About : standard furniture sarajevo
Title : standard furniture sarajevo
standard furniture sarajevo
good afternoon highlinecommunity college. hello! good afternoon! oh yeah. that's how we doat highline, right? well, welcome. i'm so pleased for you allto be here for our kick off event for unitythrough diversity week.
it's our 17th annual week. and i'm really excited aboutthe programs and activities that we have going on this week. my name is natashaburroughs, and i'm the director formulticultural affairs. and i'm also the chairfor unity week this year. and unity throughdiversity week is a time, well, wedo this all year, but this is a time wherewe bring in people from all
over the world, allover from the nation who are experts, and activists, andcommunity organizers, change agents, scholars to come hereand be in dialogue with us about issues of equityand social change, and what that looks like. and our theme this week isre-imagining the imagination, creating actionfor social change. so we want to open ourminds, and just kind of be able to dreamsomething different,
and to bring somethingdifferent into reality, to think outside the box. and that's what we're hopingthe week will really be about. so we have a whole schedule. i hope you guys got one ofthese handy dandy handbills that lays out some ofthe events that we have going onthroughout 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 reallythis is all for you guys. so i hope you'll come. i wanted to say a special thanksto our unity week planning committee. first and foremost i wanted togive a special acknowledgment to miss chayuda overby whocame here from green river. she was our firstunity week chair. she was actually thechair of unity week,
and she got a new opportunityto work over at green river. so i wanted toacknowledge her work for setting thefoundation for this week. so thank you very much,chayuda, for that, your leadership around that. i also want to givea special shout out to all of our planningcommittee members, which includes darryl bryce. raise your hand.
notorious, sharon if she's here,sam, patricia mcdonald, amy moon, gene monroe, [? jenita, ?]aisha, and [inaudible]. that was like brilliant mindscoming together for this week, so i want to thank allthe planning committee members for allyour work on this. it does not happen alone. so with that, you guys aren'treally here to hear me speak. we have a reallyawesome opportunity to hear from anhonored guest today.
and so we're going toget about that business. so with that, theperson that's going to be introducingour speaker today is lisa skari,our vice president for institutional advancement. can you guys give her a welcome? so natasha tookall my words i was going to say about unityweek and promoting it. but i also do want to say thatthe committee has put together
a great program this weekof not only presentations and speakers, andevents i should say. so please participate andenjoy in their good work. and i actually havethe honor today of introducing our firstdistinguished speaker. named by us newsand world report as one of america'sbest leaders of 2009, eboo patel is thefounder and president of the interfaith youthcore, an organization that
builds the interfaithmovement on college campuses. he served on president obama'sinaugural advisory council of the white house office offaith based and neighborhood partnerships, andholds a doctorate in sociology of religionfrom oxford university. eboo was named byislamica magazine as one of 10 young muslimvisionaries shaping islam in america. and he was also chosen byharvard kennedy school review
as one of five futurepolicy leaders to watch. both eboo and theinterfaith youth core were honored with the rooseveltinstitute's freedom of worship medal in 2009. and he was recently awarded theguru nanak interfaith prize, an award given to anindividual to enhance awareness of the crucial role of religiousdialogue in pursuit of peace. now, i had the pleasure ofhearing eboo speak last fall, and found his words inspiring.
but at the same time theychallenged my thoughts about the intersect offaith in higher education. in essence, he left mere-imagining my thinking about the faithconversation on our campus and its relationshipto social change. so without furtherado, please join me in welcoming eboo patel. [foreign language] thank you. so you know what getsleft off that bio
is i grew up in andaround community colleges. and i remember when i waslike eight or nine years old my mom, who up untilthat time was a full time homemaker, decided togo back to get her cpa. and she had a ba fromindia, but obviously you have to take a wholeset of other classes to go ahead and be acertified public accountant. and not all of herclasses transferred, so what she you woulddo with me, who was,
you know, in fourthgrade, she would drive me all across thewestern suburbs of chicago from community collegeto community college where she was takingthese different classes, and stick me in the snack roomwith like 50 math problems. i was like the nine-year-oldindian kid, eating doritos, doing multiplicationin the snack room while she went to take classes. and winds up getting here cpa.
so i watched my mom gothrough that process, and it's a verylike indian thing, but when her exam camein, when the results came in i was at a friend'shouse like four blocks away, and i heard my mom on thestoop of our apartment calling across the neighborhood,eboo, i passed! and my friend scott waslike, what the heck? i'm just like,that's just the way we do in the patelhousehold, right?
but that's communitycolleges, right? there is no place in ageographical area that is a better reflection ofthat place's aspirations than a community college. if you want to know what aparticular geography is about, go to that communitycollege and take the pulse, and that's whereyou'll find out. and it wasn't justthose few years. my mom winds up gettinga dream job, which
is to be a full time facultymember at a community college. so she works for mcdonald's intheir accounting department, and a bunch of othercompanies in their accounting departments, and decidesshe didn't want to do that. she wants to go back towhere she found a springboard into america, which wasa community college. and so for the last25 years my mom has been a full timeprofessor of accounting at a community college.
and i took my first classes,my first college classes there, and probably started thesummer of my freshman year. it's where i firstdiscovered that no matter how hard i triedi just was never going to be an accountant. so thank god to communitycolleges for closing off a certain set of paths that iknew i wasn't going to take. but for me high schoolfelt like a race. it felt like a single race.
