IA network members joined StoryCorps One Small Step for 30-minute, one-on-one conversations across lines of difference. These kinds of conversations happen every day among students, co-workers, and family members in America, and the Interfaith Leadership Summit is a space where participants can learn to seek them out with the purpose of respecting diverse identities, fostering meaningful relationships, and cooperating for the common good.
In the full conversation, Drs. Melissa Carter and Kevin Villegas discuss their own faith backgrounds, their journeys to belonging as young adults, and how those experiences inform their work with students.
Growing up in New York City, both Dr. Melissa Carter and Dr. Kevin Villegas searched for belonging.
Villegas, who is now the Dean of Intercultural Engagement and the Division of Student Life Initiatives at Baylor University, described his experience coming from a family that blended his mother’s Dutch Reformed and father’s Filipino Catholic traditions.
“I never felt like I belonged in either of those spaces. So, for me, my whole journey was trying to find belonging,” he said of his upbringing in Queens and Staten Island.
I never felt like I belonged in either of those spaces. So, for me, my whole journey was trying to find belonging.
This search for community continued as his mother became a born-again Christian, he attended a Catholic High School in New York, was a student athlete at Hunter College, joined the Marine Corps, and went to Messiah University in Pennsylvania.
Villegas’ faith evolved as he was welcomed by a Black Baptist church in Harrisburg, PA, attended Fuller Seminary, and now works at a private Baptist university in Texas.
“I’m a Buddhist-informed Catholic Evangelical Charismatic Anabaptist,” he said, explaining how his faith shaped experiences throughout his life. “I probably feel more than any other time in my life the deepest and closest I’ve ever been to God and in my faith now.”
Carter’s faith was also influenced by a plurality of traditions. Her mother’s, a first-generation Jewish American from Belarus, and her father’s, a Black Nigerian Jehovah’s Witness from the Bronx.
“I grew up with not much family around me because of my religion and because my mother was white or because my father was Black,” she said, remarking on her parents’ interfaith and interracial marriage. “I remember growing up really wrestling with belonging as well and have always searched for the deepest form of belonging, which I’ve come to learn is my own belonging.”
She described the loss of both her parents at an early age, moving to Miami, her return to New York after college, and the different careers — in the music industry, as a doula, and as a business coach — that brought her to teaching mindfulness and running the Global Spiritual Life office at New York University.
Throughout hardships and pain, her experiences taught her a lesson that she hopes to pass down to her young son: “his mom didn’t let hate make her hate,” she said. “It made her love.”
His mom didn’t let hate make her hate. It made her love.
For both Villegas and Carter, working as bridgebuilders in higher ed has felt like a “great return” — a vocation shaped by the challenges and opportunities of navigating their identities and spiritualities.
“My job is to help address belonging, particularly for people who are most at risk for being pushed to the margins or moving to the margins,” Villegas said about his role at Baylor. “I feel passionate about that work because of having known and experienced what it’s like to be on the margins.”
For Carter, who ran interfaith programming at NYU and now serves as Interfaith America’s Director of Student Life & Partnerships, bridgebuilding resonates with her story and the same resilience she recognized in Villegas’.
“I have a deep respect for those who choose a different way. We could have both stayed in very different circumstances if we wanted. It would have been a lot easier, and we didn’t. And so, I have a lot of respect for you,” she said.
She’s grateful for the opportunity to serve students, the greater community, and her son as an interfaith leader. “I get to serve and get to represent and model what’s possible. That is one of the greatest blessings of my life.”
Rachel Crowe
Rachel Crowe, Staff Writer for IA Today, tells compelling stories about interfaith cooperation across diverse communities and supports our narrative programming. She is a graduate of Gettysburg College where she earned a BA in English with a Writing Concentration and a German Studies minor.
