 Good afternoon Highline Community College. Hello. Good afternoon. Oh Yeah, that's how we do a Highline right Well, welcome. I'm so pleased for you all to be here for our kickoff event for unity through diversity week It's our 17th annual week And I'm really excited about the programs and activities that we have going on this week My name is Natasha Burroughs and I'm the director for Multicultural Affairs and I'm also the chair for unity week this year In unity week through diversity week is a time where we do this all year But this is a time where we bring in people from all over the world all over for the nation who are experts and activists and Community organizers change agents scholars to come here and be in dialogue with us about issues of Equity and social change and what that looks like and our theme this week is reimagining the imagination Creating action for social change. So we want to open our minds and just kind of Be able to dream something different and to bring something different into reality to think outside the box And that's what we're hoping the week will really be about so we have a whole schedule I hope you guys got one of these handy dandy hand bills That lays out some of the events that we have going on throughout the week You all are invited VIP because you're the first ones to come to unity week So please come join us. You are welcome and really this is all for you guys. So I hope you'll come I wanted to say a special thanks to our unity week planning committee first and foremost I wanted to give a special acknowledgement to miss Chayuta over bee who came here from Green River She was our first unity week chair She was actually the chair of unity week and she got a new opportunity to work over at Green River So I wanted to acknowledge her work for setting the foundation for this week So thank you very much. Chayuta for that your leadership around that Also want to give a special shout out to all of our planning committee members which Includes Daryl Bryce raise your hand Ha ha ha ha notorious Sharon if she's here Sam Patricia McDonald Amy Moon Jean Monroe Janita Aisha and Moy Lee That was like brilliant minds coming together for this week So I want to thank all the planning committee members for all your work on this. It does not happen alone So with that you guys aren't really here to hear me speak We have a really awesome opportunity to hear from an honored guest today, and so we're gonna get about that business So with that the person that's gonna be introducing our speaker today is Lisa Scari our vice president for institutional advancement Can you guys give her a welcome? So Natasha took all my words. I was gonna say about unity week and promoting it But I also do want to say that the committee has put together a great program this week of not only presentations and speakers and I think and events I should say So so please participate and enjoy in their good work And I actually have the honor today of introducing our first distinguished speaker named by US News and Robre Port as one of America's best leaders of 2009 Ibu Patel is the founder and president of the Interfaith Youth Corps an Organization that builds the interfaith movement on college campuses He served on President Obama's inaugural advisory council of the White House office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships And holds a doctorate in sociology of religion from Oxford University Ibu was named by Islamic a magazine as one of ten young Muslim visionaries Shaping Islam in America, and he was also chosen by Harvard Kennedy School Review as one of five future policy leaders to watch Both Ibu and the Interfaith Youth Corps were honored with the Roosevelt Institute's freedom of worship medal in 2009 And he was recently awarded the Guru Nanak Interfaith Prize An award given to an individual to enhance awareness of the crucial role of religious dialogue in pursuit of peace Now I had the pleasure of hearing Ibu speak last fall and Found his words inspiring, but the same time they challenged my thoughts about the intersect of faith in higher education In essence, he left me reimagining my thinking about the faith conversation on our campus and its relationship to social change So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Ibu Patel Thank you So, you know what gets left off that bio is I grew up in and around community colleges and I got I remember when I was like eight or nine years old My mom who up until that time was a full-time homemaker Decided to go back to get her CPA and she had a BA from India But obviously you have to take a whole set of other classes to go ahead and be a certified public accountant Not all of her classes transferred. So what she would do with me who is you know in fourth grade She would drive me all Across the western suburbs of Chicago from community college to community college where she was taking these different classes And stick me in the snack room with like, you know, 50 math problems I was like the nine-year-old Indian kid eating Doritos doing multiplication in the snack room while she went to take classes and Wines up getting her CPA. So I watched my mom go through that process and you know it's a very like Indian thing but when she went when when the When her exam came in when the results came in I was at a friend's house like, you know Four blocks away, and I heard my mom on the stoop of our apartment calling across the neighborhood Eboo I passed my friend Scott was like what the heck is I'm like That's just the way we do in the Patel household, right? But that's you know, that's Community colleges, right? It's there is there is no place in a geographical area That is a better reflection of that places Aspirations than a community college Right if you want to know what a particular geography it's about go to that community college and take the pulse And that's where you'll find out and it wasn't just those few years My mom winds up getting a dream job, which is to be a full-time faculty member at a community college So she works for McDonald's in their accounting department and a bunch of other companies that are accounting departments besides She didn't want to do that. She wants to go back to where she found a springboard into America which was a community college and so for the last 25 years my mom has been a full-time professor of accounting at a community college And I took my first classes my first college classes there Probably started the summer of my of my freshman years where I first discovered that no matter how hard I tried I just was never gonna be an accountant So thank God to community colleges for closing off a certain set of paths That I knew I wasn't gonna take but you know for me High school felt like a race. It felt like a single race and and the only way to do it Well was to go faster, right, but that just that just wasn't me. I just Didn't want to run that race and it was in Carter Carroll's history class. It was in Werner Kregelstein's Philosophy class. It was an Alan Carter's fiction writing class. It was in the first sociology class that I took I was like 15 16 17 years old that this whole new world opened up to me, you know I first read Bernard Malamud at a community college. I first read Plato's allegory of the cave at a community college and it's just it's a joy to be back here in front of a group of students and faculty and