The task was simple: talk to other people at your school.
The challenge: engage in a “positive” discussion with people about a religion other than your own or people who practice no religion.
In a nation founded with religious freedom as a central tenet, understanding the roots of one’s own faith and discussing it in a non-defensive or un-offensive way can be trying for many. Yet, it’s the goal of an emerging interfaith cooperation movement around academia, one that draws upon and expands the ideals and energy of past college generations that found commonality in purpose through their respective faiths.
“This country is so divided along religious lines, yet we are the most religiously diverse country on earth,” said Mary Ellen Giess, vice president of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a Chicago-based nonprofit that focuses on getting colleges across the nation—large, small, public, private—to make “interfaith cooperation” a norm on campuses.
There is “great [religious] intolerance” in America, said Giess, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We feel it’s a national priority to bridge the religious divide.”
Indeed, the decades-old religious divide in America—marked by debates over a range of issues from slavery to interracial marriage, the role of women in the church, abortion, same-sex marriage and military service—appears to have widened in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pa. Islam and its practitioners have joined the list of “fears” that drive wedges between otherwise reasonable people.
Answers in youth
