When Juliet Hollister decided to launch the Temple of Understanding in 1960, her idea to unite the world’s religions was divisive. With the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation looming, and tensions between religious groups contributing to bloody conflicts across the globe, Hollister’s idea was called naive, impossible, and even dangerous.
By some, that is. Others called Hollister a visionary. Among those who immediately understood Juliet’s intention was Eleanor Roosevelt, who called the fledgling idea a “spiritual United Nations.” It was an incisive way to sum it up. Where the UN was the space for nations to come together and protect peace through diplomacy, there was no venue for religions to do the same. What if there was such a place, where the world’s religions could talk to each other, learn from each other, and use their influence to promote peace, not war?
Eleanor Roosevelt played a key role in developing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She supported Juliet Hollister in the founding of the Temple of Understanding.
Juliet, then 44, was an unlikely leader for such a bold vision. A mother, wife and homemaker with no formal education in comparative religion, she had no financial resources and no backing from any political, spiritual or diplomatic institution. As a woman in the early 1960s, many of the traditional avenues of power and access were closed off to her. But she believed there was power in learning about how other people approached their spirituality – a passion she passed on to her three children. In the forward to Juliet’s memoir, “Living my Dream,” her daughter Catharine Hollister Ecton recalled her mother’s lively spirit, and her natural affinity for teaching and her efforts to introduce her children to all of the religions of the world.
“Her goal was to find the common threads in religious concepts and philosophies and to open the minds of others to exploring new ideas,” Ecton wrote. “My mother talked frequently about the power of prayer. ‘There are many ways to worship,’ she told us. ‘Each person must find his own path.’”
Juliet also had an unshakable faith. She believed that ideas could change the world, and she knew that hers was one of them. When a friend had casually suggested the concept over lunch at her suburban Connecticut home, Juliet felt as though lightning had struck in her.
“Something deep inside me whispered, “This, my lass, is a creative moment,” Juliet wrote in her memoir. “Do something now to set the idea in motion. Commit yourself before the flame dissipates. This is a beautiful idea. Don’t let it die.”
It was this conviction that galvanized everyone from taxi drivers and tailors to politicians and Popes to her cause. Roosevelt, in 1960, was among the first to lend her support. Juliet’s husband Dickerman Hollister, a lawyer, suggested Roosevelt would be the perfect person to promote the idea. With no connection to the former first lady, Dickerman advised Juliet to pray for guidance. She did. Just days later, a chance encounter with Roosevelt’s cousin at a dinner party led to an invitation to attend the former first lady’s weekly salon gathering at Roosevelt’s New York City brownstone. But with so many people in attendance, Juliet feared she wouldn’t gain the introduction she needed. Once again, she started to pray, and that’s when Roosevelt approached her.
“My dear, what a marvelous idea, and a wonderful, wonderful thing for this world,” the former first lady said after Juliet outlined her vision. “Now, my dear, tell me, what can I do to help you?”
It was a phrase Juliet would hear over and over again as she embarked on a trip around the world with her 11-year-old son Dickerman Jr., with Roosevelt’s letters of introduction opening doors for meetings with renowned heads of state, diplomats and religious leaders including Pope John XXIII, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Dr. Albert Schweitzer. “Would you please see this lady?” Roosevelt wrote in her letters. “She has, in my opinion, an important mission.”
The cover of Juliet Hollister’s memoir, “Living my Dream.”
With Roosevelt acting as the project’s “fairy godmother,” Juliet would quickly garner the support she needed to launch the Temple of Understanding. At first unsure how to respond to the many people who wanted to know what they could do to support her, Juliet began to request help with financial donations, publicity, and prayers. The response was overwhelming. The trip drew a barrage of press interest, including from Time-Life magazine, who called the effort her “wonderful obsession.”
The serendipitous encounter with Roosevelt strengthened Juliet’s belief that she was guided by what she called “the benevolent force at the heart of the universe.” Juliet believed this divine force connected “every living thing, be it bird, tree, stone, river, or human.” Humans, she wrote, were like antennae – constantly transmitting and receiving information from this vast, interconnected web. It was interacting with the divine force that caused it to respond, in the same way a pebble tossed into a lake produces ripples. Juliet often relied on her intuitive connection to this divine force to guide her most consequential actions – including founding the Temple of Understanding.
