For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about Abdullah II’s Templeton Prize ceremony.
Cathedrals don’t just happen overnight — they require of their planners, funders, and craftsmen a time horizon better suited for institutions than individuals, and a willingness to do one’s work without the guarantee of ever seeing the end result. The first proposal for the church that became the Washington National Cathedral was made in 1791, but it was more than a century before the builders laid the foundation stone. Its main sanctuary opened to the public in 1932. In 1990, nearly 200 years after its conception, workers finished erecting the cathedral’s tower. Even before its completion, the Cathedral served as both the seat of the U.S. Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop and as the “great church for national purposes” envisioned by city planner Pierre L’Enfant.
Over the past two decades, His Majesty King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein, the ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, has been laying the foundations for a great (if metaphorical) religious structure of his own — using the power of his office to gather religious leaders to articulate shared goals and extend a hand of friendship across deeply held differences, resulting in landmark proclamations that have already helped open new spaces for cooperation between representatives of Sunni and Shia, Muslim and Christian, and religious and secular perspectives.