staff and administrators who are a part of that process a part of the process of reimagining Your lives this community this country. I just think it's it's very very powerful and reminds me of Formative years in my life. So thank you so much for the opportunity to come back and and just be a part of This community's aspirations as it's reflected in this institutions and in this room right now That hand is for you all that hand is for you all So I want to you know like a lot of you I had the I had the opportunity to transfer from that community college to a four-year university and Really the first part of my story starts at that four-year university You know what this is a story over the arc of this talk what what I'm going to do is basically talk about how it is that I came to realize the significance of religious diversity issues and to believe that it was part of the the promise and responsibility of this country to engage those Issues positively and that the particular institution best situated to do that were college campuses And that the particular people who ought to be on the vanguard were young people And what I'm going to do over the course of the next half hour or so is is to basically trace the arc of that in three Parts one is I want to tell you how I came to Recognizing the significance of these issues my own story on this the second is I want to talk about The the complications and challenges and opportunities of Diversity for this community for America and for the world and and I see folks Wearing a button that I love celebrate diversity. You know, I'm actually going to complicate the idea of diversity a little bit I'm gonna I'm gonna say you know diversity doesn't always have to be a good thing It's all about how we engage it. So that's part two and then part three is I want to actually tell you the story of a woman from Seattle and how she Experienced religious diversity issues in college her name is Cassie Meyer She's a colleague of mine at interfaith youth core and I thought about her story because she's from these parts and you know Probably walk some of these streets as you all did I happen to know her well because we've worked together at IFYC for eight years I want to tell you a little bit about her journey and especially how college changed her life when it came to religious diversity issues So it's a story of understanding and engaging religious diversity in those three parts now begin from Time when I was 17 years old. I was at the University of Illinois It's when I had transferred there from taking classes at the College of DuPage over summers when I was in high school and the first the first memory I have of Being a freshman at the University of Illinois was walking on to the basketball court and there's three games going on there's a white game a black game and an Asian game and I started Instinctively walking over to the white game And then I stopped and I looked around and what I realized was Nobody else was walking to the white game Right that folks felt perfectly comfortable playing in the own kind of flow of their communities And what I realized at that moment, right? It's there's there's moments in your life when like your whole past kind of flashes before you Right It was my gosh, I'd spent a long time Trying to play in the white game and it was this kind of crazy Realization to look around and be like it's so interesting that there are robust and proud communities of different identities in this gym And there's a sense of comfort in their own identity and I had this sense like wow. I feel like I Maybe I haven't really been comfortable in my skin and that's not entirely a metaphor Now here's the crazy and wonderful thing about college is that I probably had that same or a similar kind of realization in Variety of times in high school you know when I was in high school the Rodney King stuff went down and I remember exactly one teacher making one comment about it Saying when the verdict happened acquitted, right? He just said the verdict was acquitted nobody asked any questions Nobody seemed to care. I thought to myself. Well, you know, there's there's something at play here And I feel like it implicates me in a distinct way, but because there was no processing of it There was no community that engaged it it just evaporated But the beautiful thing about college is that that's not how it was Right. There was a community of people Constantly engaged in asking diversity questions You couldn't walk 10 feet in any direction in 1993 and a college campus without running into some folks reading Cornel West or Bell Hooks or Audrey Lord the conversation around diversity, especially when it came to race and gender and ethnicity increasingly sexuality and class back then it was a live conversation and I Revealed in it because like I said for all of those years. I'd had this strange sense of like not fully Fitting in my skin. No, I was eight years old. I have this distinct recollection of trying to scratch brown skin white my brown skin white and Nobody ever talked about it, you know, I remember when my mom first put Samosas, you all know what samosas are. Okay, so back in like 1987 or my mom first put samosas in my lunch Nobody knew what samosas were at least nobody around where I grew up They just could smell them from 25 feet away, you know And and I like look at my mom like putting samosas in my lunch bag, and I'm like, you know first you name me You know and now I mean seriously, you know So it was it was powerful for me to be in sociology classes Where race was talked about directly, right to be in Freshman orientation sessions where you played crossing the line and and somebody asked, you know, who? Who felt embarrassed by the food that was cooked at home? And it was no longer my dirty personal little secret like half the room crossed the line Right. That was that was a powerful thing for me I think back to myself just how grateful I am for the live diversity Conversations in college when when I was 17, 18, 19 years old I think that that's a lot of what unity and diversity week is is meant to do here is to Create space and give voice to things that you know are Unbelievably important and very frequently challenging to talk about and I think American higher ed ought to take ought to take a bow honestly For the way it has courageously engaged race issues It's it is far from an easy thing to talk about and yet in academic program after an academic program on campus after campus You have things like the intercultural center. You have things like global studies, right? You have an institution a sector of American society that says we're gonna engage this now There's reasonable arguments to be made on multiple sides about about should it be engaged more or in different ways, etc But the fact is this institution hasn't ignored it and that's a big deal so Like you know any good student sent off to college and who takes what he's reading seriously I went back to my parents house with piles of dirty laundry my hand out looking for decent food this time at this point I was actually proud of my parents ethnic food by the time I was 18 19 years old and in large quantities of Lectures to give my dad with all the wisdom I had acquired by being at the University of Illinois for nine months I don't I don't know if you guys have tried this yet You know you read Edward Said or Karl Marx or who and