and the only way to doit well was to go faster. right? but that just wasn't me. i just didn't wantto run that race. and it was in cartercarol's history class. it was in werner krieglstein'sphilosophy class. it was in alan carter'sfiction writing class. it was in the firstsociology class that i took. i was like 15, 16, 17 yearsold that this whole new world
opened up to me. i first read bernard malamudat a community college. i first read plato'sallegory of the cave and it's just ajoy to be back here in front of a group ofstudents, and faculty, and administrators who are apart of that process, a part of the process ofre-imagining your lives, this community, this country. i just think it'svery, very powerful,
and it reminds me offormative years in my life. so thank you so muchfor the opportunity to come back and just be a partof this community's aspirations as it's reflected in thisinstitution, and this room right now. that hand is for you all. so like a lot of you,i had the opportunity to transfer from thatcommunity college to a four year university.
and really the firstpart of my story starts at that fouryear university, and, you know what,this is a story over the arc of this talk. what i'm going todo is basically talk about how it isthat i came to realize the significance ofreligious diversity issues, and to believe that itwas part of the promise and responsibilityof this country
to engage thoseissues positively, and that the particularinstitution best situated to do that werecollege campuses, and that the particular peoplewho ought to be on the vanguard were young people. and what i'm goingto do over the course of the next half hour orso is to basically trace the arc of that in three parts. one, is i want totell you how i came
to recognizing the significanceof these issues, my own story on this. the second is i want to talkabout the complications, and challenges, andopportunities of diversity for this community, foramerica, and for the world. and i see folks wearinga button that i love, celebrate diversity. and i'm actuallygoing to complicate the idea of diversitya little bit.
i'm going to 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 iwant to actually tell you the story of awoman from seattle, and how she experiencedreligious diversity issues in college. her name is cassidy meyer.
she's a colleague of mineat interfaith youth core, and i thought about her storybecause she's from these parts, and probably walked some ofthese streets as you all did. i happen to know her wellbecause we've worked together at ifyc for eight years. i want to tell you alittle about her journey, and especially how collegechanged her life when it came to religiousdiversity issues. so it's a story ofunderstanding and engaging
religious diversityin those three parts. and i'll begin from a timewhen i was 17 years old. i was at theuniversity of illinois. it's when i transferredthere from taking classes at the college ofdupage over summers when i was in high school. and the first memoryi have of being a freshman at theuniversity of illinois was walking onto thebasketball court.
and there's threegames going on. there's a white game, a blackgame, and an asian game. and i started instinctivelywalking over to the white game. and then i stopped. and i looked around,and what i realized was nobody else waswalking to the white game, that folks felt perfectlycomfortable playing in the own kind of flowof their communities. and what i realizedat that moment, right,
there's momentsin your life when like your whole past kind offlashes before you, right? it was, my gosh, i'dspent a long time trying to play inthe white game. and it was this kindof crazy realization to look around and belike, it's so interesting that there are robustand proud communities of differentidentities in this gym, and there's a sense ofcomfort in their own identity.
and i had the sense like,wow, i feel like maybe i haven't really beencomfortable in my skin. and that's notentirely a metaphor. now, here's the crazy andwonderful thing about college is that i probably hadthat same or a similar kind of realization in a varietyof times in high school. you know, when iwas in high school the rodney king stuff wentdown, and i remember exactly one teacher making onecomment about it,
saying when theverdict happened, acquitted, he just saidthe verdict was acquitted. nobody asked any questions. nobody seemed to care. i thought to myself, well,there's something at play here, and i feel like it implicatesme in a distinct way, but because there wasno processing of it, there was no community thatengaged it, it just evaporated. but the beautifulthing about college
is that that's not how it was. there was a community ofpeople constantly engaged in asking diversity questions. you couldn't walk 10 feetin any direction in 1993 on a college campus withoutrunning into some folks reading cornell west, or bellhooks, or audrey lore. the conversationaround diversity, especially when it cameto race, and gender, and ethnicity, increasinglysexuality and class back then.
it was a live conversation. and i reveled in it,because, like i said, for all of those years i hadthis strange sense of not fully fitting in my skin. when i was eight years old ihave this distinct recollection of trying to scratchbrown skin white, my brown skin white, andnobody ever talked about it. you know, i remember whenmy mom first put samosas, you all know what samosas are?
