Dr. Daniel Cowdin's interest in the traditions of Judaism and how they relate to his own Catholic faith manifested early in his college years.
"One of the courses I took as an undergraduate was Modern Jewish Thought," Cowdin says. "They were doing things like giving existentialist interpretations of the Passover and I thought it was fantastic. I started to ask whether they were doing these things in the Catholic tradition, and in fact they were."
In the fall of 2010, Cowdin was accepted as a fellow at the prestigious Woolf Institute in Cambridge, England, where he was able to immerse himself in researching some of the questions that had been formulating since his early college years.
"I really dove into the big picture and read as much as I could about different aspects of Jewish-Christian relations, but more specifically the relationship between Jewish and Christian ethics," Cowdin recalls.
After a semester in Cambridge, Cowdin spent the spring 2011 semester at the Christian-sponsored Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem, continuing his research.