you just you're like you know mom You got to hear this right because like we've been doing it wrong for the last 40 years, right? We got we got a chain. I'm like I remember the first time I was like mom workers of the world unite She was like what the heck can you talk like don't say that to anybody, okay? And I would It would have long and Valuable conversations monologues at least from my side towards my dad about race and diversity issues, right? this was like people of color unite type stuff and Super important stuff, you know I would and in my dad who is funny when I think about this, you know my dad was was one of like a handful of International students at Notre Dame University in the mid 1970s. He was one of the first non-white people in corporate advertising in the Midwest It's like it's not like my dad never experienced feeling marginalized But you know he mostly good-naturedly took the lectures I gave him about the importance of diversity issues, etc at one point I must confess when I use the word bourgeois I said if you ever use the word bourgeois in my house again, you can find some other bourgeois dad to help with your bourgeois college tuition so I hope that that's a word you're learning and and In dissecting in class, I would just caution you about where to use it My dad at one point says something else to me which changed the course of my life He he said you know ebu for all you talk about diversity issues You never talk about the diversity issue that's driving the world and that's religious diversity It's almost like you don't even know the New York Times exists or you don't know that you know the evening news exists All you do is pay attention to a segment of diversity stuff. It's not that that stuff's not important It's just that it's not the only thing that's important So so open your eyes kid and the next time you want to come here and lecture me in diversity issues I want you to first tell me how you're gonna solve religious conflict and I like literally remember you know taking the clean clothes that my parents had laundered for me and and Folded and you know the food that my mom and made for me and putting it in the back of the Oldsmobile that my dad had let Me borrow and driving back south on I-57 to the University of Illinois thinking to myself boy My dad is a 19th century creature, you know, he's so he's 200 years behind the times In the next week, I got a call from my best friend at the University of Illinois Jewish and she says and I hear the tears in her throat. She says it's awkward been has just been assassinated and And that's when my eyes flew wide open right and I started paying attention to the New York Times And I started paying attention to the evening news and I started to realize that that outside of these diversity Conversations we were having on campus, which again were supremely important. They just weren't the world of diversity Conversations there was another world of diversity happening out there and it was happening along the fault lines of religious identity and Mostly what those fault lines were doing were bleeding Northern Ireland and just experienced the omag bombing which set the peace process back there several years Middle the Middle East was in the throes of the Oslo peace accords the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin Basically scuttled it. It seems like forever 20 years later. We're still in a scuttled period when the person who Committed that murder was asked in court why he did it And if he had an accomplice, he said he did have an accomplice and the accomplice was God When I look back at the 1990s It looks very much like a decade of religious violence 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center basically the announcement of the global ambitions of Muslim extremism 1995 that assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extremist Jewish figure somebody from his own tradition 1996 The bombing of the Atlanta Olympics by a man named Eric Rudolph when he gets arraigned in court You know how he defends himself. He reads from the New Testament Couple of years earlier the absolute shredding of the Balkans yet Slobodan Milosevic's soldiers riding into Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia and tanks standing up in those tanks and holding up the number three What did that three stand for the Trinity as in we Christians are going to roll over you Muslims 1998 the election of a Hindu nationalist party in India called the BJP about to come back to power Incidentally, we will know in mid-May for sure. What's one of their first moves to test the nuclear device? What do they call it the Hindu bomb? What does Pakistan do weeks later test their own nuclear device? What do they call it the Muslim bomb? the 1990s is very much a decade all about religious violence issues and When I was in college, I probably remember the words religious diversity being mentioned together five times Somehow we had dramatically missed this huge issue even though it was not just Dominating the front pages of the newspaper. It was also dominating academic discourse in the early 1990s Samuel Huntington The Harvard political scientist writes what becomes People say the second most influential article in the history of the journal foreign affairs The article is called the clash of civilizations two years later. He turns it into a book What's the central thesis of the clash of civilizations with the end of the Cold War the demise of the Soviet Union the political and economic Polarization of the world between communists and capitalists is formally over and Huntington says that the next world order Will be defined by what he calls a more Promortial dimension of human identity not politics not economics, but Civilizational identity he names following the British scholar Arnold Toynbee seven or eight different civilizations and says what are civilizations based on? They are based on religion, which is precisely why They are fated to fight Fated to fight. What is Huntington see the preeminent political scientist of his time sees a world order in which people from different Religious communities are at each other's throats And I'm reading this and I'm thinking to myself 2021 years old coming of age at the dawn of a new century. I Want to be a part of the right side of history and somehow by providence. I'm a believer So I think God has something to do with this somehow I Also begin to get interested in a very different religious narrative I'm seeing in the in the newspapers this narrative of religious conflict, but somehow people are handing me almost randomly It seems Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. And Bacha Khan and mother Teresa All of these different faith heroes, and I'm starting to realize Yes Religion can play a very negative role in the world They can also play a beautiful and positive role in the world and so often the people that we come to admire Most as faith heroes or really just as heroes in general. They started their work young So the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin Was 26 years old and we all know that religious extremists tend to be young But the man who let the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 the recent grad from Boston University just minted with his PhD Martin Luther King, Jr. Was also 26 years old and The more I looked at these people that I admired