ok, so back in like 1987when my mom first put samosas in my lunch, nobody knewwhat samosas were, at least nobody around where i grew up. they just could smell themfrom 25 feet away, you know. and i like look at mymom, like putting samosas in my lunch bag, and i'mlike first you name me eboo. you know? i mean, seriously? so it was powerful for meto be in sociology classes
where race was talkedabout directly. to be in freshmanorientation sessions where you playedcrossing the line, and somebody askedwho felt embarrassed by the food thatwas cooked at home. and it was no longer mydirty personal little secret. like half the roomcrossed the line. that was a powerfulthing for me. and i think back tomyself just how grateful
i am for the live diversityconversations in college when i was 17, 18, 19 years old. and i think that that's a lotof what unity in diversity week is meant to do here, is tocreate space and give voice to things that areunbelievably important, and very frequentlychallenging to talk about. and i think american higher edought to take a bow, honestly, for the way it has courageouslyengaged race issues. it is far from an easything to talk about, and yet
in academic programafter academic program, on campus aftercampus, you have things like the intra cultural center. you have things likeglobal studies, right? you have an institution, asector of american society, that says we'regoing to engage this. now, there'sreasonable arguments to be made on multiplesides about should it be engaged more, or indifferent ways, et cetera,
but the fact is thisinstitution hasn't ignored it, and that's a big deal. so, like any good studentsent off to college and who takes whathe's reading seriously, i went back to myparents' house with piles of dirty laundry, my handout looking for decent food. at this point i was actuallyproud of my parents' ethnic food, by the timei was 18, 19 years old. and large quantities oflectures to give my dad
with all the wisdomi'd acquired by being at the university ofillinois for nine months. i don't know if you guyshave tried this yet, you know, you read edwardsaid, or karl marx, or audrey, and you just are like,mom, you got to here this. cause like we've been doing itwrong for the last 40 years. right, we got to change-- iremember, the first time i was like, mom, workersof the world unite. she was like what theheck are you talking--
it was like don'tsay that to anybody. ok? and i would have long andvoluble conversations, monologues, at least frommy side towards my dad about race and diversity issues. this was like peopleof color unite type stuff, super important stuff. and my dad, it's funnywhen i think about this, my dad was one of a handfulof international students
at notre dame universityin the mid 1970s. he was one of thefirst non-white people in corporate advertisingin the midwest. it's not like my dadnever experienced feeling marginalized,but he mostly good naturedly took thelectures i gave him about the importance ofdiversity issues, et cetera. at one point, imust confess, when i used the wordbourgeois, he said,
if you ever use the wordbourgeois in my house again you can findsome other bourgeois dad to help with yourbourgeois college tuition. so i hope thatthat's a word you're learning, anddissecting in class. i would just caution youabout where to use it. my dad at one pointsaid something else to me, which changedthe course of my life. he said, you know, eboo, for allyou talk about diversity issues
you never talk about thediversity issue that's driving the world, andthat's religious diversity. it's almost like you don't evenknow the new york times exists, or you don't know thatthe evening news exists. all you do is pay attention toa segment of diversity stuff. it's not that thatstuff's not important, it's just that it's not theonly thing that's important. so open your eyes kid, and thenext time you want to come here and lecture me indiversity issues,
i want you to firsttell me how you're going to solvereligious conflict. and i like literally remembertaking the clean clothes that my parents hadlaundered for me, and folded, and, you know, the foodthat my mom had made for me, and putting it in theback of the oldsmobile that my dad had let me borrow,and driving back south on i-57 to the university ofillinois, thinking to myself, boy, my dad is a 19thcentury creature.
you know, he's 200years behind the times. and the next week i got acall from my best friend at the university ofillinois who's jewish, and she says, and i hearthe tears in her throat. she says yitzhak rabin hasjust been assassinated. and that's when myeyes flew wide open, and i started paying attentionto the new york times, and i started payingattention to the evening news. and i started to realize thatoutside of these diversity
conversations we were havingon campus, which, again, were supremely important, theyjust weren't the world of diversity conversations. there was another world ofdiversity happening out there, and it was happeningalong the fault lines of religiousidentity, and mostly what those fault lineswere doing were bleeding. northern ireland had justexperienced the omagh bombing, which set the peace processback there several years.
the middle east was in thethroes of the oslo peace accords. the assassinationof yitzhak rabin basically scuttled itit seems like forever. 20 years later we're stillin a scuttled period. when the person whocommitted that murder was asked in courtwhy he did it, and if he had an accomplice, hesaid he did have an accomplice, and the accomplice was god.
when i look back atthe 1990s it looks very much like a decadeof religious violence. in 1993 bombing of theworld trade center, basically the announcement ofthe global ambitions of muslim extremism. 1995, that assassination ofyitzhak rabin by an extremist jewish figure, somebodyfrom his own tradition, 1996, the bombing ofthe atlanta olympics by a man named eric rudolph.
when he gets arraignedin court, you know how he defends himself? he reads from the new testament. couple of years earlier,the absolute shredding of the balkans. slobodan milosevic'ssoldiers riding into sarajevo and other parts ofbosnia in tanks, standing up in those tanks, andholding up the number three. what did that three stand for?
the trinity, as inwe christians are going to roll over you muslims. 1998, the election of a hindunationalist party in india called the bjp, aboutto come back to power. incidentally we willknow in mid may for sure. what's one of their first moves? to test a nuclear device. what do they call it? the hindu bomb.
what does pakistando weeks later? test their own nuclear device. the muslim bomb. the 1990s is very much a decadeall about religious violence issues. and when i was incollege i probably remember the wordsreligious diversity being mentionedtogether five times. somehow we had dramaticallymissed this huge issue,
even though it wasnot just dominating the front pagesof the newspaper, it was also dominatingacademic discourse. in the early 1990ssamuel huntington, the harvard politicalscientist, writes what becomes people say thesecond most influential article in the history of thejournal foreign affairs. the article is called theclash of civilizations. two years later heturns it into a book.
it's the central thesis ofthe clash of civilizations. with the end of thecold war, the demise of the soviet union, thepolitical and economic polarization of theworld between communist and capitalist is formallyover, and huntington says that the nextworld order will be defined by whathe calls a more primordial dimensionof human identity. not politics, not economics,but civilizational identity.
he names, following the britishscholar arnold toynbee, seven or eight differentcivilizations, and says what arecivilizations based on? they are based onreligion, which is precisely why they arefated to fight, fated to fight. what does huntington see? the preeminent politicalscientist of his time sees a world orderin which people from differentreligious communities
are at each other's throats. and i'm reading this,and i'm thinking to myself 20, 21years old, coming of age at the dawnof a new century, i want to be a part ofthe right side of history. and somehow, byprovidence, i'm a believer so i think god hassomething to do with this, somehow i also beginto get interested in a very differentreligious narrative.
