Tuesday, February 27, 2007. Dr. Eboo Patel. "God in the Classroom -- Teaching about Religion."
MS. FORD: Good morning, everyone. I hope you had a good night's sleep and maybe a little sunshine already this morning. I know that last night at dinner everybody enjoyed the music and lots of wonderful conversation afterwards. Our table was nearly asked to leave at the very end. They were taking off the tablecloths and everything else. Our conversation was all focused on heads' horror stories, which at the time are not always so funny, but sometimes in retrospect, mercifully, they can be absolutely hilarious.
We have another wonderful program set out for today which I know you're going to enjoy, and I think you'll find more inspiration, more instruction, and even more engagement as we go along. Before we get started, Bruce has a few housekeeping things he'd like to tell us about.
MR. GALBRAITH: Good morning. The back table has a number of handouts including an evaluation sheet, a yellow form, and the second session today prepared some things to take home about the crises that they have been through and some ideas. It's a green sheet. And Eileen prepared even some more things.
Our first speaker has some postcards about his upcoming book, if you're interested.
This is a potpourri. There are two golf spots available at 1:40, so see me immediately. We need to get that done.
Tonight is dining out. We leave from the lobby and go to the former girls' school.
I'd like to introduce Jim McKee from Aladdin Food Service. He's been working to get here for a couple of days so we could thank him for our refreshments on the opening night. Jim, would you stand, please? Thank you very much.
The person I'll introduce now is a member of the planning committee for this program, and she claims she didn't do anything, and I tell you that's not true. Linda Gibbs.
MS. GIBBS: In respect to Dr. Cole, I'm one of those vertically challenged school leaders, so I'm going to stand out here. Here is the postcard that Bruce was referring to with the very nice picture of our speaker. Those are in the back.
I think many of us struggle in our schools with appropriate ways to deal with different faith traditions, whether it be at the holidays or other times throughout the year, and to be respectful of all the various faith traditions that we have in our diverse schools. I'm hoping this morning that Dr. Patel can help us with understanding and moving forward with those things, especially those of us in nonsectarian schools.
We're very fortune to have Dr. Eboo Patel with us this morning. He is the executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit organization, that brings together young people from diverse religious communities for the purpose of building understanding and encouraging collaborative service.
He also serves as the director of the Harvard Pluralism Project, whose mission is to help Americans in understanding religious diversity. Dr. Patel is a Rhodes scholar, and he received his doctorate in sociology of religion from Oxford University. He is a prolific writer and a leader in the global interfaith movement, and he has been featured in a range of media, including PBS, BBC, and CNN, to mention only a few.
A much sought-after speaker, Dr. Patel's addresses include the keynote speech at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum. His new book, Acts of Faith, will be available in early summer, and that's the one that the postcard is illustrative of.
Finally, Dr. Patel is an Ashoka Fellow, part of a highly select network of social entrepreneurs with ideas that have potential to change the world.
Please welcome Dr. Eboo Patel to NAPSG.
MR. PATEL: Well, it's wonderful to be here. There's nothing like the Tucson sun and I guess a golf outing or two to grease the wheels of pedagogical thinking. Yesterday my wife and I were having lunch by the pool, and it was getting a little bit raucous. My wife said, "Who are all these people?"
I said, "Principals, sweetheart. Principals."
I want to thank Brad Lyman and Bruce Galbraith for facilitating my being here. It must have been my friend Brad who said that I was the director of the Harvard Pluralism Project. I am not, although, Brad, I appreciate you suggesting that. I will talk about all the dreams that I have to be director of all kinds of places in units around the world.
But one of the people I admire most in the world, Diana Eck, is the director of that project, and that does a lot of work in religious diversity, and one of the colleagues I met through that project, Peter Cobb, is here. I just want to say how grateful I am for my early conversations with him in the area of religion diversity and faith formation several years ago.
With that, I want to begin with a story of a student that I taught a couple of years ago in a "Semester in Chicago" program, a student from a liberal arts college in Colorado named Kristin. She had grown up in a strong Christian family, but told me she stopped going to church in college and no longer calls herself a Christian.
I asked her if she still found solace in the Bible, if she occasionally hummed Christian hymns, if she was still inspired by the words of Christian preachers. She answered yes to all these questions. "I don't understand," I said. "If all that is true, why are you unwilling to call yourself a Christian?"
Kristin told me that a guy from an organization in Colorado Springs came to speak at her college on Christianity. He said that Christians believe women should be subservient to men; that people of other faiths, especially Muslims, are wicked; that professors who teach courses applying philosophical and intellectual frameworks to religion should be avoided, because they will only delude your faith.
One group of students in the room was excited by this message and approached the man. They were the ones who got to wear the label "Christian" on campus. The other group slunk away and scattered.
Reflecting on this, Kristin told me, "I don't want to be subservient because of my gender. I don't want to hate anybody because of their religion. And I don't want to put my mind on hold because of my faith. If that's what it means to be a Christian, then I don't want it."
Sometimes it feels like what the song writer Paul Simon said was true, that "Faith is an island in the setting sun." The island, for sure, is still there. But it's increasingly covered in darkness, harder and harder to point to, maybe even for some people to find.
The faith that I am speaking of is a faith that involves intellect, that seeks cooperation with diversity, that wants to enrich the public square but not dominate it, that uncovers some of the deepest desires of the human heart, that speaks to those places in us that Gucci and Goldman Sachs can't, that helps us have a conversation with our heritage, that inspired some of the most important heroes in our history.
The darkness shrouding this type of faith I believe is coming from at least two directions. The first is from religious totalitarians, the Pat Robertsons and Osama Bin Ladens of our world, people who say that your faith must command you to dominate others, and if you don't, you deserve the fire along with the rest of the infidels. And the darkness from the other direction is coming from people like Sam Harris, people using scientific credentials to galvanize and organize the forces of skepticism, secularism and atheism, saying that religion can only be a dangerous destructive delusion, that religious moderates are simply failed fundamentalists, that faith is worse than a crutch for the weak, that it is a suicide belt around a young person's waist, the power of the purse in the hands of the religious right, a form of rigid ethnocentrism that wills away diversity or destroys it; that essentially faith can produce nothing but Pat Robertsons and Osama Bin Ladens.
