‘Daring to Understand One Another’: The Story of Interfaith Philadelphia

It is fitting that an organization of the ethos of Interfaith Philadelphia plant in this place, as the city and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at large has been a space of relative religious liberty from the start. Founded by William Penn, a Quaker, the city from its earliest decades has been a home for those seeking to acknowledge and practice their faith or spirituality in their own special way. Early inhabitants not only came from overseas but even from other American colonies, where religious liberty was more tenuous. 

That spirit bore fruit in the mid-20th century when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to study in the Philadelphia area. He writes in “Stride Toward Freedom,” “One Sunday afternoon, I traveled to Philadelphia to the 

Fellowship House at Broad and Girard to hear a sermon by Dr. Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard University. Dr. Johnson had just returned from a trip to India and spoke of the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.” 

Inspired by this history and the current bountiful spiritual environment, Interfaith Philadelphia facilitates programming for all ages. Youth participate in our Walking the Walk program for middle and high school students, visiting each other’s sacred spaces and learning the art of curious questions. Our Mosaic program over the summer engages students at the intersection of faith and the arts. For years, college students have been doing service projects and reflecting on the impact of their value traditions during Alternative Break. 

A broader audience explores faith and the arts with the Rev. John B. Hougen in Art of Interfaith Understanding. During our inaugural session of our Dialogue: Face-to-Face series, a Jew and Muslim shared how their faith traditions hold space for disagreement and how that can inform interfaith conversations or wider discourse across society. 

Mostly recently Interfaith Philadelphia has been developing partnerships. A partnership with the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice comes together in the Executive Program for Faith and Social Impact Certificate. Most currently, Interfaith America and Interfaith Philadelphia are collaborating on Foundations LIVE: the curated synchronous offering of Interfaith America’s course, Foundations of Interfaith Leadership. 

The totality of these programs and the heartset that inspires these initiatives can be summed up in Interfaith Philadelphia’s motto, Dare to Understand. By taking a step towards and outstretching an arm we understand others and in turn ourselves better. And knowing ourselves better has deeply impactful implications. A saying of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) translates as, “Whosoever knows themself knows their Lord.” 

In the early 1980s our family moved to suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. Our neighbors were the Iyers, an Indian Hindu family, and the Tontonis, an Italian Catholic family. We got to know each other over food, conversation and yard work. The Tontoni’s stepped into the role of grandparents as mine were a world away. I developed a taste for homemade pizzelles but more importantly, an appreciation and respect for Catholicism via their home that was meticulously adorned with symbols of their faith. For me, their home and company were a place of thoughtful advice and the occasional universal moral lesson. Without knowing it, we were all daring to understand one another.