Fermi Project

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The Fermi Project, based in Atlanta, Georgia, is a loose collective of Evangelical innovators, entrepreneurs, and faith leaders who pursue endeavors that advance Christian goals. It was founded by Gabe and Rebekah Lyons in 2003, and has no direct connection with the physicist Enrico Fermi.

Contents

Fermi's main influence is exerted in "Q" conferences, which invite world leaders from a variety of areas to share "ideas that create a better world." Conference presenters have included people like authors Donald Miller, Rob Bell, Scot McKnight and Rick Warren, model Jon Passavant, media personality Jeff Johnson and social entrepreneur Majora Carter.

Fermi and its projects have made national headlines when they asked Eboo Patel, a Muslim leader and thinker, to present to their ambitious Christian audience. [1] Founder Gabe Lyons has also been interviewed about faith patterns amongst the young on national news programs such as CNN. [2]

Publications

The Fermi Project offers a paid subscription to Fermi Words, a digital magazine about faith and culture. They also collaborated to publish a recent best selling book, unChristian by Lyons and David Kinnaman of the Barna Group, which featured contributions from Christian thinkers like Jim Wallis, Margaret Feinberg, Mike Foster and Sarah Cunningham.

Origin of name

A Fermi is an extremely small unit of length equal to one quadrillionth of a meter. It is named after Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize winner and physicist who produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Lyons uses this name because they seek to use small, incremental changes to create a series of large changes in how the church views its mission.

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Enrico Fermi Italian-American physicist (1901–1954)

Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics. Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. With his colleagues, Fermi filed several patents related to the use of nuclear power, all of which were taken over by the US government. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics.

Femtometre Unit of length

The femtometre symbol fm derived from the Danish and Norwegian word femten 'fifteen', Ancient Greek: μέτρον, romanized: metrοn, lit. 'unit of measurement') is an SI unit of length equal to 10−15 metres, which means a quadrillionth of one metre. This distance used to be called a fermi and was so named in honour of Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, as it is a typical length-scale of nuclear physics.

World Evangelical Alliance Global organization

The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) is an interdenominational organization of evangelical Christian churches, serving more than 600 million evangelicals, founded in 1846 in London, England, United Kingdom to unite evangelicals worldwide. WEA is the largest international organization of evangelical churches. The headquarters are in Deerfield, Illinois, with UN offices in New York City, Geneva, and Bonn. It brings together 9 regional and 143 national evangelical alliances of churches, and over one hundred member organizations. Moreover, the WEA includes a certain percentage of individual evangelical Christian churches. As of March 2021, the Secretary General of the WEA is German theologian Thomas Schirrmacher.

Franklin Graham American Christian evangelist and missionary (born 1952)

William Franklin Graham III is an American evangelical evangelist and missionary. He frequently engages in Christian revival tours and political commentary. He is currently president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and of Samaritan's Purse, an international Christian relief organization. Graham became a "committed Christian" in 1974 and was ordained in 1982, and has since become a public speaker and author. He is a son of the American evangelist Billy Graham.

Interfaith dialogue Positive interaction of different religious people

Interfaith dialogue refers to cooperative, constructive, and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions and/or spiritual or humanistic beliefs, at both the individual and institutional levels. It is distinct from syncretism or alternative religion, in that dialogue often involves promoting understanding between different religions or beliefs to increase acceptance of others, rather than to synthesize new beliefs.

Reza Aslan Iranian-American scholar of religious studies

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of sociology of religion, writer, and television host. A convert to evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to write about Christianity. He has written four books on religion: No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and God: A Human History.

Religion in Trinidad and Tobago, which is a multi-religious nation, is distributed as follows: The largest religious group is Christianity with 63.2 percent of the population. This includes Protestant Christians with Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Shouter or Spiritual Baptists and regular Baptists as well as Roman Catholics. Hindus are 20.4 percent, Muslims 5.6 percent. There is an Afro-Caribbean syncretic faith, the Orisha faith with 1 percent and there are Rastafaris with 0.3 percent. Other Religions account for 7.0 percent and "None/not shared" for 2.5.

