“In Good Faith”

Some good listening from Brigham Young University:

Dr. Eboo Patel, Interfaith Youth Core

Author and activist Dr. Eboo Patel is nationally and even internationally known for his interfaith work on college campuses as the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, but as a young man, religion wasn’t even on his radar. 

In this interview we’ll follow his path back to faith and to interfaith work, and why he feels it’s important enough to devote his life to it. If you’ve ever wondered what interfaith work is or why it should matter to you, please take a listen.

The interview is followed by a panel discussion with four Chaplains who serve people of all faiths or no faith, in college, hospice, prison, and a police department, and how they have seen interfaith relationships strengthen people and communities. 

There’s also a link below to a video of Dr. Patel’s recent address at BYU on the purpose and the history of interfaith work in the US.

Click the link to watch the video of Dr. Eboo Patel speaking on interfaith work at BYU conference. He is introduced at 21:12 into the video.

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From The Economist:

“Liberté, egalité, laïcité: Western governments are telling Muslim women not to cover up: State secularism and personal freedom clash over the hijab and the burkini”

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“Economic growth slowed by dramatic global decline in religious freedom: Two billion more people live in countries with high restrictions on religious freedom than did so just a decade ago.”

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I’m grateful to Matthew Wheeler for calling my attention to this item out of France:

“Muslims in Paris show solidarity with Christians over Notre-Dame fire: Sunni and Shia Muslims take part in an interfaith gathering organized by Efesia, a Christian movement working for reconciliation among communities”

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In an age of increasing fragmentation, not only between cultures and civilizations but, sadly, within them, articles like this one seem to me extremely important:

“Explainer: what Western civilisation owes to Islamic cultures”

The notion that cultures are plainly separate and distinct, hermetically sealed off from one another, is transparently false, as anybody who actually knows any world history must recognize.  It’s surprisingly common, though — and is nicely illustrated in, among other places, the weird charges of “cultural appropriation” that have recently been tossed around by crackpot leftist activists.  Of course cultures “appropriate” each other’s “products” — their words, ideas, foods, clothing, music, art, and so forth.  They trade.  They exchange.  They observe.  Of course they do.  They always have.  They should.  That’s how they (and we) learn and grow.  To think otherwise is either ignorance or madness or some combination of the two.