One of the most important skills of interfaith leadership is to be able to articulate your own religious or nonreligious identity in a way that both affirms your beliefs and builds pluralism.
Interfaith America’s Building Relationship Across Interfaith Difference (BRAID) Fellowship brings student interfaith leaders together to navigate an increasingly polarized landscape and encourages them to explore their own identities.
BRAID also helps students to develop and frame their understanding of interfaith cooperation through the worldviews and values that shape them.
At the 2025 BRAID Fellowship Convening, five fellows shared what wisdom from their religious, cultural, and spiritual traditions inspires them to respect, relate, and cooperate across difference as interfaith bridgebuilders.
The following responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Aleena Malik
University of Michigan
“What brings me to interfaith work is following the actions of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. In Islam, he was a really amazing example of someone who promoted working together with others to live peacefully by engaging in discourse and talking through things. At the end of the day, we’re all humans, and we all have to work together to really advance society, and so I think that inspires me to keep on pushing forward this type of work in my community.”
Avery Usher
Hastings College
“Everyone is a person, and they all deserve to be treated with love and respect. And I think it’s really important to like find connections with people, to be able to actively humanize them.”
Mahnoor Iftikhar
Pacific Lutheran University
“Being able to give people the benefit of the doubt and being able to have uncomfortable conversations, so that you can grow at the end of it and get to know the other person better is important. Creating a brave space, and not a safe space is also significant, because you can’t grow if you’re in a safe space all the time.”
Joel Omanye Thompson
Livingstone College
“In my Christian faith, I believe in service as worship. To love God is to love people…I believe in faith and fellowship, and that’s why I’m here. I do not need you to agree with me, just like I do not need to agree with you. But if we can listen, respect and reflect, maybe, just maybe, we’ll find unity in diversity.”
Kobe Deener-Agus
Washington University in St. Louis
“There’s this idea in Judaism that we really value the dissenting opinion in one of our core texts called the Talmud, which is a parallel text to the Bible. It’s a collection of legal arguments throughout centuries, arguing how to interpret the Bible for everyday Jewish life. And these texts record all these legal arguments, and they go back and forth. And what’s really cool is they actually don’t come to a conclusion about what the text means. They say ‘this school of thought thinks this way, the opposing thought is this.’ And then they go on to the next issue, and the idea that they record and codify the dissenting opinion, and they value disagreeing arguments, I find really inspiring.”