The Islamic Thinkers Society is an Islamist group based in New York City that seeks the goal of restoring the Islamic Caliphate to create what it calls "an ideal Islamic society." Its members are located mainly in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, United States. The ITS is an offshoot of Al-Muhajiroun, a pro Al-Qaeda British Islamic extremist group.

Richard Cizik is President of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He was the Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and one of the most prominent Evangelical lobbyists in the United States. In his position with the NAE, Cizik's primary responsibilities were setting the organization's policy on issues and lobbying the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. Cizik also served as NAE's national spokesman and edited a monthly magazine, NAE Washington Insight. Since 2003, Cizik has been active in a type of environmentalism known as "creation care"; his stance on global warming has drawn both support and criticism from fellow Evangelicals. He serves on the Board of Advisors of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

Leona Woods American nuclear physicist

Leona Harriet Woods, later known as Leona Woods Marshall and Leona Woods Marshall Libby, was an American physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and the first atomic bomb.

Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur is an author and activist focused on faith-based initiatives and gender equality in Islam who currently serves as the chief of staff and chief communications officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She works with Malaria No More, a leading non-profit formed to advance the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by ending malaria-related deaths by 2012. She also consults on a variety of interfaith projects and volunteerism efforts.

Moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD) is a term that was first introduced in the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by the sociologist Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton. The term is used to describe what they consider to be the common beliefs among U.S. youths. The book is the result of the research project the National Study of Youth and Religion.

Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel was a member of President Barack Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. He is an American Ismaili of Gujarati Indian heritage and founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation.

Fabiola Gianotti Italian particle physicist and CERN Director-General

Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian experimental particle physicist, and the first woman to be Director-General at CERN in Switzerland. Her first mandate began on 1 January 2016 and ran for a period of five years. At its 195th Session in 2019, the CERN Council selected Gianotti for an unprecedented second term as Director-General. Her second five-year term began on 1 January 2021 and go on until 2025. This is the first time in CERN's history that a Director-General has been appointed for a full second term.

Deborah Fikes is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association. She is a co-president of Religions for Peace, the world’s largest and most representative multi-religious coalition, with offices in New York. Fikes serves as an executive advisor to the World Evangelical Alliance, which represents a constituency of 650 million with alliance offices in 129 countries, and was the WEA's permanent representative to the United Nations from 2009-2016. She served for three consecutive terms as a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), which represents 45,000 churches in the United States.

Partners for a New Beginning

In his "A New Beginning" speech on June 4, 2009, at Cairo University in Cairo, Egypt, President of the United States Barack Obama stated that "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings." During the speech, he also committed to "host a Summit on Entrepreneurship this year to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world".

Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) is a Chicago-based non-profit founded in 2002 by Eboo Patel. The organization’s stated mission is to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. Today it operates with approximately 30 full-time staff and a $4-million budget. It has worked on five continents and with over 200 college campuses domestically.

Samuel Rodriguez Jr. is an Evangelical American Christian leader born to Puerto Rican parents in the United States. He is a pastor, movie producer, author, civil rights activist and television personality. He is the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.

The Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism project is an interfaith initiative originated by the Dalai Lama and Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan. These two were joined by a panel of select scholars, and the project was officially launched on May 12, 2010, in Bloomington, Indiana, US. The project is based on the book Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism, by Reza Shah-Kazemi, who together with Ingrid Mattson and Eboo Patel was part of the scholars’ panel convened for the Bloomington event.

Johnnie Moore is an American evangelical leader and businessman who founded the Kairos Company, a public relations firm. Moore is a commissioner for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and president of Congress of Christian Leaders.

References

  1. Patel, Eboo (2008-04-10). "A Muslim Among the Evangelicals - OnFaith". Newsweek.washingtonpost.com. Archived from the original on 2008-04-14. Retrieved 2017-02-28.
  2. "Gabe Lyons On Cnn". YouTube. 2007-12-05. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 2017-02-28.