so much Dorothy Day all these folks from different backgrounds Bacha Khan tic-not-han the Dalai Lama They had started when they were so young. I started to think to myself What if College campuses just as they are taking race and ethnicity and gender and sexuality issues seriously Engaging those in both co-curricular and curricular efforts What if they took religious diversity issues with equal seriousness? No, I was part of a group of student leaders that met for like 30 minutes with the president of of the University of Illinois system in the spring of 1996 and he had a line that sticks with me He said I want to be able to shake the hand of a graduating student from the University of Illinois And have a sense of confidence that that student has over the course of their undergraduate career acquired Multicultural literacy built multicultural relationships and had opportunities for multicultural leadership Started to shape up in my mind. What if College campuses from Highline Community College to Harvard When you all crossed the stage and shake hands with the president of your college He or she Has a sense of confidence that you have over the course of your one or two or three or four years here When he hands you your associates degree or whatever degree you're in here you have acquired interfaith literacy Interbuilt interfaith relationships had opportunities for interfaith leadership Why why does this matter part two of my story? it matters because the United States is Some sociologists say the most religiously diverse nation in human history and The most religiously devout nation in the West at a time of global religious conflict I have to tell you something. There are plenty of rooms that I am in that are a lot less interesting than this I might say in which I have to convince those folks that this is the most religiously diverse nation in human history I don't have to convince you all just look to your left and to your right That's a powerful thing that you are a microcosm of this country a Microcosm of the most religiously diverse nation in human history in a Western nation in which religion counts in ways that it Doesn't count in any other Western nation our rates of believing in God of going to church synagogue mosque temple Gurdwara of of saying grace before meals of having religion Involved in the discourse around politics are two three four five six times higher Than in other similar countries in Britain or in Germany or France remember actually I was Studying England in the late 1990s when Tony Blair got elected prime minister there And it was well known that Blair was a believing Christian and somebody asked Blair's Chief communications guy colloquially called the spin doctor You know was Blair going to talk about his Christian beliefs and the spin doctor put an end to that conversation by saying we don't do God And you know what the British press never asked about it again. The American press doesn't work that way Right and nor does the American public and I think that that is a very good thing Because religious identity is at the heart of who so many people in this country are faith and philosophical identity Whether you're a Christian or a secular humanist It's at the heart of who so many people are and why shouldn't there be a robust public conversation about that, but We can't expect that every dimension of that conversation is positive And this is where I want to get into complicating diversity, right? So Diana Ekka professor at Harvard that we spent a lot of time reading and studying at Interfaith Youth Corps Points out that diversity is actually just a fact It's not a value. It's not an achievement. It's just a fact Diversity is just the fact of people with different identities living in close quarters And it says nothing about what those people do with each other and unfortunately in a good many parts of the world People with different identities living in close quarters with each other equals a civil war The question is How do we take diversity the fact of people who are different living close to each other and Turn it into something positive turn it into an achievement Diana Ek calls that pluralism the achievement of Positive relationships between people who orient around a religion who people people who orient around religion differently I love to think of the great line by the political philosopher Michael Walzer on this He says that the challenge of the diverse democracy is to embrace its differences and maintain a common life The challenge of the diverse democracy is to embrace its differences and maintain a common life That's a fancy way of saying unity in diversity or at the very least commonality in diversity Dr. Birmingham, and I were having a few words before Before I came to the podium. He basically said to me, dude, you better be inspiring or we're kicking you out And he was talking about what what he sees as powerful in the model that we're creating at Interfaith Youth Corps is The centrality of service, right? I want to speak about that for a second because I think that the best way You build a diverse democracy That embraces its differences and maintains a common life is that you bring people from different backgrounds together in a common endeavor in a way in which they can voice their Particularity and I think that best common endeavor is service one of the powerful things about service is that every Religious and philosophical tradition Recognizes the importance of serving others What's the good Samaritan story about at the end of the day? It's about the holiness of the Samaritan picking up the person laying by the side of the road What does Rama in Islam mean? It means mercy Right? What is the golden rule across religious traditions about it's about doing unto others and the beautiful part of that is It's not just philosophy. It's not just abstraction. It's application It's the actual doing and the story that I want to tell you about this is the story of habitat for humanity How many of you all have heard of habitat for humanity in here? How many of you have participated? Okay, so I love habitat for humanity precisely because it's that hands-on service I spent many a weekend in my college years getting up at like 7 a.m. On a Saturday morning and going in and going in volunteering for habitat for humanity builds And one of the things that always struck me was that those builds brought together people from all kinds of different backgrounds And we had conversations about what it was from our various backgrounds that brought us there now That's how we built the initial model of the interfaith youth corps We actually ran a habitat for humanity build in Hyderabad, India because we thought to ourselves Well, what if we brought people together to actually do service and then ask the question? What is it about your faith or philosophical background your muslim this your hindu this your Jewishness your behindness? Your secular humanness that inspires you to do this work quote me some scripture Tell me a story lift up a hero from your tradition so that I can learn more about it, right? I'm not pretending that I'm like you I'm just appreciating the story that you're telling and in you telling your Buddhist story It opens up the opportunity for me to tell my muslim story or my hindu story So the beautiful thing about this is that when habitat for humanity the international