![\"photograph](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/359\/2013\/06\/6014_117433265972_7155811_n-300x239.jpg\")
For my first trick, I\u2019m providing you all with a somewhat vanilla introductory post about myself.\u00a0 Why? Because as you read this, I\u2019m attending the Religious Leadership Diversity Workshop<\/a> at Hartford Seminary and, therefore, I\u2019m hoping that my second trick will be pretty awesome.\u00a0 Also, we\u2019ve never met and I figure it might be nice for you all to have a sense of who I am.\u00a0 Finally, there\u2019s a snake at the end of this article.<\/p>\n I was born into something of an interfaith family.\u00a0 My mother\u2019s family is Christian while my father\u2019s is Jewish. \u00a0 While my mother converted to Judaism and the religion of my childhood was the same, we would still celebrate holidays and life events in a Christian setting with our extended maternal relations.\u00a0 I actually recall one of the first times that I was in a Christian church and my mother had my sister and I write down anything that we did not understand.\u00a0 Everything from the context of the pictures in the stained glass to the items on the altar to the theological underpinnings of what was going on was fair game, and my mother did her best to fill us in on what it was that we were experiencing.<\/p>\n It was after my Bar Mitzvah<\/em> that I eventually left Judaism.\u00a0 I was invited to read from the Torah and through a series of unfortunate events, I was woefully unprepared to do so.\u00a0 I gave it a shot, made it about six words into the passage, fumbled the seventh, and then burst into tears.\u00a0 At thirteen years old, that\u2019s a major problem and it was likely due, in no small part, to my own embarrassment that I didn\u2019t return to shul for some time.\u00a0 And, it was during that time, that I started reading about other faiths.<\/p>\n I started with Christianity.\u00a0 It\u2019s strange, perhaps, in America to have to learn about Christianity.\u00a0 But, while I was surrounded by Christians and grew up across the street from a Methodist church, I found that I didn\u2019t have much in the way of an understanding of the theology of the religion.\u00a0 From there I\u2013somewhat logically\u2013started to read about Islam.\u00a0 Then, being in high school, I met a nice young woman who just happened to be a Buddhist<\/a>.\u00a0 So, obviously, I started reading about Buddhism<\/a>.\u00a0 While more attractive to me than some of the others, neither the religion nor the young woman stuck.\u00a0 But, eventually, I encountered Paganism and, like she did when I asked her questions about Christianity, it was my mother who purchased for me my first Wicca 101 book, the venerable Cunningham\u2019s Guide to a Solitary Practitioner<\/em>.<\/p>\n The rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been walking a Pagan path for about 15 years now, and I\u2019ve been involved in interfaith efforts for about the last 10 of those.\u00a0 Primarily, I did so first as a member of an undergraduate student organization when I attended school and, later, as a staff adviser to another such organization.\u00a0 Those groups opened doors connecting me to other students of different faiths and of none.\u00a0 Especially as a staff person, I was able to sit on panel discussions not just to educate others about Paganism but also to engage others about the similarities and differences between their faiths and philosophies and my own.<\/p>\n It was through a student organization that I first also began to be involved in interfaith activism.\u00a0 At the time of this writing, my day job is as a professional nerd for the University of Illinois.\u00a0 At Illinois, a student organization named Interfaith in Action brought students together to work on a common cause but also provided them the opportunity to reflect on why they were doing so.\u00a0 Was it motivated by their faith and, if so, why?\u00a0 Or, perhaps it was a more humanistic ideal that led them to help out.\u00a0 Regardless, it helped to create a context for why a person serves and not just how.\u00a0 I was less involved in such efforts than I should have been.<\/p>\n More recently, and with some controversy, I\u2019m exploring the creation of a Pagan chapter for the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy<\/a>.\u00a0 While the terms \u201cinterfaith\u201d and \u201creligious diplomacy\u201d sound synonymous, they\u2019re slightly different.\u00a0 Interfaith efforts often bring people together to find common ground and similarity.\u00a0 But, religious diplomacy, like international diplomacy,works from our differences in an effort to find mutual understanding.\u00a0 I hope to report on these efforts here as time and progress permits.<\/p>\n In closing, I thought I\u2019d rapid fire out some other details about myself.\u00a0 I\u2019m happily married to a Catholic continuing my trend of interfaith relations.\u00a0 She\u2019s a veterinarian which, as you might suspect, means we have pets.\u00a0 10 of them, in fact:\u00a0 2 dogs, 4 cats, and 4 snakes.\u00a0 Yes; snakes.\u00a0 They live in my house.\u00a0 With us.\u00a0 Sometimes, I hold them.\u00a0 I also have tattoos (five at the time of this writing) and one of them is of one of my snakes (pictured).\u00a0 I\u2019m a solitary eclectic and I\u2019ve been using the liturgy of Solitary Druid Fellowship<\/a>.\u00a0 I work primarily with the Hellene cosmology, mostly Prometheus and Eris.\u00a0 Yeah, I\u2019m an Erisian<\/a>; not a Discordian, though.\u00a0 Those dudes are nuts (I keed, I keed).<\/p>\n (I told you there was a snake.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wanting to provide you all with a better understanding of who he is and what experience with interfaith he’s had, Dash introduces himself herein and hopes that you don’t mind the somewhat formulaic nature of his first post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1545,"featured_media":68,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[17,6,16,4,5],"class_list":["post-67","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-david-dashifen-kees-posts","tag-experience","tag-interfaith","tag-introduction","tag-pagan","tag-paganism"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/359\/2013\/06\/312405_10150315985002612_1353693240_n.jpg\")
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