i'm seeing in thenewspapers this narrative of religious conflict, butsomehow people are handing me, almost randomly it seems,dorothy day, martin luther king junior, and bacha khan,and mother theresa, all of these differentfaith heroes. and i'm startingto realize, yes, religion can play a verynegative role in the world, but it can also play a beautifuland positive role in the world. and so often thepeople that we come
to admire most as faithheroes, or really just as heroes in general, theystarted their work young. so the assassin of yitzhakrabin was 26 years old. and we all know that religiousextremists tend to be young. but the man who led themontgomery bus boycott in 1955, the recent grad from bostonuniversity just minted with his ph.d, martinluther king junior, was also 26 years old. and the more i lookedat these people
that i admired so much,dorothy day, all these folks from different backgrounds,bacha khan, thich nhat hanh, the dalai lama, they hadstarted 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 issuesseriously, engaging those, in both co-curricularand curricular efforts, what if they tookreligious diversity issues with equal seriousness?
now, i was part of agroup of student leaders that met for like 30minutes with the president of the university of illinoissystem in the spring of 1996, and he had a linethat sticks with me. he said i want to be able toshake the hand of a graduating student from theuniversity of illinois and have a sense of confidencethat that student has over the course of theirundergraduate career acquired multiculturalliteracy, built
multicultural relationships,and had opportunities for multicultural leadership. started to shape up in mymind, what if college campuses, from highline communitycollege to harvard, when you all cross thestage and shake hands with the presidentof your college, he or she has asense of confidence that you have, over the courseof your one, or two, or three, or four years here, when hehands you your associates
degree, or whateverdegree you earn here, you have acquiredinterfaith literacy, built interfaith relationships,had opportunities for interfaith leadership. why? why does this matter? part two of my story. it matters becausethe united states, as some sociologists say, themost religiously diverse nation
in human history, and themost religiously devout nation in the west at a time ofglobal religious conflict. i have to tell you something. there are plenty ofrooms that i am in, that are a lot less interestingthan this i might say, in which i have to convincethose folks that this is the most religiously diversenation in human history. i don't have toconvince you all. just look to your leftand to your right.
that's a powerfulthing, that you are a microcosm of thiscountry, a microcosm of the most religiously diversenation in human history, in a western nationin which religion counts in ways thatit doesn't count in any other western nation. our rates of believing in god,of going to church, synagogue, mosque, temple, gurdwara, ofsaying grace before meals, of having religion involved inthe discourse around politics
are two, three, four,five, six times higher than in other similarcountries, in britain, or in germany or france. i remember actuallyi was studying in england in the late1990s when tony blair got elected prime ministerthere, and it was well known that blair wasa believing christian. and somebody asked blair'schief communications guy, colloquially called thespin doctor, you know,
was blair going to talkabout his christian beliefs? and the spin doctor put an endto that conversation by saying, we don't do god. and you know what? the british press neverasked about it again. the american pressdoesn't work that way. and nor does theamerican public. and i think that thatis a very good thing, because religious identityis at the heart of who
so many people inthis country are, faith andphilosophical identity. whether you're a christianor a secular humanist, it's at the heart ofwho so many people are, and why shouldn't there bea robust public conversation about that? but we can't expect that everydimension of that conversation is positive. and this is where i want to getinto complicating diversity.
so diana eck, aprofessor at harvard that we spend a lot oftime reading and studying at interfaith youthcore, points out that diversity isactually just a fact. it's not a value. it's not an achievement. it's just a fact. diversity is justthe fact of people with different identitiesliving in close quarters.
and it says nothing aboutwhat those people do with each other. and unfortunately in a goodmany parts of the world, people with different identitiesliving in close quarters with each otherequals a civil war. the question is how do we takediversity, the fact of people who are different livingclose to each other, and turn it intosomething positive, turn it into an achievement?
diana eck calls that pluralism. the achievement ofpositive relationships between people who orientaround religion differently. i love to thinkof the great line by the political philosophermichael walzer on this. he says that the challengeof the diverse democracy is to embrace its differencesand maintain a common life. the challenge of thediverse democracy that's a fancy wayof saying unity
in diversity, or at the veryleast commonality in diversity. dr. birmingham and iwere having a few words 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 whathe sees as powerful in the model that we're creatingat interfaith youth core is thecentrality of service. i want to speak aboutthat for a second,
because i think that thebest way you build a diverse democracy that embracesits differences, and maintains a common life,is it you bring people from different backgrounds togetherin a common endeavour, in a way in which they canvoice their particularity. and i think that bestcommon endeavour is service. one of the powerfulthings about service is that every religiousand philosophical tradition recognizes the importanceof serving others.
what's the goodsamaritan's story about at the end of the day? it's about the holinessof the samaritan picking up the person layingby the side of the road. what does rama in islam mean? it means mercy. what is the golden rule acrossreligious traditions about? it's about doing unto others. and the beautiful part of thatis it's not just philosophy.