Organization based in Georgia found out about our work bringing people from different religious communities together in habitat projects They reached out to us and one of the things that they said was We want you to know We started as an organization for this exact purpose They are not just an organization devoted to helping people build houses for those who can't afford them as Profound and important and inspiring as that is they're an organization that started with an ecumenical Mission as well the founder Millard Fuller Recognized that it was hard for people from different wings of Christianity for Pentecostals and Presbyterians to come together to talk about the nature of Jesus because they disagreed on the nature of Jesus But what they could do is act in accordance with the ethics of Jesus They could engage in what Millard Fuller called the theology of the hammer And that's where he gets the idea for habitat for humanity It's the engagement of the theology of the hammer and those are the kinds of programs I think that are most profound and effective when it comes to engaging especially religious diversity So how can? Highline community college. How can this community? Des Moines, Washington one of the most diverse communities in the country Somebody told me that the most diverse zip code in America is just a couple of miles over right in what ways? Can you conceive of using service as a vehicle to bring unity to diversity not? Uniformity not we are all the same But a common table around which we can sit in our chairs and share our stories of what inspires us to do Concrete service That's the second part of my story Here's the third part. I want to tell you the story of Of my friend Cassie Meyer, right and the reason I want to tell the story is because so much of interfaith leadership Is about personal transformation? It's about the encounters that individuals go through and the role of college campuses really in formation Right and helping people become who they want to be what they were meant to be So Cassie grow grew up not far from here in She would say it a pretty secular household right one with a lot of ethics and values in a moral core But not a particularly religious belief system when she was in high school She decides to become an evangelical Christian and she goes to an evangelical church for a few years in high school And when she goes to college in Wisconsin, it turns out that at this little college in Wisconsin Wisconsin Lawrence and Appleton of Wisconsin. There's only enough Christians Right from all different backgrounds the Presbyterians the Pentecostals the Charismatics the Catholics They can only form one Christian group and so Cassie's having a tough time with this because she came from a brand of Christianity that you know had a Different kind of view of other sorts of Christians, so she's struggling with this but man She had no idea what she was about to encounter because one day in the library Dude from Bangladesh approaches her with a sheet of paper from an anthropology 101 class and he sits down and he says my name is Mohammed I am an international student from Bangladesh, and I've got this assignment for anthropology 101 we have to do a study of a distinctive tribal group and I've been like observing your group like your Wednesday night song circle and you know the vans you guys take to church on Sunday and like the little bracelets you wear and like the shirts and like so Question one is there a name for your tribe? And Cassie's like I'm the white American Christian girl from Seattle, right? What do you mean tribe? but she goes through this set of questions and she finds out that a Muslim from Bangladesh Looks at her and her way of being as distinctive as something worthy of an anthropology 101 project And then Cassie's like give me give me that sheet of paper I'm gonna do this on you and so she's like you know question three What are your distinctive rituals and he's like well, you know, we Muslims when we're like Proper we pray five times a day and Cassie was like you do what she's like I can't get half the Christians on this campus up at 9 a.m. on a Sunday to go to church I mean you pray five times a day. He's like well, it's like I don't always make it for the early prayer The 5 a.m. Prayer that can get hard, but I'm supposed to I'm supposed to one day inshallah. I will he's like, you know She's like, what are some other distinctive traits of your group? He's like well, you know, we don't drink alcohol I she's like you're an upstate, Wisconsin at a college campus. You're not drinking alcohol right in the winter. Really, okay? And she's going through this and she's realized she's having this like Internal conflict because she's hearing the very real voice of her church community back here in Seattle saying When you encounter somebody from a different religion you share the truth of your faith with them That's a real voice And she's also learning over the course of this conversation that she admires Muhammad and that yes, she feels like she has a deep truth that she wants to share But that's not the only relationship. She wants to have with this guy. She wants to learn from him She wants to find out more about Islam not as something she wants to become a part of but just as something that she finds Interesting and frankly admirable as she's going through all of this as this you know 19 year old on this college campus and She tells me the story She feels like nobody else on her campus is going to understand this struggle And I'm thinking to myself. I don't know if there's a 19 year old in College in America not having some version of that right not having some version of Who am I and where do I come from and how does that connect with all of these things that I'm encountering in my book acts of faith I call this Staining at the crossroads of inheritance and discovery trying to look both ways at once Look, that's why we do the work we do on college campus as an interfaith youth court because it is precisely Spaces like this that are doing things like this that are opening up the opportunity For positive conversation across these fault lines of difference so that the fault line around religion is not Inevitably and necessarily One that is filled with blood although that's what the evening news will tell you it is one instead That is characterized by partnerships by goodwill by mutual appreciation By what we at interfaith youth court call a sense of being better together That's my story. Thank you Thank You Ibu So we're gonna open this up for you all to ask any questions Any questions in the audience for our speaker there's a microphone there Hi, mr. Patel. I'm skyman. I'm a real-life superhero and I'm a bit of an interfaith guy myself I study Christianity Buddhism Hinduism Islam I like it all I'm an interfaith kind of guy And I was wondering what got you interested in interfaith What made you want to believe that you know, we could come together as a Society here in America actually talk about our spirituality. Who does that? It's like a taboo So well, thank you for that question. So I mean, I think you know like you I stand on the shoulders of Giants, right? So when I look back at the folks I admire the most in American history There are folks who created space for this whether it's Martin Luther King, Jr. Talking about not only his own Christian faith openly But his admiration