“We live embedded in a field of universal intelligence, and if we throw a question out into the field that some would call God and some would call Allah and some would call energy or some other name, there is always an answer,” Juliet wrote. “Jesus put it, knock and the door shall be opened to you, seek and ye shall find. You have to seek, you have to knock.”
At her core, Juliet was a seeker. She was a voracious reader, listener, and learner. She studied up on history, philosophy, and religious and spiritual traditions of all kinds, likening her drive for knowledge to an enormous hunger. While she never identified with any one particular religious or spiritual path, she recognized a similar belief in the interconnectedness of the human family in every tradition she researched. Where others saw division, Juliet saw unity. She believed diversity was an essential element of that unity, something meant to strengthen the bonds between people, not drive them apart. She sought out others who viewed the world from the same lens.
Juliet’s pioneering efforts in the interfaith space included spiritual summits and conferences that built bridges across religious divides and drew some of the most preeminent spiritual voices from a wide array of religious traditions. At the Temple of Understanding’s Summit Conference in Calcutta in 1968, Trappist monk Thomas Merton offered a reflection that defined the interfaith movement: “What we have to discover is that we are already one.” Listening via short wave radio from Dharamsala, India was a young Tibetan monk who was so intrigued by Juliet’s vision that he sent his sister to invite her to come visit him. This began a lifelong friendship with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who would years later refer to Juliet as “my Lama Mama.”
Later, in 1975, the Temple of Understanding’s fifth Spiritual Summit in New York City culminated in a conference at the United Nations, the first time religious voices had ever been invited to speak on UN grounds. “Let us prove to the whole world that we are One,” Mother Theresa said at the conference. “Let us be One in love to the poorest of the poor.”
Juliet Hollister and Albert Schweitzer, 1960
Though Juliet’s vision for a physical temple would never be realized, her efforts expanded the Temple of Understanding to one of the most preeminent interfaith institutions in the world. The Temple of Understanding’s mission would eventually shift to educational programs, advocacy, and global dialogue, promoting peace, justice, and understanding between people of all faiths. When Juliet died at 84 in 2000, she was remembered as an interfaith visionary – though she herself was sometimes uncomfortable with the term. She at times battled what she called “dragons” of shyness that caused nerves before important meetings or public speaking events. Though her accomplishments were enormous, she maintained a humble nature. She’s most remembered by those who knew her personally as intelligent, curious, funny and kind.
“To know Juliet was to love her. She had a flair for the dramatic and an incorrigible sense of humor,” wrote Alison Van Dyk, Temple of Understanding executive director, in the Interfaith Observer. “Her innocent curiosity was beguiling – yet many times I witnessed her sharp intellect at work surprising politicians, academics and religious leaders with her grasp of international affairs and her vision of interfaith understanding.”
Juliet’s contribution to the interfaith community was one of openness and dialogue. She believed that everyone must find their own spiritual path, but never promoted proselytizing or strict dogma. Rather, she opened space for people of a wide variety of faiths to come together, learn, and listen, holding respect for others’ beliefs while honoring their own. Those who she brought together saw the value in this approach as well.
“The purity of her motives and the fresh natural beauty of her thought captured whoever listened to her,” wrote Suheil Bushrui, the late Baha’i Chair for World Peace at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland, in an introduction to Juliet’s memoir. “No matter how radical some of those thoughts were, she never allowed herself to become a doctrinaire.”
Bushrui wrote that Juliet intuited what Mahatma Gandhi before her had wisely stated: that there would be no lasting peace on earth unless we learn not to merely tolerate other faiths, but to respect them as we would our own.
“What she achieved was creating and nurturing a circle of unity and light that invited everyone, without exception, to join,” Bushrui wrote.
In 2027, the Temple of Understanding will launch the book Divine Courage, a record of the interfaith organization’s conferences, UN involvement, and educational materials spanning 1960 to the present. Who was this woman, and why did she take on interfaith dialogue at a time when most religions mistrusted the idea? How did this pioneer of the interfaith movement succeed in bringing faith leaders from many diverse traditions together for the first time in Calcutta in 1968? What motivated her, and how has the organization evolved into one of the oldest and most influential interfaith organizations in North America? Divine Courage is a book for historians and scholars, as well as those seeking new ideas for interfaith educational programing for all ages.