The media is happy to provide a spotlight and a stage for these people. When I talk to journalism students, I tell them, one of the reasons Muslim totalitarians commit heinous acts of violence is to get you to show up. They videotape confessions of murderers and beheadings precisely so that you will play them. They commit suicide bombings and book burnings for the express purpose of luring your cameras and microphones. They want people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to view Islam as a religion of violence and hatred. Why are you letting yourself as journalists be used for their purpose?
For Kristin, the student from the liberal arts college in Colorado, this darkness, for some time at least, covered her island of faith. A few glimpses peeked through, but mostly she lived in the material world. I worry about that. It saddened me a little, partially because I believe God created us and wishes for us to recognize we have both a transcendent purpose as well as human limits; partially because a certain continuity in her family, a family that had been the pillar of her church for generations, had been broken or at least interrupted; partially because Kristin's understanding of what faith is or can be had been dramatically narrowed.
I suspect that some people in this room share all three of these concerns with me: The concern about the loss of faith, the concern about the interruption in heritage, and the concern about the increasingly narrow window through which young people view religion. Many of you, I imagine, are people of faith yourselves. Many of the institutions in this room have an explicit religious mission or were founded with a powerful religious ethos, and all of us, religious and nonreligious alike, share an educational mission, the hope that young people can confidently and competently participate in the world.
If religion, one of the most diverse and colorful dimensions of the human experience, is consigned to only one category, that of the dangerous and destructive and delusional, what are our young people missing? This, I think, is where educators come in. What does it look like to provide students with frameworks with which to understand faith in our world in a broad way, to see that all religions have managed to produce both slave drivers and freedom fighters, war mongers and peacemakers; to discuss why that might be the case, why some people derive slavery from the Bible and other people derive liberation, and to perhaps commit to working for one over the other.
One of the things that I admire most about independent schools is that they take a set of aspirational goals seriously, the most important of which I think are the commitment to nurture well-educated people and active citizens. I think there is little doubt that in our world today, an educated person has to have some degree of religious literacy that is some basic knowledge of and fluency in the great world religions and religious philosophy, and that a responsible citizen has to have some commitment to interfaith understanding and cooperation.
Let me just illustrate this for a moment with an exercise that Martin Marty, one of the great scholars of American religion, does with high school principals. He says to them, especially those who are a little bit reluctant or resistant to teaching about religion in their classes, "Take the New York Times on any given day and clip all the articles that have something to do with religion. Don't do it with your family newspaper, because your spouse is going to be angry that all you have left him or her with is confetti. Now, take the articles on religion, and pile up the ones on religion and violence. You're not going to have that many left. Pile up another set, the ones that have to do with religion and getting elected. You might actually at this point have none left. But look at those piles, and look at the confetti left on the table and ask yourself, 'Can I understand my world, can my students understand this world, without having some broad framework of what religion is, has been, or could be?'"
I actually think that there is perhaps an imperfect parallel to the issue of race here. 100 years ago, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois famously said that the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. Slavery, segregation and colonialism were amongst the ugliest manifestations of that problem. But I think it started in a more basic place, a situation in which human beings from different backgrounds did not come to know one another, did not have the chance to see each other as fully human, and therefore, could do the most inhuman things to one another.
For me, this is most profoundly illustrated by a beautiful story in the work of one of our great writers of the 20th century, James Baldwin. He went to a small Swiss village to finish a book, and he realized something in that village. Not only was he the only black person there at that time; he was the only black person that those Swiss villagers had ever seen. They would come up to him and touch his skin and his hair, ask him how he slept and what he ate. They were discovering slowly, slowly, the full humanity of a person whose skin color had only previously been a fantasy. The end of Baldwin's essay is one of the most profound lines I have read in all of American letters of the past century. He writes, "The world, once white, is white no more, and will never be white again."
For much of human history, religious communities lived largely apart from each other, or if they happened to share geographic space, many of their members still chose to live in secluded bubbles. The great religious scholar Huston Smith, writing in 1958, talks about how that all changed in the 20th century. He writes, "We live in a fantastic century. Lands across the planet have become our neighbors. China across the street, the Middle East at our back door. We hear that east and west are meeting, but it is an understatement. They are being flung at one another. When historians look back at our century, they may remember it most as the time when the peoples of the world finally came to take one another seriously."
I just want to point out that that book was written seven years before America opened its doors widely to immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and 40 years before the widespread use of the Internet. If Huston Smith thought that different people in the world were being flung at each other in 1958, how might he describe the high-velocity interaction we see today?
America is the most religiously devout nation in the west, and the most religiously diverse country in the world. There are 1 million Hindus in America, between 3 and 4 million Buddhists, and perhaps 6 to 8 million Muslims. That is about three times the number of Muslims as there are Episcopalians. To parallel Baldwin's experience, for many people, the world, once Christian, is exclusively Christian no more, and may never be exclusively Christian again. And while we are light-years away from solving the problem of the color line, we may well have inherited a new line at the dawn of the 21st century, the faith line. From Northern Ireland to South Asia, the Middle East to West Africa, people are fighting, killing, and dying in the name of God.
But the faith line does not separate Muslims and Christians or Jews and Hindus. It does not, in fact, separate religion communities or civilizations at all. The faith line separates totalitarians and pluralists. On one side of the faith line are the religious totalitarians. Their conviction is that only one interpretation of one religion is a legitimate way of being, believing, and belonging on earth. Every one else needs to be cowed or converted or condemned or killed.
On the other side of the faith line are the religious pluralists, who hold that people believing in different creeds and belonging to different communities need to learn to live together in some sort of mutual trust and loyalty. Religious pluralism is neither mere coexistence nor forced consensus. It is a form of proactive cooperation that affirms the identities of the constituent communities while emphasizing that the well-being of each and all depends on the health of the whole.