for Gandhi and his partnership with Abraham Joshua Heschel and his correspondence with the tick-knock hon Well all the way to you know, Jane Adams who was engaging Catholics and Jews and Hall House So I mean, it's I think that it's part of the best of the American tradition to open up open up the space for this Can I just say I've been doing this for 15 years. I've seen lots of fascinating things a real-life superhero I've never seen but I appreciate seeing It's a small group of people who believe in servant leadership who believe in the power of the superhero that actually Conceptualize and create their own superhero You know the comic book base Batman Superman Spider-man, I just saw the amazing spider-man 2 over the weekend, you know superheroes are all over the place So why not create your own? Why not be the superhero of your own story? That's what RLSH is about why not rock on. Thank you. I Feel like Oprah I know You didn't want to fly over the banister Hi, I'm Janita, and I work actually in the intercultural center on campus and This year I feel like I've been dealing with a lot of struggling with finding my place within my own identity and Before I kind of thought it was more important to deal with other people and Relationships with them like you said interfaith between maybe different religions But I think I've been experiencing a lot within my own identity and who I am So did you ever have to deal with that and how did you if you had to yeah? I mean I thank you for that question 100% of course and I and I think that that I think for for for a lot of people This is certainly the case with me. I think it's like it's it's a It's a multi-part dynamic where some parts are like intense interaction with lots of folks And then then there's times for retreat and reflection and a huge part of interaction is Dealing with other people's identities, but an awful lot of it is reflecting on your own and in fact that's To be geeky for a second yet. I carry the baggage of graduate school So I'm gonna spill a little bit of that out here That's that's one of the the kind of chief characteristics of The era in which we live which is is is constant interaction with people who are different from you a hundred a hundred and fifty years ago The vast majority of the human race didn't experience that right and if you're only with people who are like you If you are in a community where everybody goes to church on Sundays, and they go to the same church Well, you probably don't really ask the question. Why should I go to church? Because it's you know It's like you don't ask fish what water is like because it's all they know Right, but if you're with folks who do different things all the time as all of us are all the time Well the thing that we have to do that our ancestors didn't have to do is ask ourselves. Well, why do I do this? Basically, who am I that's a really intense question and and college is the time when I think it's felt most intensely so I think it's this back-and-forth dynamic of of engagement with other people's identities Causing reflection on one's own and then you know taking retreat and reflection time to to ask those questions and for me reading Reading the stories of of other folks as they came to a sense of who they were Through that interaction and then retreat process was really powerful for me So I mean in part that's what acts of faith my first book is about it's kind of that that process including the painful part of it Okay, we got a question in the back All right. Well, I want to say thank you so much for coming I'm faculty here at Highline and I work with future teachers many of my students are in the classroom or in the room today And I think that what you said around diversity being a fact. We're very proud of our fact Right, we just won a great award from the American Association of Community Colleges for all the work We do at diversity and I am I love that about Highline But I think that you are bringing another challenge to us is how can we address this topic that we Don't know how to talk about on campus. It's really brought to mind for me What are the things that my future teachers who are going to be working in the most diverse district in the? United States possibly the world How are they going to prepare? Themselves to work in such diverse communities and as we have so many Muslim teachers coming down the road, right? I ask our public schools prepared to support them in the work that they're Going to do and so I just hope that faculty here listening to this really take this as a challenge and see how we can Value our fact but also continue to have these conversations that allow us to learn from each other So thank you so much for everything you shared. Hey listen, thank you so much Let me just say as I as I told Skyman there I've been doing this for 15 years right and in 15 years I've gotten exactly two community college invitations one of them was from the college I went to and they knew they knew they could get me for free because my mom works there The other is you guys, right? So I Mean, I think I think that's a big deal. I think I think that that is a that's a really big deal and I think that that is That is in that is an engagement of a dimension of diversity that is it's it's volatile I mean, you know This is the robust engagement of religious identity and diversity issues is is a significant challenge And there's the vast majority of institutions in your sector are saying look we prioritize other challenges Which makes a ton of sense to me but to have to have you guys who are willing to you know Take a step out a little bit and say we want to look at this I'm just you know, that's why well That's why we made this a priority right to come here and it's was telling a dr. Birmingham earlier This is this is our it's a gift to us to sit with you and learn from you and to get a sense of How you are? Articulating this challenge to yourselves. Is it because of the diversity of your own student body? Is it because? So many of you are off to be teachers and nurses which I just think is great I think it's the most important work in the world and you are going to be working and in hospitals and in schools that are highly diverse You know in which you know for for Hindus if and and for many Buddhists When the school or hospital cafeteria says our soup is vegetarian with a little bit of chicken That doesn't cut it right it might cut it for other folks But but it doesn't cut it for people for whom that's a religious commitment, right like you know Most Muslims they they won't take the bacon off They just won't eat it right and for like a Muslim nine-year-old Probably not going to tell you he's probably just not going to eat so to have a To have a radar screen for that and that's that's what that that's what that initial conversation with my dad helped Me develop which was a radar screen like I didn't think about religious identity and diversity issues Because of college I developed a radar screen around race gender sexuality ethnicity class But I didn't develop a radar screen or a religious diversity issues, and I just I just think that it's I'm gonna be blunt and bold and saying this I I don't think you can call yourself an educated person in 21st century America without that radar screen I just want to thank you very much for coming here I got a lot out of what you said and I want to tell