Building an Interfaith Dialogue – Eboo Patel

In an exciting and informative workshop, Eboo Patel, an activist for religious pluralism based in Chicago, spoke before an audience of 100 area educators at William Penn Charter School. He defined pluralism as respect for the identity of others, the building of mutually inspiring relationships and engaging in common action for the common good.
Patel started as a teacher in Chicago. His heroes were “people of faith” like Jane Addams, Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama and Mohandas Gandhi. They all shared values that he believes can be found in the religions of the world.
Since 1998, the goal of Patel’s work with the Interfaith Youth Corps has been the creation of  “an educated, intelligent, respectful conversation about religion.” In the 1990s he was disturbed to see that the national conversation about religion was dominated by “aggressive atheists who hate religion and by an industry of religious bigots.” These voices filled the vacuum left in the absence of interfaith education. The goal of his work is to create a “pattern change” in how young people discuss religion and to make them “religiously literate.”
In a demonstration of this goal, in small groups the audience read quotes about service from many world faiths and discussed what they had in common. He sees the themes of mercy, compassion, hospitality and service as common to all faiths. On a practical level, Patel recommends forming interfaith clubs and bringing religious discussions into all facets of the curriculum. Patel’s presentation was an effective call for us to open a new conversation in our diversity work.

Eboo Patel speaks to an audience member after his presentation.

For More Information

Patel’s blog through the Washington Post
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/eboo_patel/

The Youth Corp’s Outreach and Education Page
http://www.ifyc.org/programs/oet 

Click here for Part I an ABC show about the Youth Core
and here for Part II