Greetings

By Reuben Shank

September 15, 2026

Dear MIC members, friends, and partners,

I am grateful for the chance to serve MIC and our collective mission in the Marin communities you each love and labor in.

The last newsletter introduced me as a lifelong friend to the world's cultural, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. True indeed. What it didn't say is that I am relatively new to Marin. I know these traditions and this work; I don't yet know this county very well, or you. 

So let me lead with what I would want new colleagues and partners to know. Well before any strategic thinking, I believe the futures we desire are built through the relationships we nurture, the convictions we practice, the stories we tell, and the commitments we keep when the costs are real.

Two big picture convictions hold me in this work:

Spiritually-rooted wisdom can support mutual liberation, repair generational harms, and help build communities where all living beings flourish.

Sacred communities have long practiced what few spaces can: staying with difficulty —across generations, classes, statuses— and moving through it together toward something no one arrived with.

Two more personal convictions I am still working to live into:

I trust that love is stronger than hate, and life more powerful than death.

I lead assuming everyone is suffering, everyone is healing, everyone is longing for connection.

Some of this may echo your own convictions in different language, and some may sit in real tension with them. 

No matter where you are coming from, I am eager to connect, learn, and collaborate.

Here's the fuller thought behind those convictions.

For millennia, living traditions — ancestral, spiritual, religious, cultural — have been among the most serious attempts human beings have made to hold belonging and difference at once. They are something like what many of us value about democracy today, though older, and more besides. Before modern democracy became a powerful political vision, these traditions were offering models for collective belonging, care-taking, meaning-making, healing, and deliberation across real difference. You find it in Indigenous and ancestral traditions rooted in land and lineage. You find it in the world religions and civic institutions that helped organize more dense and plural societies. 

That's why I find the framing in the last newsletter helpful: sacred communities are key connective, place-based infrastructure. They carry the enduring care of these living traditions into conversation with modern knowledge and civic life in our interdependent world, meeting our needs for belonging, safety, and creativity through steady labor and renewed imagination.

Your congregations, temples, sanghas, circles, values-based communities, and personal practice help hold this county together in ways an interfaith council can only support, stretch, and interconnect. What MIC can be is connective tissue for the connective tissue: solidarity across difference, deep roots held alongside public moral deliberation, unexpected partnerships, collaboration built for the long haul rather than the news cycle. That is a formative and supporting role.

MIC is in a season of change — a new mission statement, a new leader, a new set of questions about what this work is for. Change brings uncertainty and opportunity in equal measure. That is all the more real in a world already feeling fragile amid compounding crises. And it matters all the more because religious and spiritual communities can contribute to harm and division as much as to connection and flourishing. What emerges depends on how we show up for one another.

So I invite you into three questions:

• What are some of your own convictions?

• How does “interfaith” work contribute to your life and labors?

• What practices sustain your courage, curiosity, and compassion when differences get real?

Write back. I am listening and grateful to be in this space with you.

In hope,

Reuben Shank