Katherine Mateo: Dialogue and Progress

From an early age, I learned the importance of dialogue in order to ameliorate a situation. It is a lesson that is taught to many of us very early on in childhood. Nonetheless, it is not a lesson that is sufficiently applied when dealing with topics such as interfaith work and religious conflict. This class has been one of the most rewarding parts of my career as a student, seeing that it took a conflict which throughout history, has seemed to be ubiquitous to civilization, compacted it to be manageable, and allowed a small group of interested college students to deliberate its multiple facets. From this experience, I leave with increased knowledge of the struggle a pluralistic society faces when dealing with religion and a valuable experience in working in the community.

Priya Patel: Much More Than Just A Class

When I first heard about this class, I knew that it was something I had to be a part of. I loved my freshman year at Penn, but I felt like I wasn’t taking advantage of attending such a diverse college. I also felt like I was reaching the “Sophomore Slump”, a time in which I stopped making new friends and seemed to have settled into a predictable and not too exciting lifestyle that year of college. I wanted to bring back that part of me from high school in which I found it easy to connect with people regardless of their religion on a spiritual level, something I thought was difficult in college. 


I remember thinking on the first day of class that it was amazing how diverse our class was especially in terms of academic interest. This was the first time I was not taking a class because of a college, pre-med, or major requirement. Everyone in this class was taking it because they found the subject interesting, and I have found that throughout the course, everyone’s genuine interest in the material we discussed was so important in maintaining the quality conversations we had. We all came from different backgrounds and had different interests; it was amazing to have that opportunity to hear everyone else’s opinions, experiences, and perspectives on situations. 

Zack Tabor - Religious Communities in Cooperation--not just Dialogue

I think that when the class began, I had a rare perspective of interfaith interactions, at least as far as the class is concerned. I think that most of my colleagues joined the course with the community service as their primary focus, and that they expected the interfaith element to be means to that end. In many ways, they were right. I have had a sizeable amount of experience in interfaith work, however, and my experiences had always seemed to suggest something different. I had come to believe that interfaith dialogue always existed at worst as a sort of ‘conference of the religious,’ in which a diverse group of people talked across a room at each other in a very civil, yet disconnected way, and at most, in the ideal, a setting in which individuals of various religious backgrounds come together to really know each other and connect in meaningful ways, and then spread a sort of good faith and understanding outwards in their respective networks. I have had dozens of beautiful experiences such as this, and so I did not feel that a social justice or community action component necessarily had to be a part of an interfaith experience in order for it to work. In many ways, I was right, in that this class was very often a perfect embodiment of everything that I had hoped for on a personal, individual basis from interfaith dialogue.

Meghan Hussey: What's Faith got to do with it? : Reflections on a Semester of Interfaith Action

Religion was something that I knew deep down was an element of my identity that shaped and molded my worldview and my values. It was in college that I really began to own my faith for myself. Church was not something I just did on Sundays because I had to go with my family. Going to Mass and receiving the sacraments was a choice I made because I found that in growing closer to God I could find peace despite the intense pressure of being at an Ivy League school, find direction in my life in times of uncertainty as I have gone through immense changes over the past four years. Though I have not been very involved in explicitly Catholic activities or ministry, I know that many of the choices I have made in my life to be involved with service and social justice work on the local and international levels have been heavily motivated by my faith.

Knowing how important religion has been to me in my own personal journey, I have always been interested in discussing it with my peers.

Thulani Tsabedze - Moving Beyond Tolerance to Understanding

My high school was a community-oriented institution and it always strived to be of great asset to the neighboring communities. As a result, community service was part of the curriculum with a minimum of a hundred hours required in two years for one to be able to graduate. But there was one thing ‘interesting’ about our community service projects – they never included working with churches. In fact, working with churches was not considered community service and didn’t count towards the hours to fulfill this requirement. As a religious fanatic, this has always concerned me. Coming to this class, I was looking forward to the experience of doing community service in religiously diverse community.

Melanie Young: Building Understanding

When I say that I am in a class about interfaith action people’s initial reaction is usually something like “So what is it that you get from taking this class?” My answer is usually “I’ve gotten a whole lot of understanding”. People’s faces almost immediately frown when they find out that my first response to this question is not that it fulfills some type of major or sector requirement. Then I almost immediately try to explain why this idea of building understanding is so important. My knowledge and understanding of why interfaith dialogue/action is important has really developed over the past 12 weeks of this semester.

Mak Hussain - Visions Realized: Flashes of the Future of a Pluralistic American Society

I came to iBelieve looking for the same as I had gotten from my previous interfaith experiences (being both interfaith dialogue and interfaith action). I was very active in interfaith work in high school and community service. For me, interfaith previously presented itself as one of the few opportunities I had in my life to share my faith with others. My faith has always been a big part of my identity, but it’s rare in our society for religion to play a major part of one’s public self-expression. Interfaith was just a chance to share that part of myself with others and to teach them about my faith, with underlying intentions of both stereotype fighting and proselytism. With iBelieve, I was hoping for the same, with the added benefit of community service, which is something that had also been missing recently from my life.