Religious pluralism is the belief that the common good is best served when each community has a chance to make its unique contribution. Religious totalitarians have the unique advantage of being able to oppose one another and work together at the same time. Osama Bin Laden says that Christians are out to destroy Muslims. Pat Robertson says that Muslims only want to dominate Christians. Bin Laden points to Pat Robertson as evidence of his case. Robertson points to Bin Laden as proof of his. Bin Laden says he is moving Muslims to his side of the faith line. Robertson claims he is moving Christians to his. But if you look from a certain angle, you see that they are not on opposite sides at all. They are right next to each other, standing shoulder to shoulder, a most unlikely pair, working collectively against the dream of a common life together.
I think the outcome of the faith line depends on which side young people choose. Young people have always played a key role in social movements, from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. We live in an era where the populations of the most religiously volatile parts of the world are young, and where this generation is networked and is talking and is interacting like no generation in human history. 75 percent of India's 1 billion plus are not yet 25. 85 percent of the Palestinian territories are under 33. Over two-thirds of Iran is under 30. The median age in Iraq is 19 and a half. These young people are standing on the faith line. Whose message are they hearing?
In the same way that independent schools took seriously the challenge of helping their students understand race and help build a truly multiracial society, it may now be the time to do the same, to show the same commitment around religion and religious diversity. I suggest this not only because it is one of the great issues of the 21st century, but because it is an issue in which I think educators make all the difference.
Consider two very different scenarios. Not too long ago, we all saw images of Eric Rudolph in court pleading guilty, but he was not sorry. Not for the radio-controlled mail bomb that he detonated at the New Woman All Women Health Care Center in Birmingham that killed an off-duty police officer and left a nurse hobbled and half-blind. Not for the bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta that killed one, injured dozens, and sent shockwaves of fear through the global community. Not for his hate-spitting letters stating, "We declare and will wage total war on the ungodly Communist regime in New York and your legislative bureaucratic lackeys in Washington. Signed, the Army of God." Not for defiling the Holy Bible by writing "bomb" in the margin of his copy. In fact, Eric Rudolph was proud and defiant. He lectured the judge on the righteousness of his actions. He gloated as he recalled federal agents passing within steps of his hiding place. He unabashedly stated that abortion, homosexuality, and all hints of global socialism still needed to be, quote, "ruthlessly opposed."
He did this in the name of Christianity, quoting from the New Testament. "I have fought the good fight. I have finished my course. I have kept the faith."
Of all the information published about Eric Rudolph, one sentence in particular stood out to me. Eric Rudolph wrote an essay denying the holocaust when he was in high school. How does a teenager come to hold such a view? The answer is simple. People taught him. Eric had always had trouble in school, fights, truancy. He never quite fit in. His father died when he was young. His mother met and married a series of dangerous iconoclasts who preached a theology of hate. Many of them were trained in education. One was a man in Schell City, Missouri, named Dan Gayman, a leading figure in the extremist Christian identity movement, a former high school principal who knew how to make his mark on young people. Dan assumed a fatherly relationship with Eric, enrolled him in Christian identity youth programs, made sure he read the literature of the movement. Eric learned from Gayman that the Bible was the history of Aryan whites and that Jews were the spawn of Satan and part of the tribe called the Mud People. The world was nearing a final struggle between God's people and Satan's servants, and it was up to the conscious white supremacists to ensure victory for the white race. Eric took to calling the television the electric Jew. He carved swastikas in his living room furniture. His library included virulently anti-Semitic publications such as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Anne Frank's Diary -- A Hoax, and The International Jew.
Under the tutelage of Dan Gayman and other radical preachers, Eric Rudolph's hate did what hate always does. It spread. I imagine Eric's teachers felt a surge of pride where Rudolph told the judge, asked whether he set off the bomb in Birmingham, responded with a smug, "I certainly did."
Now consider a very different scenario. Middle school students in Whitwell, Tennessee, are giving tours to visitors of one of the most profound holocaust memorials anywhere in the world, a German rail car that was used to transport Jews to Auschwitz. The teenagers asked guests to imagine how it might have felt to be one of the 70 or 80 Jews packed into that tight space, hearing the wheels cranking as the train took you to torture and death. They explained that the rail car is filled with millions of paper clips, each one a symbol of a Jew murdered by a Nazi. One student says that now to look at a paper clip is to think of a soul. The sign at the entrance of the memorial reads, "We ask you to pause and reflect on the evil of intolerance and hatred." The sign on the way out reads, "What can I do to spread the message of love and tolerance these children have demonstrated with this memorial?"
One Whitwell tour guide, about to graduate from eighth grade and leave for high school, reflects, "In the future, when I come back and see it, knowing that I was here to do this, it will be not just a memory, but kind of like in your heart, that you changed the way that people think about other people."
Whitwell, Tennessee, is a town of less than 2,000, located outside of Chattanooga, in the coal mining region of southeastern Tennessee about 100 miles from where the Ku Klux Klan was born. It has two traffic lights and a whole lot of "God bless America" signs. The mines closed 30 years ago, leaving the region even poorer than it was before. You can count the number of black and Latino families in the town on your two hands, and you won't need any of those fingers to count the number of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims because there aren't any in Whitwell.
Why would Protestant kids in a poor region with a history of prejudice care so much about educating people about Judaism? The answer is simple. Somebody taught them. The principal of Whitwell Middle School, Linda Hooper, wanted the students in her school to learn about cultures and people different than themselves. She says, "Our children, they are respectful. They are thoughtful. They are caring. But they are pretty much homogeneous, and when we come up to someone who is not like us, we don't have a clue."
She sent a teacher to a diversity conference and he came back with the idea of a Holocaust education project. "This was our need," Linda Hooper said. Over the next several years, the students at Whitwell studied that horrible time, met with Holocaust survivors, learned about the rich tradition of Judaism, and taught all the people they touched about the powerful role that the most unlikely young people can play in building pluralism.
