Tips for Socially-Distanced Interfaith Leadership

Gather your friends on Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc. and have people bring a dish they eat during their religious holiday and share a little about it. This spring is full of religious holidays (Ramadan, Easter, Passover, etc.). Now that worship spaces are closed and gatherings are harder to come by, our respective celebrations will necessarily look different. How can we come together and use this as an opportunity for interfaith connection?

Times of crisis bear an emotional weight, so it’s healthy to balance our need to stay updated with communities as religious, ethnic, familial, collegial have a lot of experience in persevering through hard times and even great suffering. Share the music, the stories, the images and even the funny captions that share this kind of resilience and joy for your network. On our end, we’re going to share playlists to bring content to people’s feeds that is intended for pure enjoyment with the bonus of some religious literacy on the side.

You’ve likely seen stories of a rise in attacks against Asian Americans in public spaces. This phenomenon has emerged amidst a broader trend of rising bias incidents (Anti-Jewish, Islamophobic, Anti-Black) in a climate of polarization. While some will act out of fear in this moment, we can continue to tell humanizing stories focused on cooperation and our common good.

The bottom line is this: If you feel called to interfaith leadership, you’re also in the business of building relationships and helping others. That’s what we do. Our individual capacities to give of ourselves during this time will ebb and flow, but if we re-commit to our calling as a collective there will certainly be enough energy to sustain efforts that mark this as a time of true civic pluralism. Share stories of how you are using interfaith leadership in this moment, and we’ll share them via Instagram to build community and continue sharing ideas.

Hannah Minks is a IFYC Program Manager.