it's not just abstraction. it's application. it's the actual doing. and the story that i wantto tell you about this is the story ofhabitat for humanity. how many of you all haveheard of habitat for humanity in here? how many of youhave participated? ok, so i lovehabitat for humanity
precisely because it'sthat hands on service. i spent many a weekendin my college years getting up at like 7:00am on a saturday morning, and going in, andgoing and volunteering for habitat for humanity builds. and one of things that alwaysstruck me was that those builds brought together people from allkinds of different backgrounds. and we hadconversations about what it was from our variousbackgrounds that brought us
there. now, that's how we built theinitial model of the interfaith youth core. we actually ran ahabitat for humanity build in hyderabadindia, because we thought to ourselves, well, what ifwe brought people together to actually do service, and thenasked the question what is it about your faith orphilosophical background, your muslimness, your hinduness,your jewishness your bahainess,
your secular humanness thatinspires you to do this work. quote me some scripture. tell me a story. lift up a herofrom your tradition so that i can learnmore about it, right? i'm not pretendingthat i'm like you. i'm just appreciating thestory that you're telling. and then you tellingyour buddhist story, it opens up the opportunityfor me to tell my muslim story,
or my hindu story. so the beautifulthing about this, is that when habitatfor humanity, the internationalorganization based in georgia, found out about ourwork bringing people together in habitatprojects that we shot to us, and one of things that theysaid was we want you to know, we started as an organizationfor this exact purpose. they are not justan organization
devoted to helpingpeople build houses for those who can't afford them. as profound, and important,and inspiring as that is, they're an organizationthat started with an ecumenicalmission as well. the founder, millardfuller, recognized that it was hard forpeople from different wings of christianity, forpentecostals and presbyterians to come together to talkabout the nature of jesus,
because they disagreedon the nature of jesus. but what they could dois act in accordance with the ethics of jesus. they could engage in whatmillard fuller called the theology of the hammer. and that's where he gets theidea for habitat for humanity. it's the engagement of thetheology of the hammer. and those are thekinds of programs i think that are the mostprofound and effective
when it comes to engagingespecially religious diversity. so how can highlinecommunity college, how can this community, desmoines, washington, one of the most diverse communitiesin the country-- somebody told me that the mostdiverse zip code in america is just a couple of miles over. in what ways can youconceive of using service as a vehicle to bringunity to diversity? not uniformity.
not we are all the same, buta common table around which we can sit in our chairs andshare our stories of what inspires us to doconcrete service. that's the secondpart of my story. here's the third part. i want to tell you the storyof my friend cassie meyer. and the reason i wantto tell this story is because so much ofinterfaith leadership is about personaltransformation.
it's about the encountersthat individuals go through, and the role of collegecampuses really in formation, and helping people becomewho they want to be, what they were meant to be. so cassie grew up not farfrom here, in, she would say, a pretty secular household,one with a lot of ethics and values, and amoral core, but not a particularlyreligious belief system. when she was in highschool she decides
to become anevangelical christian. and she goes to anevangelical church for a few years in high school. and when she goes tocollege in wisconsin, it turns out that at this littlecollege in wisconsin, lawrence in appleton,wisconsin, there's only enough christians fromall different backgrounds, the presbyterians, thepentecostals, the charismatics, the catholics, they can onlyform one christian group.
and so cassie's havinga tough time with this, because she came from abrand of christianity that had a different kind of viewof other sorts of christians. so she's struggling with this. but, man, she had no idea whatshe was about to encounter, because one day in thelibrary a dude from bangladesh approaches her with a sheetof paper from anthropology 101 class, and he sits down, andhe says, my name is muhammad, i am an internationalstudent from bangladesh,
and i've got this assignmentfor anthropology 101. we have to do a study of adistinctive tribal group, and i've been like observingyour group, like your wednesday night song circle,and, you know, the vans you guys taketo church on sunday, and like the little braceletsyou wear, and like the shirts. so question one, is therea name for your tribe? and cassie's like i'm thewhite american christian girl from seattle, right?
what do you mean tribe? but she goes throughthis set of questions, and she finds out thata muslim from bangladesh looks at her and her wayof being as distinctive, as something worthy of ananthropology 101 project. and then cassie's like,give me that sheet of paper, i'm going to do this on you. and so she's like,question three, what are yourdistinctive 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 thechristians on this campus up at 9:00 am on a sundayto go to church. what do you mean youpray five times a day? he's like, well, i don't alwaysmake it for the early prayer. the 5:00 am prayer,that can get hard. but i'm supposed to.
i'm supposed to. one day, insha'allah, i will. he's like, you know. she's like, what are someother distinctive traits of your group? he's like, well, wedon't drink alcohol. and she's like, you'reat upstate wisconsin on a college campus. you're not drinking alcohol,in the winter, really?
ok, and she'sgoing through this, and she's realized she's havingthis like internal conflict, because she's hearing thevery real voice of her church community back here in seattlesaying when you encounter somebody from a differentreligion you share the truth of yourfaith with them. that's a real voice. and she's also learning overthe course of this conversation that she admires muhammad,and that, yes, she
feels like she has a deeptruth that she wants to share. but that's not theonly relationship she wants to have with this guy. she wants to learn from him. she wants to findout more about islam, not as something she wantsto become a part of, but just as something that shefinds interesting, and, frankly, admirable. as she's goingthrough all of this
as this 19-year-old onthis college campus, and she tells methe story, she feels like nobody elseon her campus is going to understandthis struggle. and i'm thinkingto myself i don't know if there's a 19-year-oldin college in america not having some version of that,not having some version of who am i and where do i comefrom, and how does that connect with all of thesethings that i'm encountering.
in my book acts of faithi call this standing at the crossroads ofinheritance and discovery, trying to lookboth ways at once. look, that's whywe do the work we do on college campusesat interfaith youth core, because it is precisely spaceslike this that are doing things like this, that areopening up the opportunity for positive conversationacross these fault lines of difference, so thatthe fault line around religion
is not inevitablyand necessarily one that is filled withblood, although that's what the eveningnews will tell you. it is one instead that ischaracterized by partnerships, by goodwill, by mutualappreciation, by what we interfaith youth core call asense of being better together. that's my story. thank you. [clapping]
thank you eboo. so we're going to openthis up for you all to ask any questions. any questions in theaudience for our speaker? there's a microphone there. or you can use this. hi, mr. patel. i'm skyman. i'm a real lifesuperhero, and i'm
a bit of aninterfaith guy myself. i study christianity,buddhism, hinduism, islam. i like it all. i'm an interfaith kind of guy. and i was wondering what gotyou interested in interfaith. what made you want to believethat we could come together as a society here inamerica and actually talk about our spirituality? who does that?