Eric Rudolph and the young people of Whitwell are two very different responses to one of the most important questions of our time. In a world of passionate religiosity and intense interaction, how will people from different faith communities engage one another? Eric Rudolph responded by building the bombs of destruction. The students of Whitwell responded to diversity by building bridges of understanding. Watching "Paper Clips," the documentary film made about the Whitwell students, I could not help but wonder, what if Linda Hooper had gotten to Eric Rudolph before Dan Gayman did? What if Rudolph attended the First United Methodist Church in Whitwell that hosted the events for the Holocaust project, instead of Christian identity compounds, helped collect paper clips with the other kids at Whitwell Middle School, instead of studying bigots, read The Diary of Anne Frank instead of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? Eric Rudolph, the religious terrorist, was not inevitable, just as the teenage bridge-builders of Whitwell were not. It was educators that made the difference.
Of course, it is easy to say that educators should teach about something. It is much more difficult to say how. I know a little bit about this challenge. I wrote my doctorate on the religion education programs of a Muslim community in Britain, a community that had for many, many centuries lived in isolation from pluralism, and because of their journey west to London, to Toronto, to Chicago, to Barcelona, they were finally coming into contact with people who were different, and their leaders were saying, "How is it that we can maintain our tradition but also be open to this world around us?"
And I have spent several years building an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core, whose purpose is to encourage better understanding of religion and religious diversity in educational settings. More than anything else, I have found one thing: That students love to learn about religion. They are in awe that some of the greatest social justice heroes in our history were inspired by faith. Take the student that I opened this speech with, Kristin. She was in a class that I taught on social justice. We spent a lot of time in that class studying King, and I opened the unit by asking the students what they knew of this great leader. Kristin answered first, rattling off the typical list -- King was a civil rights leader, a man who understood the true message of the Declaration of Independence, an African-American hero, a brilliant orator with a Ph.D. She paused. I stared at her expectantly. She shook her head. She had nothing else to say, no other way to describe King.
I quoted to her from King's famous speech of Riverside Church where he came out against the Vietnam War. "As I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to here, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men, the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. And because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them."
And then I quoted one of King's reflections on himself, that many people have for many years tried to make him out to be many things, but he sees himself as first and finally a Christian pastor like his daddy and like his daddy's daddy, trying to live out the calling of God.
Kristin couldn't believe that she hadn't realized this, that King was a faith hero, that he was embodying a way of being Christian in the world, a way that Kristin deeply resonated with, that she did not have to have her Christian paradigm dominated only by what that man from Colorado Springs came and said; that there was liberation, justice, hope, beauty, love, openness, written into the DNA of her religious tradition.
What happened next provides a window into the possibility of this methodology. Kristin started wondering about the passages that inspired King, what they might mean to her, causing her to return to the scripture and re-reading parts of Amos, Exodus, and Matthew. She began wondering if her other heroes were inspired by faith, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Jane Addams. She discovered that most of them were, and started to study the way that faith worked in their lives. In this way, she realized that faith has inspired social justice for millennia, and not just one type of faith. She was struck by Gandhi's Hinduism, Thich Nhat Hanh's Buddhism. She was struck that King, her Christian hero, had learned profoundly from Gandhi, had walked in Selma with a Jewish rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, had had his opinion on the Vietnam War changed by a Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh.
A little further study revealed that many of the movements that had defined the 20th century, the movements that had inspired Kristin, the civil rights movement, the struggle in South Africa, had a profoundly interfaith character. She read Mandela's speech at Oxford on the role of religion in the struggle in South Africa. She read everything she could get her hands on that King wrote on other religions. She started to ask herself, "What could an interfaith movement accomplish today around the issue of the environment or poverty or AIDS alleviation?" And most importantly, "How can I get involved?"
Watching Kristin's experience, I thought to myself, if this is the way that students naturally learn about religion and religious diversity, if this is how students best understand what Huston Smith called religion alive, then we should teach about it this way. We should teach religion through the lens of how it has inspired people to do social justice, because there are the historical movements that we want our students to know about. There is so much of the great literature that we want our students to read, the letter from Birmingham jail, Mandela's and Gandhi's autobiographies, Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, Abraham Joshua Heschel's sermons. There is the notion that diversity does not mean division, but can sometimes mean cooperation.
And that's why over the past several years, the organization I lead has developed its curriculum and its teacher training programs around the question of: How have different religions inspired people to work for social justice? What are the scriptures in those religions? What are the heroes in those religions? What are the aspects of those traditions that have embodied that impulse, and who is out there who is living it out on earth?
Watching Kristin's excitement around this reminded me of my own journey. I deliberately pushed religion away for many of my high school years in an attempt to fit in with the kids around me. In college, I got politically radicalized in a potentially dangerous way, but somehow found Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement and marveled at the effectiveness of love-based approaches to social justice. "Where do you get this love from?" I would ask Catholic workers in New York, in D.C., and Atlanta. And they would answer with a simple three-letter word: God. That was my first conscious encounter of how a religious tradition inspires social justice.
As a Muslim, in many ways my first conscious faith hero was a Catholic, Dorothy Day. From there, I went on to read Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ram Dass, Thich Nhat Hanh. I followed Brother Wayne Teasdale, a great Catholic monk, around Chicago as he gave talks exhorting people of different faiths to work together for the environment. I decided I wanted to start an interfaith youth organization. I went to India to have a short audience with the Dalai Lama, to ask his advice on how to do it. I learned to admire the social justice teachings in so many religions, but realized at one point that I knew little about my own until I met someone who taught me.
It happened to be my grandmother. I was staying with her in Bombay. This is the woman who, when I was a child, would come and stay with my family in the western suburbs of Chicago, and I would try to sneak out of the house before she woke up, because I knew that she would ask me if I had said my prayers that morning, or if I was going to marry a Muslim girl, and I'm like, "Mama, I'm nine years old, and can I just ride my skateboard?"
And I always had this narrow image, narrow view of my grandmother. But on this trip to Bombay, I realized something different about her. I woke up one morning, and I found a new woman living in the house. She didn't look like she was part of the family, and she didn't look like she was part of the household help. And I asked my grandmother, "Who is this woman?"
My grandmother said, "Well, her uncle and her father are abusing her. And so we will take care of her. We'll take her in. Now, don't answer the door for the next few days, because these crazy men might be looking for her."