you that I really appreciate the fact that you said that America is one of the leading countries one of the finest that is Engaging in diversity and religious diversity of all kinds I want to thank you for that comment because I've been Believing that same thing because I watched I'm a person that watches the news in America We have a lot of great organizations here. There are human rights animal Activist people and everything and we do try to intervene when people in other countries are being mistreated if we can And so I want to thank you for that and thank you And I'm glad that you came because everyone will recognize America is a great country, right? So I think you know I think that there are such inspiring parts of the American tradition Actually, that's what my book sacred ground is about and I think that the challenge for America has long been and continues to be Well, the forces of pluralism defeat the forces of prejudice and I don't think that's that's that's a battle That's never put to rest It's a battle that's fought every generation and we have the chance to fight it in ours and I think that that's a privilege So thank you for your comment Hello, my name is Latanya, and I'm in student government. Thank you for being here as well I wanted to ask you for students who are here as well as students who are not here. How do we? Let me read I'd wrote it down. So let me read it here how do we present this topic to students mostly for students who aren't present and Do you have any tools that we can use as students and having this conversation or continuing on this sort of education? Yeah, what a great question. Thank you. Thank you for coming today So I would say I Mean I think the Intercultural Center here my sense is it's going to be the nerve center of a lot of this And I think having a set of conversations with Natasha and others about what set of programs You can create that Engages in a positive way highlights religious diversity. So at IFYC we have we have a something called the better together campaign We run interfaith leadership institutes where students can be trained in how to run it or you can just take stuff off of our website but it's basically a series of interfaith service and dialogue programs that the arc of which we call the better together campaign and the the kind of the Animating spark of all of it is the question. How does your tradition inspire you to serve others? Right, doesn't mean it's the only question But it's a great place to start and look one of the reasons that people stay away from Engaging religious identity and diversity is because so many conversations start with here's what I hate about your religion We just tell you that's not a good way to start right That's inner it's interfaith 101. It's still useful to go over a A really good place to start is how does how does your belief system from secular humanist as our last week? How does inspire you to serve others? Yeah So what about for students who maybe don't identify with a specific religion? Yeah, so I mean that's why I include that's why we're so forthright about including secular humanists or seekers from wherever Somebody is right from wherever somebody is my guess is there's a set of stories or moments That are important that person's life now perhaps you're you know like me and you're a committed Muslim and you come from what's a pretty Cohesive tradition and there's Quranic stories and there's stories meaning stories from the central scripture in Islam The the the holy Quran their stories from what we call the Sunnah the prophet Muhammad made the peace and blessings of God be upon him The Sunnah as the actions and statements, right? So you might pull from that, but there's there's if you're from whatever background you might be from There's probably a set of stories that you keep in your back pocket that plays a role in your life and Simply creating the space and asking the question. Hey, tell me what stories inspire you, right? And folks from from secular humanist or seeker or syncretic backgrounds Have just as much of a right to share their story as folks who are who? Call themselves committed Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus Hi, my name is Michelle I just had a question as a Christian woman, you know, I walk around and I hear a lot of people's opinions and and That go against what I believe and I just want to see how do I shift from wanting to protect? My belief to to being able to hear their story and not want to change their story Yeah, what a great question. Thank you for that question so I think that there's So my view on this is that is somebody's faith or philosophical identity ought to be dealt with with the same dimension of Sensitivity as other dimensions of their identity, right now that doesn't mean that Somebody shouldn't be able to disagree with the philosophical or belief system I think that's entirely legitimate, especially in the college campus, but I think I think statements like, you know Muslims are evil or Christians are dumb. I just think my in my view. That's like Insert another identity in that and it's Impermissible in my view. That's the same thing when it comes to a religious identity. However, right? I think that You or I or anybody else we ought to be able to have an intelligent conversation with people who we disagree with and ought to have it in a way that seeks to build a relationship and an appreciative knowledge of that other person's perspective Rather than simply well, you know, let me tell you what I hate about your system, right? Asking a set of asking a set of questions. I don't understand this or I disagree with that, you know I think that that's a very different thing than walking around saying Muslims are evil, you know So I'll tell you a personal story about this on my console, you know Of a Muslim family We're raising our two boys Zaden Khalil to be Muslims as best we can at least and a part of that is we sent him to Catholic school at least Khalil at Catholic preschool, right? Which by the way, it's this is standard operating procedure for, you know Hundreds of million of Muslims around the world in South Asia, Middle East lots of lots of Muslims Send their kids to Catholic schools. So around Easter time, you know We have a set of serious conversations with the four-year-old about, you know Christology Because Khalil's preschool teacher as ought to be the case at a Catholic school is teaching The hugely important Easter event in Christianity Jesus died on the cross was crucified for the sins of Of the human race and that's how human beings are saved, right? If you believe in Jesus and particularly the the event of the crucifixion So we Muslims don't believe that, right? We have great reverence for Jesus as a prophet But we do not agree with Jesus being the son of God or the event of the crucifixion Now I have a four-year-old Who's the first adult outside of the his family that he loves is his teacher Ms. Terrace at st. Ben's elementary school. I have to Articulate our Muslim identity to Khalil Around the event of the crucifixion in a way that doesn't make him think Ms. Terrace is wrong or bad Just that we are different and my sense is that that's like not a that's a Reasonably good way of thinking about the engaging somebody with a different religion you get to be who you are We get to be who we are How do we do it in a way that builds