it's like a taboo. well, thank youfor that question. so i mean, i thinklike you i stand on the shoulders of giants. so when i look backat the folks i admire the most in americanhistory, they're folks who created spacefor this, whether it's martin luther kingjunior talking about, not only his own christianfaith openly, but his admiration
for gandhi, and his partnershipwith abraham joshua heschel, and his correspondence withthich nhat hanh, all the way to jane addams, who was engagingcatholics and jews in hull house. so, i think thatit's part of the best of the american tradition toopen up the space for this. can i just say, i've beendoing this for 15 years. i've seen lots offascinating things. a real life superheroi've never seen,
but i appreciate seeing you. --concept that i'vededicated my life to. it's a small groupof 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 basebatman, superman, spiderman. i just saw the amazing spiderman 2 over the weekend. you know, superheroesare all over the place.
so why not create your own? why not be the superheroof your own story? that's what rlsh is about. why not? rock on. i feel like oprah. you didn't want tofly over the banister? hi, i'm [? jenita, ?]and i work actually in the inter-culturalcenter on campus.
and this year i feellike i've been dealing with a lot ofstruggling with finding my place within my own identity. and before i kindof thought it was more important to deal withother people, and relationships with them, like yousaid, interfaith between maybedifferent religions. but i've been experiencinga lot within my own identity and who i am.
so did you ever haveto deal with that? and how did you if you had to? yeah, thank youfor that question. 100% of course. and i think for a lot ofpeople, this is certainly the case with me, i think it'sa multi part dynamic, where some parts are like intenseinteraction with lots of folks, and then there's times forretreat and reflection. and a huge part of interactionis dealing with other people's
identities, but an awful lot ofit is reflecting on your own. and, in fact, that's, tobe geeky for a second, you know i carry thebaggage of graduate school so i'm going to spilla little bit of that out here, that's one of thekind of chief characteristics of the era in whichwe live, which is constantinteraction with people who are different from you. 100, 150 years ago, the vastmajority of the human race
didn't experience that. and if you're onlywith people who are like you, if you are in acommunity where everybody goes to church on sundays, andthey go to the same church, well, you probably don'treally ask the question why should i go tochurch, because it's like you don't ask fish whatwater is like, because it's all they know. but if you're with folks who dodifferent things all the time,
as all of us areall the time, well, the thing that we have to dothat our ancestors didn't have to do is ask ourselves,well, why do i do this? basically, who am i? that's a reallyintense question, and college is the time when ithink it's felt most intensely. so i think it's this back andforth dynamic of engagement with other people'sidentities, causing reflection on one's own, and then takingretreat and reflection time
to ask those questions. for me, reading thestories of other folks as they came to asense of who they were through that interactionand then retreat process was really powerful for me. i mean, in part that's whatacts of faith, my first book, is about. it's kind of thatprocess, including the painful part of it.
ok, we've got aquestion in the back. all right, well, i wanted to saythank you so much for coming. i'm faculty here at highline. and i work with future teachers. many of my students are inthe are in the room today. and i think that what you saidaround diversity being a fact, we're very proud of our fact. we just won a great awardfrom the american association of community colleges for allthe work we do with diversity,
and i love that about highline. but i think that you arebringing another challenge to us, is how can weaddress this topic that we don't know howto talk about on campus. it's really broughtto mind for me what are the thingsthat my future teachers who are going to beworking in the most diverse district in the unitedstates, possibly the world, how are they going toprepare themselves to work
in such diversecommunities, and as we have so many muslim teacherscoming down the road, i ask are public schools preparedto support them in the work that they're going to do? and so i just hope thatfaculty here listening to this really take this isa challenge, and see how we can valueour fact, but also continue to have theseconversations that allow us to learnfrom each other.
so thank you so much foreverything you shared. hey listen, thank you so much. let me just say, asi told skyman there, i've been doingthis for 15 years. and in 15 years i've gottenexactly two community college invitations. one of them was fromthe college i went to. and they knew theycould get me for free because my mom works there.
the other is you guys. so i think that's a big deal. i think that is areally big deal. and i think thatthat is an engagement of a dimension of diversity. it's volatile. the robust engagementof religious identity and diversity issues isa significant challenge. and there's the vast majorityof institutions in your sector
are saying, look, we prioritizeother challenges, which makes a ton of sense to me. but to have you guyswho are willing to take a step out a littlebit and say, we want to look at this,that's why we made this a priority, to come here. and i was telling dr.birmingham earlier it's a gift to us to sitwith you and learn from you, and to get a sense ofhow you are articulating
this challenge to yourselves. is it because of the diversityof your own student body? is it because so manyof you are off to be teachers and nurses, whichi just think is great. i think it's the mostimportant work in the world, and you are going to be workingin hospitals and schools that are highly diverse, which forhindus and for many buddhists when the school orhospital cafeteria says our soup is vegetarian witha little bit a chicken, that
doesn't cut it, right? it might cut it for other folks. but it doesn't cut itfor people for whom that's a religious commitment. like most muslims theywon't take the bacon off. they just won't eat it. and for like amuslim nine-year-old he's probably notgoing to tell you. he's probably justnot going to eat.