I said to my grandmother, "Don't you think you're the one who's being a little bit crazy? You can't just house people who are being abused by dangerous people who might be looking for her."
My grandmother looked at me and said, "How old are you?"
I said, "Twenty-two."
She said, "I have been housing people like this for more than twice as long as you have been alive."
And she went to this cupboard and she took out this box and opened the box, and there were all these Polaroid pictures of all the women that my grandmother has helped over the past half-century. She told me their stories. "This one came from Gujrat. She used to work in the fields. Her husband died and left her without a solid caregiver and breadwinner, and she couldn't take care of her five children, so she came to me, dripping wet, in the pouring monsoon, showed up on my door.
"And this one. She was so beautiful when she came, but so quiet, she would barely talk. I sent her to beautician school, and now she has a trade. She lives in Calcutta. She's doing well.
"And this one, her teeth were bad, but I got them fixed, and she ended up marrying a really good man, and they own a business together in Hyderabad."
And on and on and on, and story after story after story. Finally, I asked my grandmother, "Why do you do this?"
And she kind of shrugged and said, "Because I'm a Muslim. This is what Muslims do."
And I thought about a line from the great South African writer J.M. Coetzee. He says, "All creatures come into the world carrying the memory of justice."
And the reason I thought about that is because when my grandmother said that, "This is what Muslims do," there was something unique that stirred in me. It was the prayers that my mother had taught me when I was a child, the Shi'a Muslim prayers: Ya Ali, Ya Mohammed. They kind of re-emerged in my consciousness. I hadn't prayed those prayers for over a decade, but there was something in there that wanted to come out, and what I needed was another teacher to help that thing inside me. That memory of justice that my grandmother had kind of kicked open emerged, which is one of the reasons that at Oxford I decided to do my doctorate in the sociology of religion.
I happened to meet another great teacher who kind of pulled that tradition out of me. His name was Azim Nanji. He was an American professor of Islam in London at the time, and I would go see him about once a month and I'd ask him this whole set of questions on Islam.
What he taught me was that Islam, just like most religions, is not primarily about rules and rituals. Those things are important, but Islam, like religion in general, is primarily about stories. And I'd ask him these questions and he wouldn't respond with yes-or-no answers. He would respond with stories.
I asked him, "How did Islam, a faith with such a highly focused monotheism, find a place in Hindu India with its millions of gods?"
And Professor Nanji responded with a story. Once there was a sufi sheikh who led his followers to the state of Gujarat in India. He sent word to the local Hindu prince that he had arrived and wanted to stay. The Hindu prince sent a servant with a full glass of milk to the sheikh, as if to say, "We are already complete here." The sheikh took the glass of milk, mixed in a spoonful of sugar, and sent it back, as if to say, "I will only sweeten your profits."
And on and on and on, Azim would tell me these stories. Finally I wanted to tell him a story. I shared the story of my grandmother in India. And he looked at me and said, "You think I don't know about her? You think that her story hasn't traveled?"
I said, "Where does it come from? What is it in Islam that inspires this?"
And he told me the creation story of Islam, the founding Sura of the holy Koran, that God created Adam through a lump of clay and with his breath, and made Adam his abd and khalifa on earth, his servant and representative. He told Adam, "I give you stewardship over my creation, all the beauty of this creation." And then God called the angels forth and said to the angels, "I want you to honor humankind in the representative form of Adam, whom I have made my servant on creation." And the angels said no. They refused to do it. They said, "Why would we honor a creature who will only fiddle and destroy?" And God turned to the angels and said, "I know what you do not know."
That's when Azim turned to me and said, "The question for humankind and from a Muslim scholar to a Muslim student, for you especially as a young Muslim on this path, is to find that great goodness that God put into each of us, that the angels could not see, that we so often cannot see in ourselves. What is that great goodness and what does it mean for you to live it out?"
From Azim, I learned about the awesome power of these stories, stories that guide our lives. As the social philosopher Alastair MacIntyre writes, "I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'"
Stories are the very makeup of our religious traditions, and stories are the shortest distance between two people. Which stories about religion are our young people hearing? It is the story of how a religious tradition plays out in someone's life that people relate to. When you hear someone talk of how a text or a sermon or a stained glass window impacted them, you wonder how it might have impacted you. When somebody tells their story well, that helps us frame and tell our own. I wrote my recent book, Acts of Faith, as a story of my journey to re-engage in Islam and how it helped me start the Interfaith Youth Core. My highest hope for the book is that it helps shed light on a dimension of religion, its inspiration to social justice, that might move people to tell their own story, understand the best in someone else's faith, perhaps even return with new eyes to their own. And most of all, I hope that the telling of the story creates new opportunities for people from different backgrounds to relate in new and powerful ways with one another. As the Holy Koran says, "God created us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another."
I want to close with a couple of stanzas from a great poem by the poet William Stafford, a poem called A Ritual to Read to Each Other. He says, "If you don't take the time to get to know me, and I don't take the time to get to know you, then a pattern that others made may prevail in this world, and following the wrong God home, we may miss our star. It is important that those who are awake be awake, or else a falling line may lull us back to sleep. The signals we give, yes or no or maybe, must be clear now, because the darkness around us is deep."
May God give you goodness. Thank you.
MR. LYMAN: We'll do questions and answers, please.
MR. GALBRAITH: We'll have some questions from our participants. Please state your name and your school.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Good morning. I think I speak for everyone saying that was so inspiring and helpful to all of us. I do have a very big question. Putting myself right in there with your student Kristin, I felt very excluded from my religion because of my gender. And it's still very true in many religions today, and as I have discussions with young girls, they feel that if they really want to be leaders and work for social justice, they're going to have to do that outside of their religion, or take a subservient role, and therefore not utilize all their leadership abilities. Can you give us any hope on that front or any advice?
MR. PATEL: Thank you for that. Well, I'll tell you where I derive hope for that from. First of all, it's my wife, who is not subservient to anyone or anything, a living, everyday example of an inspired religious leader for me.