However, upon completing the course, iBelieve has opened my eyes to interfaith and pluralism as immensely beneficial myself as an individual and incredibly important to the development of our society.

Raymond Habbaz - My First Interfaith Experience

For the first 19 years of my life, my interfaith interaction had been kept to a minimum. I grew up in a largely insular religious Jewish community, kept dialogue to only those who accept most of the same principles of faith as I do, and pursued service with only those of the same belief system as my own.

It was with this background that I decided to take advantage of the open atmosphere of college to expose myself to something completely new – a class on Interfaith Dialogue and Action. While service has definitely been an important part of my life, the real push for me to take this class was the discussions and relationships I hoped to build with members of Penn’s interfaith community, centered around our shared desire for dialogue and action.

Lili - McKinley - Discovering New Philosophies in the Class I Did Not Drop - Lili McKinley

Five months ago, I walked into the Greenfield Intercultural Center not really knowing what to expect when I interviewed for the iBelieve Interfaith Action class. Originally I became interested in the class because I thought that part of it was going on a spring break trip to San Diego. As I walked along Chestnut Street, I was surprised by the fact that the building where I was being interviewed was a house and even more surprised that I could take a class in such a cozy atmosphere. I walked to the back of the GIC to the small library and met Steve and Fatima, who were interviewing me. As I spoke to the both of them about the class, I was really impressed by the premise of the class: combining students’ own religious experiences with an academic study of religion in society. Although I soon realized that the class did not actually go to San Diego, I thought that the class sounded pretty cool and it did not hurt to take the class during the add/drop period.

My plans of dropping the class started to wither away after the first couple of class meetings. At the first class, I was yet again impressed.

Sean Massa - How Atheism Strengthened My Christianity

Having gone to a private Christian school for the past 8 years of my life, I can honestly say that my views were fairly sheltered. Christianity seemed to be the norm and every other belief was alien. It was with this same background mindset that I was confronted with the week on atheism in my interfaith course, a week that would be ironically pleasant.

In my high school I knew that a good majority of the public was considered atheist, but my school-bred knowledge of atheism did not go much deeper than that. There was the addition that it was something that was frowned upon in our school, and with these simple premises I had concluded my own views.

The challenge came when our required reading for the week was “God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, a title that initially sent shivers down my spine.

Lisa Doi-Lessons Learned

When I enrolled in iBelieve, I was not sure what I was going to get from the class. I went to high school in the suburbs of Chicago and in my senior year I got to hear Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, speak at an event. It was too late for me to get involved in IFYC programs in Chicago, but it sparked an interest in interfaith communities and interfaith service. This was a community and experience that I looked for, and found, at Penn.

I grew up attending a Jodo-Shinshu Buddhist Temple on Chicago’s north side. It was a very small congregation in a very small denomination of Japanese-American Buddhism. It is a religion closely linked to an ethnic community, but it is an ethnic community that is really facing its declining size and relevance. I knew, coming to Penn, that I would not be able to find a religious community similar to the one I was raised in. Instead of looking for a Buddhist community that might be the closest thing to my own, I wanted to satisfy my spirituality with something completely different, so I looked at interfaith communities.

Kerubo Mokaya - Playing Nice

It’s hard to believe that a whole semester has gone by. I vividly recall the first day; how afraid I was that three hours of class on a Tuesday afternoon would probably be more than I could take. The introductory spectrum exercise in the basement is also still vivid in my mind: and so is the awkwardness, confusion and vulnerability that followed having to answer personal questions in the presence of strangers and acquaintances. Before I knew it, however, I was looking forward to class every Tuesday and engaged in the conversations.

Ben Schneider: How I Learned to Love Interfaith Interaction

I was at an advisory board meeting for the Greenfield Intercultural Center when I decided to participate in iBelieve: Interfaith Service in Action, an Academically Based Community Service course. I first became involved with interfaith dialogue and intercultural interaction at Penn when, on a whim, I decided in my freshman year to participate in Alliance and Understanding—a spring break trip to the American south to learn about Black and Jewish collaboration during the Civil Rights movement. At that time, neither Judaism nor intercultural dialogue were major parts of my life. I’m now a junior, and a lot has changed in my life since that first interfaith experience here. I’ve drifted from Reform to Orthodox on the Jewish observance spectrum, and my friends and my extracurricular commitments have changed as a result. Something that has always stayed constant, both here and before college, was my involvement with community service, and I took this class partially as a way of exploring that commitment.
 
My previous experience with interfaith work has not been very inspiring.