so to have a radarscreen for that, and that's what my initialconversation with my dad helped me develop, whichwas a radar screen. i didn't think about religiousidentity and diversity issues. because of college ideveloped a radar screen around race, gendersexuality, ethnicity, class, but i didn't developa radar screen around religiousdiversity issues. and i'm going to be bluntand bold in saying this,
i don't think youcan call yourself an educated personin 21st century america withoutthat radar screen. i just want to thank youvery much for coming here. i got a lot out of what yousaid, and i want to tell you that i really appreciate thefact that you said that america is one of the leadingcountries, one of the finest that isengaging in diversity and religiousdiversity of all kinds.
i want to thank youfor that comment, because i've beenbelieving that same thing, because i'm a personthat watches the news. and america, we have a lotof great organizations here. they are human rights,animal activist people, and everything. and we do try to intervenewith people in other countries are being mistreated if we can. and so i want to thank youfor that, and thank you,
and i'm glad that you camebecause everyone will recognize america's a great country right? i think that there aresuch inspiring parts of the american tradition. actually that's what mybook sacred ground is about. and i think that thechallenge for america has long been and continues tobe will the forces of pluralism defeat the forcesof prejudice, and i don't think that's a battlethat's never put to rest.
it's a battle that'sfought every generation. and we have the chanceto fight it in ours, and i think thatthat's a privilege. so thank you for your comment. hello, my name is latonya,and i'm in student government. thank you forbeing here as well. i wanted to ask you forstudents who are here, as well as studentswho are not here, how do we-- i wrote it down,so let me read it here--
how do we present thistopic mostly for students who aren't present, and doyou have any tools that we can use as students inhaving this conversation, or continuing on thissort of education? yeah, what a great question. thank you for coming today. so i would say i think theinter-cultural center here, my sense is it's going to be thenerve center of a lot of this, and i think having a set ofconversations with natasha
and others aboutwhat set of programs you can create that engagesin a positive way highline's religious diversity. so at ifyc we have somethingcalled the better together campaign. we run interfaithleadership institutes where students can betrained in how to run it, or you can just takestuff off of our website. but it's basically a series ofinterfaith service and dialogue
programs that the arc of whichwe call the better together and the kind of animatingspark of all of it is the question, how doesyour tradition inspire you to serve others? doesn't mean it'sthe only question, but it's a great place to start. and, look, one of thereasons that people stay away from engaging religiousidentity and diversity is because so manyconversations start with,
here's what i hateabout your religion. let me just tell you, that'snot a good way to start. that's interfaith 101. it's still useful to go over. a really good place to startis how does your belief system from secular humanists tozoroastrian, how does it inspire you to serve others? so what about forstudents who maybe don't identify witha specific religion?
yeah, so, i mean,that's why we're so forthright about includingsecular humanists or seekers. from wherever somebodyis my guess is there's a set ofstories or moments that are important inthat person's life. now, perhaps you are like me,and you're a committed muslim, and you come from what's apretty cohesive tradition. and there's koranicstories, meaning stories from the central scripturein islam, the holy koran.
there're stories fromwhat we call the sunnah. the prophet muhammad, may thepeace and blessings of god be upon him. the sunnah is theactions and statements. so you might pull from that. but from whateverbackground you might be from there's probablya set of stories that you keep inyour back pocket that plays a role in your life.
and simply creating the space,and asking the question, hey, tell me whatstories inspire you. and folks from secularhumanist, or seeker, or syncretic backgroundshave just as much of a right to sharetheir story as folks who call themselvescommitted christians, or muslims, or jews, and 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 ofpeople's opinions. and that go againstwhat i believe. and i just want tosee how do i shift from wanting to protect mybelieve to being able to hear their story, and not wantto change their story? thank you for that question. so my view is that somebody'sfaith or philosophical identity ought to be dealt with thesame dimension of sensitivity
as other dimensionsof their identity. now, that doesn't meanthat somebody shouldn't be able to disagree with aphilosophical or belief system. i think that's entirelylegitimate, especially in a college campus. but i think statementslike muslims are evil or christians aredumb, in my view that's like, insert another identityin that, and it's impermissible. in my view that'sthe same thing when
it comes to areligious identity. however, i think that you,or i, or anybody else, we ought to be able to havean intelligent conversation with people who wedisagree with, and ought to have it in a waythat seeks to build a relationship and anappreciative knowledge of that other person'sperspective rather than simply, well, let me tell you whati hate about your system. asking a set of questions,i don't understand this,
or i disagree with that,i think that that's a very differentthing than walking around saying muslims are evil. so i'll tell you a personalstory about this on my count. so i have a muslim family. we're raising our twoboys, aidan and khalil to be muslims, asbest we can at least. and a part of thatis we sent them to catholic school,at least khalil,
catholic preschool right? which, by the way, this isstandard operating procedure for hundreds of millions ofmuslims around the world, in south asia, middleeast, lots of muslims send their kids tocatholic schools. so around eastertime we have a set of serious conversationswith the four-year-old about christology, becausekhalil's preschool teacher, as ought to be the caseat a catholic school,
is teaching the hugely importanteaster event in christianity. jesus died on thecross, was crucified for the sins of thehuman race, and that's how human beings are saved,if you believe in jesus, and particularly theevent of the crucifixion. so we muslims don'tbelieve that, right? we have great reverencefor jesus as a profit, but we do not agree withjesus being the son of god or the event of the crucifixion.