a relationship, especially at that really formative level, right? I mean that's that's how I think we have learned in Different dimensions of the United States that to treat other people's identities to treat other dimensions of identity I just think that the same type of kind of educated sensitivity Around diversity ought to be a play when it comes to religious identity. I'm next It's it's very interesting to me to see you come from a very positive views and preaching your interfaith without commenting on your Challenges being a Muslim or even different colors Did that any way? Shape you oh, yeah So I mean that's I mean this is acts of faith my first book is you know A good part of it is that is that challenging story right for me and I mean I think I shared a little bit of that right like You know The wanting to be white for the first 15 years of my life for from the age of two to fit to 17 basically Yeah, that played a shaping role, but you know I mean My dad my dad once said to me he's like There is no doubt that Communities nations religions need a need improvement But how are you most likely Ibu to spark improvement? Are you most likely to spark improvement by telling telling them how bad they are right? Or you most likely to spark improvement by by articulating An image of what they could be when they have been that in the past and trying to inspire them in that direction I guess that that that always made sense to me. I mean that's who I am. I mean I I guess part of that is just my personality Part of that is I mean honestly at the end of the day What do I have to complain about? Right what and so meaning like I get to do work that I love I Got to start my own organization based on something that I believe in I get invited to talk about issues that I think are important I get to interface with super inspiring students Extremely engaged faculty, you know I just I just got to let me keep doing this Thank you so much for your talk and that really brings me to question of what can we do in like our action and often times We see change in the individualized way and we we need to start thinking a more collective term So how do we move into this? Religious diversity of moving just beyond from a fact of how we engage similar when we talk about race You know it's founded on this whole idea white supremacy and so similarly we we look at institution or power structure We are often is founded by this dominant culture of Christianity So how do we see when United States? It's almost like a spiritual battleground in a state of you know when we drove out first nation folks You know we kind of really wiped out the indigenous spirituality and now we have this whole you know Islamophobia along with that So I guess I'm just curious to hear from from in the institution of that power structure How do we work with dominant cultures where that narrative is so? Strong yeah, so you know I I find that a very interesting question I have multiple responses, but I guess the first response is I don't I don't frame it that way, right? I understand I understand that that is a framing of it I'm I am fluent in that framing It's not the way that I I personally choose to frame it and it's not though It's not the way we frame it at that interfaith youth core I'll just tell you a quick story of how that that that kind of came to be for me To two quick stories, you know, so so the the terms Privilege oppression colonialism used to be a much more common part of my own lexicon and I certainly understand Why they are a part of the lexicon period, right? My dad once pointed out to me. He's like look Notre Dame University starts in the early mid 19th century an institution built in the South Bend, Indiana by French Catholics for Catholics and They let me in In the mid 1970s to do an MBA there and there are 235 Catholic institutions of higher education across America And you could probably count five that are only for Catholics right and by the way If you want to talk about a group that's been oppressed across American history Catholics would be in the top five the great historian Arthur Slushinger Jr. Once said that the deepest bias in the American people is its anti-Catholic prejudice now My own view is that there's a number of communities African-Americans native Americans lesbians and gays that would have a shot at that crown But Catholics would certainly be in the top five and yet they built a set of institutions that have broadly served The diversity of America There's 600 Catholic hospitals in the United States so and Again, you probably couldn't there's probably not ten that only that that that are exclusively for Catholics Why am I saying all this? I'm saying all of this because it seems to me that Another way of framing the issue is to say how is it that particular groups in the United States Can keep a sense of pride and Particularity in their own identity and build institutions from their own inspiration that serve the common good Right. That's that's for me that that's a that's a more useful But look, you know, I Mean I could do Said as well as anybody, you know, so I love that stuff And it's that it's not that I don't that I don't find it. I find that find it intriguing and useful I will say this. I was at Columbia University On the other side of the which a very different institution than this right You know and like all these like upper-middle-class kids Talking to me about how they're oppressed and I'm like dude. I mean, you're not oppressed Okay, like I understand the guy three spivak got like a chair and something here But like you're not oppressed, right? That doesn't mean that growing up brown in Staten Island wasn't hard I get that but at the end of the day you're at Columbia like every Pakistani peasant in that country would trade places with you So stop acting like you're in there. You're in the same position as they are, you know, so Anyway, the limits of Said from my point of view Okay, I'm just saw the time and I see we're running out of time So I'm gonna take the last question and then for the other folks who have questions you guys can maybe talk to Ibu after Really, okay All right, then I'll take the person here. I just like to say that I'm a kind of older than most people going to college here, but Throughout my life, I've learned that the things that you're saying like about the When the lady over here said she her religion she had a part part hard time trying to Tell people or not tell people It's it's like the good Samaritan story that you said, okay You can either be the Samaritan or you cannot be the Samaritan You know, you can either help or not help and if your Religious Faith has you to not help do for others or care for others worldwide I mean just on what they believe in just love them from the human aspect of being a human being Okay, then you need maybe need you need you need to back up on your faith because we have racism. We have Ageism we have all kind of Isms here going on, you know in life and throughout life It's it's easier and it's a lot more peaceful in your heart to accept someone for who they are. I Love that. Thank you. It's a lot more peaceful in your heart to accept some of the beautiful. Thank you I think we'll leave it at that. Thanks everyone. I'll be signing some books over here folks who are interested I love being here. I'm looking forward to being with you for the rest of the day