

Sponsored by UTS Interfaith Caucus and Students for Peace and Justice

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I will be leading a conversation with two amazing people, Dr. Michael Merrill of Van Arsdale, Jr., Center for Labor Studies and Carolyn Klaasen of Union Theological Seminary and a Protest Chaplain on the topic “Breaking Good: Why and How an Occupied Wall Street Could Join the Occupation?” It will be this Wednesday, Feb 15, at 1pm, with live audience (no RSVP necessary), online and on-demand.  I hope to see you there, and send me some wisdom about what would you say on that topic, or ask.

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~ by Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass (Huffington Post, 12/25/11)

We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to “cool down” and to “be moderate” will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.

In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious “community of communities,” we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our “co-laboratory” of interdependence: “Experience your neighbor’s faith, deepen your own.”

Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today’s world, religious people have to remap their reality to include — in tension and in gratitude — ‘the other.’ While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. ‘The other’ is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?

This past year, Faith House started a new program with four religious communities in Manhattan, who were part of a “Tour Bus” with reciprocal visits to each of our main religious gatherings. We brought people together to trespass imaginary boundaries while preserving the real ones. From an experience of worship at a Hindu temple, to a Jewish Shabbat service, to a Sufi Zikr, to midweek “Space for Grace” at a major Protestant church — either as “Interfaith 101″ or an opportunity for seasoned pilgrims to be hosts or guests in their own setting — this seven-week adventure was a unique New York City experience.

– read the entire article on Huffington Post and comment click HERE –

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NOTE: DUE TO THE WEATHER CONDITIONS, THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED FOR A DAY LATER. IT WILL TAKE PLACE ON MONDAY, AUG 29.

Find out MORE.

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My book is now available in softcover!  It is blue, it has a new subtitle “… How Islam, Atheism, and Judaism Made Me a Better Chritian.”  All else is good ole’.

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From my Twitter account, April 17 afternoon: http://twitter.com/#!/SamirSelmanovic

Event description at www.faithhousemanhattan.org

Exploring meaning of freedom at 3rd Faith House Passover Seder at progressive St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic church, more than 200 of us!

To dance or to cry? Jews know music and will keep us tonight in this dilemma of life until we burst into both!

Rabbi David Ingber evokes the meaning of Palm Sunday and affirms Rebbe Jesus as a holy teacher of freedom.

Biblical concept of hope where humans must act to have freedom has been supplanted by passive notion of optimism.

We are born with gift off freedom inside of us. When world oppresses us there is a way back to who we are: 15 Passover steps back to freedom

Time is not cyclical but open. Future is unknown and dependent on human action. Freedom starts with freedom of time.

Close your eyes, imagine you are in total and cold dark. You are going to pieces, there is no hope. You are a slave.

On your lips there is salt from tears of your enslavement. We dip green leaves into salty water recognizing that new shoots of life do come.

Hebrew word for bread is the same word for brokenness. Hasidic masters say that we cannot live without either of them.

We won’t be fooled by movements which free only some of us & in which our so-called “freedom” rests upon enslavement or embitterment of others

Slaves just say ‘it is what it is.’ The most insidious form of slavery is when we stop asking questions.

Questions are beginning of freedom, like ‘why are rich getting richer and poor getting poorer,’

Hebrew word Egypt means ‘narrow place.’ In Jewish mystical tradition narrow place of throat is a holder of bondage. Speech brings redemption.

Two women saving baby Moses by subverting the edict is the 1st historical record of civil disobedience. From then on human story shifts from might to right

“God help us dream new paths to freedom so that the next sea-opening is not also a drowning, so that our singing is never again their wailing”

Wow, the whole crowd of Jews, Christians, Muslims is bursting into singing, clapping with raised hands singing Dayenu (Enough)!

Breaking of Matzah bread is like breaking the tablets of the law. No absolute can withstand, all are idols. No religion or system has arrived

Here is a pic, 250 of us singing at the end of Passover Seder on Palm Sunday! Heavenly.

Ooops forgot the pic: yfrog.com/h7yuiylj

Rabbi David finishes with quoting St Augustine, freedom of finding ones rest in who we are made for and with New Testament and Rumi. G’night

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