But I feel like one of the things about a social justice or a service lens into religion is that it doesn't privilege only the areas in which men have been allowed in religion. It's impossible to tell the history of the 20th century in America without telling the story of Dorothy Day and Jane Addams, for example. And it's impossible to tell those stories without their religions. And so I think that a straightforward answer to your question is: You present your female students with examples of female faith heroes and you encourage them to engage how those women have engaged the challenges of their religion traditions, and you say, "Is it okay that Dorothy Day did start this unbelievable movement called the Catholic Worker, but was still fine with only men being allowed into the Catholic priesthood?"
And that's a fantastic conversation across the generations for women, and you might find some 90 percent of the girls in your class saying, "I totally disagree with Dorothy Day on this point."
I have to tell you she did a whole lot more than most religious men I can ever think of, and that's a striking thing. So many of my faith heroes are women, and one of the things that I look to so much is how have they engaged religion in their lives? Let me give you an example from Islam because there's this image of all the women walking ten feet behind their men, fully covered, illiterate, following, effectively. Well, in Islam, what we believe is that God has sent a range of prophets to earth with effectively the same message, and that message is monotheism and mercy. There are two key parts to the Muslim message, that there is one God and that human beings are required to be merciful to each other. Okay? And the first prophet was Adam, and then there were, in some readings of Islam, six major prophets, ending with Muhammad, and some parts of the Koran says there are thousands of prophets. And it says that God has left no people without a teacher.
In any case, in the Muslim tradition, God's final prophet, Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him, was chosen to be God's prophet in the year 610 in the cave of Mount Hira. What happened is the Angel Gabriel, the same angel that came to Mary, descended from heaven as Mohammed was praying and fasting in that cave, and he gripped Mohammed and he said, "Iqra," which is, "Recite."
And Mohammed said, "I am not a reciter. I'm illiterate."
And the angel gripped him tighter and said "Iqra" again, and Mohammed said, "I'm illiterate."
And the third time the angel gripped him again, and Mohammed found the piece of the Koran coming from his mouth. And Mohammed thought that he had been possessed by a demon, and there are some stories that say Mohammed was getting ready to throw himself off of that cliff, but his wife found him, and his wife looked into his eyes and said, "God has not forsaken you. Something very special has happened to you." And Khadija, his wife, took Mohammed to her cousin Waraqa. Her cousin was a Christian. Her cousin looked into Mohammed's forehead and said, "Verily the prophet of your people has arrived."
I tell this story as many places as I can. Had it not been for Mohammed's wife, who recognized something that had happened, had it not been for that Christian who recognized something had happened, we might not have the holy Koran for Muslims. And so for Muslims who believe that women should play a subservient role, I ask them, "You tell me about Khadija. Tell me where you would put her in Muslim history. Tell me why you would suggest that her perceptiveness that night, her wisdom, her courage, does not deserve a central place."
These are the kinds of conversations that I have with students in class, and the wonderful thing is, students come back to you. You kind of have this back-and-forth. But to have that collection of stories of women faith heroes I found very important in working with both men and women. Thanks for your question.
MR. HARVEY: Good morning, Doctor. My name is Tom Harvey. I'm headmaster of Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Virginia. I appreciate your words and I admire your work. My question is, is there a healthy ideology, one that you might even call a theology, in lower case, outside of religion? And I wouldn't mind hearing from Peter Cobb on this, as well.
MR. PATEL: Let's let Peter answer that question first. Just like the old days; right, Peter?
MR. COBB: Absolutely.
MR. PATEL: I think the easy answer to that is absolutely. And it's secular humanism. So there's kind of almost a codified or well-articulated body of work that could broadly be called secular humanism. I would put Walt Whitman in there. Some people would put Jefferson in there. Some people who don't want to claim Jefferson as a Christian will put Jefferson in there. Nehru would a secular humanist. There are many, many fantastic people who would connect with that. I focus particularly on religion and religious pluralism, first of all, because that's what I was asked here to do; and secondly, simply because I'm a person of faith; and thirdly, maybe because I think that is an acute problem of the world that needs to be engaged deliberately. I don't think we're going to do it by separating religious people from nonreligious people.
I think there has to be, as the poet Edward Markham says, a circle that draws everybody in. And that circle I think is a respect for life and the beauty of life. I think that secular humanists can speak of that in ways as profound as religious people.
The term "theology" is an interesting term. You know, the easy answer to that is, I don't know. I mean, I don't argue with my secular humanist friends what they talk about transcendence outside of the divine, and I probably wouldn't argue with them if they said that they were articulating a theology of that, but I don't think that I can articulate it for them. And once I heard it, I think that I might have to say there might be dimensions of theology that emerge from what is known as traditional world religions, which is to say, has some connection with the divine, and in that case, I am using Clifford Geertz' observations on what he thinks religion is, and a piece of that is that it has some connection with the divine. So he says it can be said that a man might be ritualistic about golf, but not that he is religious about golf, unless he somehow thinks there's a golf God who is guiding his swing.
So I'd have to punt on the question of theology. But you know what? I'm actually going to punt to Peter, and see where he takes that.
MR. COBB: Well, first of all, thank you, my friend, eloquent and gracious in spirit, and I thank you. In regard to Tom's question, I go back to my days at seminary when a professor of mine said the most religious thing we can ever do is tell our story, and if we get hung up on theology or ideology, we miss the opportunity to tell our story. That seems to me invitational and transcendent in some ways.
My question is this, Eboo. Someone said earlier, how do we engage religious difference -- how do we even talk about religion in secular schools? And what I find is, there's no reservation about the need for religious literacy, but it's rather the devotional one. And how, in particular, the skittishness is around agenda. It's around the fundamentals. Have you found forums in which we don't marginalize or demonize the fundamentalists? Because thereby we are excluding. And a mutual friend of ours, Charles Haynes, once said to me, "Peter, God may be a liberal Protestant, but if I were you, I wouldn't count on it." We have to invite everyone to the table, even those whose points of view are most difficult, if we are truly to engage in liberal education, and I would welcome any thoughts you have about that.