now, i have afour-year-old who's the first adultoutside of his family that he loves is his teacher ms.terris at st. ben's elementary school. i have to articulate ourmuslim identity to khalil around the event of thecrucifixion in a way that doesn't make him think ms.terris is wrong or bad, just that we are different,and my sense is that's a reasonably goodway of thinking about engaging
somebody with adifferent religion. you get to be who you are. we get to be who we are. how do we do it in a waythat builds a relationship, especially at thatreally formative level? i mean, that's how ithink we have learned in different dimensionsof the united states to treat other people'sidentities, to treat other dimensions of identity.
i just think thatsame type of kind of educated sensitivityaround diversity ought to be at play when itcomes to religious identity. i'm next. it's very interestingto me to see you coming from avery positive views and featuring yourinterfaith without commenting on your challengesbeing a muslim or even a different color skin.
did that any way shape you? i mean, acts of faith, myfirst book, a good part of it is that challengingstory, right, for me. and, i mean, i think ishared a little bit of that, like wanting to be white forthe first 15 years of my life, from the age of 2to 17 basically. yeah, that playeda shaping role, but my dad once said to meis like there's no doubt that communities, nations,religions need improvement.
but how are you most likely,eboo, to spark improvement? are you most likelyto spark improvement by telling themhow bad they are? or are you most likelyto spark improvement by articulating an image of whatthey could be when they have been that in thepast, and trying to inspire themin that direction? i guess that alwaysmade sense to me. i mean, that's who i am.
i guess part of thatis just my personality. part of that is,i mean, honestly, at the end of the day whatdo i have to complain about? and meaning i get todo work that i love. i got to start my ownorganization based on something that i believe in. i get invited totalk about issues that i think are important. i get to interface withsuper inspiring students,
extremely engaged faculty. i just ask god to letme keep doing this. thank you so much for yourtalk, and that really brings me to the question of what canwe do in like our action? and oftentimes we see changein an individualized way, and we need to start thinkingin the more collective term. so how do we move intothis religious diversity of moving just beyond froma fact of how we engage? similar when we talk about race.
you know, it's founded on thiswhole idea of white supremacy, and so similarly we look atinstitution or power structure, we are often founded bythis dominant culture of christianity. so how do we see,when united states is almost like aspiritual battleground these days, of when we droveout first nation folks. we kind of really wiped outindigenous spirituality, and now we have this wholeislamophobia along with that.
so, i guess, i'mjust curious to hear from in an institutionof that power structure how do we work withdominant cultures where that narrativeis so strong? so i find that a veryinteresting question. i have multiple responses to it. i guess the first responseis i don't frame it that way. i understand that thatis a framing of it. i am fluent in that framing.
it's not the way that ipersonally choose to frame it, and it's not the way we frameit at interfaith youth core. i'll just tell you a quickstory of how that kind of came to be for me, two quick stories. so the termsprivilege, oppression, colonialism used to bea much more common part of my own lexicon. and i certainlyunderstand why they are part of thelexicon period, right?
my dad once pointedout to me like, look, notre dame university startsin the early mid 19th century, an institution builtin south bend, indiana by french catholicsfor catholics. and they let me in in themid 1970s to do an mba there. and there are 235catholic institutions of higher educationacross america, and you couldprobably count five that are only for catholics.
and, by the way, if you wantto talk about a group that's been oppressed acrossamerican history catholics would bein the top five. the great historianarthur schlesinger jr. once said that the deepestbias in the american people is its anti-catholic prejudice. now, my own view is thatthere's a number of communities, african americans, nativeamericans, lesbians and gays, that would have ashot at that crown,
but catholics wouldcertainly be in the top five. and yet they built a set ofinstitutions that have broadly served the diversity of america. there's 600 catholic hospitalsin the united states. and, again, there'sprobably not 10 that are exclusivelyfor catholics. why am i saying all of this? i'm saying all ofthis because it seems to me that anotherway of framing the issue
is to say how is it thatparticular groups in the united states can keep a senseof pride and particularity in their own identity,and build institutions from their own inspirationthat serve the common good? for me that's amore useful framing. but, i mean, i could dosaid as well as anybody. so i love thatstuff, and it's not that i don't find itintriguing and useful. i will say this.
i was at columbiauniversity, which is a very differentinstitution than this. and all these like uppermiddle class kids talking to me about how they're oppressed,and i'm like, dude, you're not oppressed. like i understandthat guyatri spivak got like a chair in somethinghere, but you're not oppressed. that doesn't mean that growingup brown in staten island wasn't hard.
i get that, but at the endthe day, you're at columbia. like every pakistaniin that country would trade places with you. so stop acting like you're inthe same position as they are. so anyway, the limits ofsaid from my point of view. ok, i just saw the time, and isee we're running out of time. so i'm going to takethe last question, and then for the otherfolks who have questions, you guys can maybetalk to eboo after.
really? ok. all right, then i'lltake the person here. hi, i'd just liketo say that i'm kind of older than mostpeople going to college here. but throughout mylife i've learned that the thingsthat you're saying like when the ladyover here said, her religion, she hada hard time trying
to tell people ornot tell people. it's like the good samaritanstory that you said. you can either be thesamaritan, or you can not be the samaritan. you know, you caneither help or not help, and if you're religious faithhas you to not do for others, or care for others worldwide,just on what they believe in, just love them from the humanaspect of being a human being, then you maybe need tobackup on your faith,
because we haveracism, we have ageism, we have all kind of ismshere going on in life. and throughout life it's easier,and it's a lot more peaceful in your heart to acceptsomeone for who they are. i love that. it's a lot more peaceful inyour heart to accept someone. beautiful. i think we'll leave it at that. thanks everyone.
i'll be signing some books overhere folks that are interested. i loved being here. i'm looking forwardto being with you for the rest of the day.