MR. PATEL: Thank you for that, Peter. I want to just go back for a moment and restate kind of what I call the faith line, and it's divided between totalitarians and pluralists. Okay? I use the word "totalitarian" advisedly and I define it specifically. A totalitarian is somebody who believes that only their interpretation of their religion is a legitimate way of being, believing, and belonging on earth, and everyone else can only be cowed or converted or condemned or killed. Okay? That's a totalitarian. Evangelicals are not totalitarians. Traditionalists are not totalitarians. Conservatives are not totalitarians. If the person on the other side does not want to cow you into submitting to their interpretation and their way of being, believing, and belonging, they're not a totalitarian. And I think that religious liberals, of which I am one, do a dramatic disservice to pluralism when they draw the circle of the enemy so large that it includes all believers with an exclusive set of beliefs.
In fact, in my organization -- and I'm not kidding about this -- I am proactive about hiring people who believe exclusively, who have a strong exclusivist belief in their religion and still a commitment to working together on earth, because I think that's where the big challenge is. The big challenge isn't: How do people with liberal and open interpretations of their religion traditions -- God bless them; I'm one of them -- get along? That's not a problem. You know? That's a self-applause session. Right? The challenge is: How are people with very different ideas of heaven going to get along on earth? And my answer to that is that you agree to have certain kinds of conversations in some spaces, and then understand that your differences are, in fact, actually very different.
It's that simple. And the truth is, we do this in America all the time. I walk into rooms where there are people who think I'm going to hell all the time. In fact, I walk into an office every day where people might think I'm going to hell, but that is not the primary focus of our conversation. The primary focus of our conversation is: How do we build religious cooperation on earth? And some people say, "Well, how can you do that if the person on the other side thinks you're going to hell?"
And you know what? The truth is, I don't have a good answer to that question. I only say, "We do it." And the fact is, you do it all the time, too. There's no doubt that there are people on your faculty, some people in this room, who have a set of exclusivist beliefs that exclude other people. I don't see swords and spears and arrows out yet. Okay? We do what human beings do. We agree we're going to work together on some things and we're going to disagree on other things. All right? And one of the reasons that we have built the Interfaith Youth Core in the way we have with the guidance of people like Peter Cobb, Diana Eck, Brad Lyman, and many others is that it focuses on what people can do together without having them check what they think are their most precious beliefs at the door.
So this isn't a sense of the only way you get into the room of building religion pluralism is if you effectively believe the same thing that I do. Okay? The truth is, if you feel the need to pray for my soul in church, by all means go ahead. Please pray for my soul. But we have to agree on a set of ground rules for the public square and in this space, here is how we have to interact, because it's a question of respect for all. I am not denying your belief. I am not even curtailing your free speech in the broader swath of society. I am articulating that for this unique space we should interact in this way and, in fact, that interaction can perhaps prove enriching, that there are ways for you to be enriched by my story and not feel like you're violating your own tradition, which is, by the way, another reason that the Interfaith Youth Core, in our work with young people and our teacher training programs, focuses on social justice and shared values and not theology.
I'll tell you why. Because there's this kind of new movement that we should call America not a Christian country or a Judeo-Christian country, but an Abrahamic country. There's a sense of like, okay, now let's broaden the theological canopy. I just think that's entirely wrong-headed for a couple of reasons. I mean, number one, there are a lot of nonreligious people in this country. Number two, there are a lot of Hindus and Buddhists in this country who don't trace themselves back Abrahamicly. Number three, it doesn't take that many steps down the road of the Abrahamic theologic conversation for you to hit the wall called Hagar or called Ishmael and Isaac.
So why would you encourage a conversation in which, at step two, you're going to have mutual exclusivity, instead of encouraging a conversation that is continually mutually enriching? When I tell you stories about how my grandmother inspired me to be a better Muslim, what does that take away from your Jewishness or your Christianness or your Buddhistness? When I tell you stories about the tradition of social justice in Islam, how does that deny your deepest beliefs? It doesn't. You can say that my stories didn't happen, but you can't say they're not important to me. And, in fact, what you might find, as Peter suggested, is that the stories are invitational, that you learn, by what stories I tell that are important to me, who I am and you are invited to tell stories that are important to you.
So that's a circuitous way of getting back to the importance of story-telling and the importance of -- I'll unpack the entire Edward Markham poem that I just referenced a little bit earlier, which is a beautiful four-liner.
MR. PACKARD: Doctor, my name is Jeremy Packard. I'm from Wyoming Seminary, which is neither in Wyoming nor a seminary. We were exposed earlier in this conversation to a brief talk about how members of the American government in very important positions could not possibly make any distinctions between what is a Shi'a and what is a Sunni Muslim, and I wonder if you, as a liberal Shi'a, have anything other than a four-and-a-half-hour answer to what you see happening in the world today in terms of the divisions in Islam itself, and does our media exaggerate those? Does the current situation in the Middle East totally distort those? What do you as a liberal Shi'a see about divisions in Islam today as reflecting on this whole business of tolerance among religions?
MR. PATEL: Thank you for that. I'm going to actually answer that in multiple dimensions. It's an issue that I take extremely personally, and I'm very glad you asked that question. First of all, I am married to a Sunni Muslim, and I'm still a deeply believing Shi'a, and this is part and parcel of a more liberal theology, ideology, that I come primarily from the Muslim tradition, and that that tradition is multiple legitimate interpretations, of which mine is one, but there are others. And because the touchstone is Islam, is the Holy Koran is the hadith of the prophet, is the story of creation of Adam, is the message of mercy and monotheism over the course of the century, is the tradition of primacy as taught by the classical scholars, so on and so forth, I find enormous amounts of common ground with Sunnis, as I do with Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists and so on and so forth, although it was very important to me to marry another Muslim. So let me, first of all, say that.
Secondly, I want to point out a number of things that are going to be more or less coherent. One thing I want to point out is, I think that undoubtedly, in my mind, the central challenge of the 21st century is: How do you build peaceful, participatory, pluralist societies? And in America, we do this reasonably well. Now, we have racism. We have profound racism. We have profound religious bigotry. We have all those things. But I'm from a country where people from different religious backgrounds kill each other on the streets. We don't have that in America. And I think what we have to do is understand this as a unique and blessed case that we can, in fact, build on, that America, the idea of America, is as a grand gathering of souls, the vast majority from elsewhere.
There is a broad understanding that America is enriched when different souls add their notes to the American song, so to speak. I think we have traditions in America going back to Jefferson and Franklin, traditions that I think were most profoundly contributed to by African-Americans, who decided that even though they were brought to this country in chains, that they were going to participate in this society. So James Baldwin famously says, "I am not a ward of America. I am one of the first Americans to arrive on these shores."
Langston Hughes says, "America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath: America must speak."
So we have in America our own model of pluralism. The question is: How do we strengthen this model of pluralism and how are we honest about the fissures of pluralism? Did anybody here see Gangs of New York? Do you remember the first scene of that film? What was it? This is 1860s New York. This happened. Protestants -- except not with Daniel Day Lewis, by the way -- praying over their cross, Catholics praying over their cross, walking into the street and murdering each other. And it happened here. Right?
A few decades later there was a huge hue and cry over which Bible was going to be taught in schools. Again, death on the street between Protestants and Catholics, largely in Philadelphia. So Christianity has experienced its own tribal bloodletting, a tribal bloodletting which, by the way, is only barely over in northern Ireland. What's interesting is that that Catholic Protestant tension, which is still very much alive there, although it doesn't emerge into bloodshed the way it did over much of the past 20, 25 years, didn't spread and infect people in America over the past 25 or so years. In other words, Protestants didn't view Catholics through the prism of Belfast. Catholics didn't view Protestants through the prism of Belfast.
And here is what makes me most frustrated about America's adventure in Iraq. That there was, I think, little or no idea about the fragile situation between Sunni and Shi'as in that country. And I have to tell you, I consult with the State Department. I'm there every month. One of the things I believe in, in what America can do in the work -- I have a great deal of love and admiration for this country, and the one big, flat-out criticism that I said to a 16-year person there, is: "Why didn't any of you have any idea that once you toppled this man, that you were going to unleash the ghosts of the past in this country? I mean, didn't you see this in Bosnia? Isn't that what happened in Bosnia? Tito goes, and ethnoreligious nationalisms go berserk and you have 200,000 people dead -- by the way, most of them Muslim. You have hundreds, thousands of mosques smashed. You have the horror of Srebrenica. Did you not see that possibility in Iraq? And is it because Sunnis and Shi'as naturally hate each other? Of course not. Just like Protestants and Catholics, there are situations in which tensions flare up when there are resources and power at stake."
But the problem, the challenge, the beauty of a religious tradition also is that tensions travel through religious traditions. So here's the big challenge that I am going to face for the next half-century. Is my religion going to have a civil war for the next 50 years because of the ripple effects of Iraq? That's what I'm going to deal with. That's what Muslims are going to deal with. And who paid any attention to this in the toppling of Saddam Hussein, who was an absolute monster, and not just because of what he did to Shiites.
You know, do we not have these tensions in America? I have to tell you, there was a high school that closed in Chicago, and kids from that school were shipped to a high school a mile and a half away, and fights broke out every day. A kid was killed. Front page of the Chicago Tribune, Latino/African-American tension in the city. Front page of the New York Times two months ago. The same kind of tension in Los Angeles.
Do we not have racial tension in America? Do we not have religious tension in America? What if some other country came in, pulled the lid on that tension, mixed people up in ways that they weren't used to being mixed up, changed the power scenario a little bit? What might America look like?
What did we look like after the O.J. Simpson verdict or the Rodney King verdict? I guess what I'm saying is that to try to bring some coherence to this litany, it's back to the original point: What does it mean to build peaceful, participatory, pluralist societies in the 21st century, a century in which religious intensity is high and interaction between people is frequent and intense? There's a tradition of pluralism in America, there's a tradition of division in America. There's a tradition of pluralism in Islam, there's a tradition of extremism in Islam.
One of the things that I am most interested in doing in the Interfaith Youth Core is what I call connecting different ideas of pluralism. In fact, tomorrow I'm leaving for Australia, because I'm interested in Australia's model of pluralism. I'm interested to learn if there is a way to resonate between American pluralism and Australian pluralism.
My organization has a group of 15 young people, high school and college students, who went to Jordan for ten days to meet with young people in Jordan, building religious pluralism between Christians and Muslims there. Why? Because Jordan has a model of pluralism and a model of extremism. And I want pluralists in America and pluralists in Jordan, young people, to be able to meet and connect each other.
So that's one of the projects of the 21st century that I hope that my organization can play a small role in, and I think that I threw out a bunch of shards out there, and there are a bunch of smart people in this room who on golf outings and pool time can perhaps put those shards together in some sort of collage which is beautiful and coherent.
Thank you, again. I'd love to hang out for a few minutes. There are postcards and flyers in the back. Thank you.
MR. LYMAN: Thank you, Dr. Patel, for reminding us that there are many paths to God, and that we share a common humanity, and that this is on the minds of our students in this day and age. It's not an accident that you see more books being written about atheism, children talking to us about atheism, because in their minds, I think in many kids, they are torn. Their religion leads to war and division, when in reality, it should be a force of bringing us together. Thank you for reminding us of that, Dr. Patel. I hope you have a wonderful trip to Australia.
A little bit of news. Dr. Patel and his wife are expecting their first child.
MR. GALBRAITH: We have a break in the same manner as yesterday. The next session is in here, a panel, and that will be the last meeting in this room. From now on our meetings will be at the ballroom, which is in the area past the shops, which is where, at 1:00, the Jeeps depart, and at 1:30 the Sonora Desert Museum trip departs.
Tonight we leave from there for dining out at Hacienda del Sol. There are a couple of places open on each of those trips. If you're interested, please see me right after the meeting.
There's a yellow evaluation form, which is really important. Please leave them in the basket. The basket will be at every meeting from now on. If you're staying longer, please wait and evaluate more.
Thank you. Have a good break. We'll see you in about 30 minutes.