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We are building interfaith America, a nation of people equipped to engage American religious diversity and interfaith bridgebuilding. Explore the latest national news coverage of our work.
Interfaith America
We are building interfaith America, a nation of people equipped to engage American religious diversity and interfaith bridgebuilding. Explore the latest national news coverage of our work.
As polarization and tensions roil college campuses across the country, Cornell University continues taking steps to foster understanding across lines of difference. The university has received three grants from Interfaith America, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes bridge-building across religious and ideological divides.
Fifty dollars for STEM, five cents for citizenship—that’s how America apportions its education dollars. Our beleaguered universities must redress the balance—helping the country and themselves.
In recent years, however, the most significant shift has happened not on the right but in the center and on the left, as leaders who once embraced D.E.I. have come to doubt the way it has been carried out. Patel, the Interfaith America president, who describes himself as an Obama liberal, blames the backlash on the “anti-oppression” strain of D.E.I., which emphasizes the marginalization of minority groups.
For nearly 250 years, Americans of diverse identities have worked to build a more perfect union based on founding values and ideals rather than race, religion, nationality or creed. Building unity from diversity is also our story as members of the Vote Is Sacred Fellowship, convened by Interfaith America, for leaders of faith and conscience to encourage peaceful democratic engagement and social trust.
As democracies around the world are tested and polarization becomes ever more pervasive, President Barack Obama concluded the third annual Democracy Forum by calling on attendees to build bridges across differences and renew their commitment to pluralism—by focusing on “we” instead of “us and them.”
Rebecca Russo, Interfaith America’s vice president of higher education strategy, said that while there is a story of increased divisiveness and polarization on college campuses that mirrors the national landscape, “it’s not the full story.”
Patel’s approach to fostering this cooperation is pluralism, which he defines as “an ethos that is about respect for diverse identities, relationships between different communities and cooperation on concrete projects for the common good.” As the leader of Interfaith America, the country’s largest such organization, as well as a University of Utah impact scholar, Patel has spent years promoting this vision.
Interfaith America’s Bridging the Gap project is training students on college campuses across the country. Students learn how to engage with people that they disagree with — sometimes deeply. They learn that bridge building isn’t about judgment or blame or trying to get the other side to take responsibility for the problem. It’s about being open and curious about the other person’s experiences.
Eboo Patel has a vision for colleges and universities embroiled in fights over race, gender, sexuality, and, more recently, the war in Gaza.
The founder and president of Interfaith America, which tries to help institutions, groups, and people find common ground, wants to make “pluralism” central to a liberal-arts education at colleges across the country.
About 140 college and university leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday for a conference on fostering campus pluralism in response to ongoing student conflicts over the Israel-Gaza war and rising antisemitism and Islamophobia nationwide.
The event, called “Advancing Campus Pluralism: Building Bridges Across Difference,” was hosted by Interfaith America, an organization focused on religious diversity, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
“We are striving to build a ‘potluck nation’ where all Americans bring the best of their identities to the table for a shared feast,” said Interfaith America Founder and President Eboo Patel. “Of course we will disagree on some things, but that should not prevent us from working together on other things. Team Up encourages respecting people’s diverse identities, building relationships between different communities, and cooperating on concrete projects with common aims.”
Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith America, which over the past 20 years has worked on about 1,200 campuses to narrow toxic divides and build bridges between people of all faiths or no faith. Over these decades, he has concluded that far from creating a healthier, more equitable campus, this ideology demonizes, demeans and divides students. It demeans white people by reducing them to a single category — oppressor. Meanwhile, it demeans, for example, Muslim people of color, like Patel, by reducing them to victims.
Founder and President of Interfaith America, Eboo Patel‘s publications, interviews, and appearances include The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN, among many others. To inquire about media engagements, reach out to Teri Simon.
We know diverse democracies depend on acts of service by diverse groups of people. Let’s do the good we can in the time we have, knowing our acts of decency lift people up today, and set the stage for a better tomorrow.
Right now, the United States faces a crisis of polarization and division and urgently needs more collaboration and cooperation across differences. To better serve the nation and improve themselves, universities need to become laboratories and launching pads for pluralism, because, ultimately, as Brooks taught us, “we are each other’s business.”
In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ JD Vance wrote he felt enriched by diversity at Yale Law School. Every college student should experience how pluralism is patriotism.
An upswell of interfaith cooperation on issues such as immigration offers valuable lessons on what effective diversity work looks like.
We have to make sure that across this country, people of diverse backgrounds are respecting each other’s identities, building relationships across communities and cooperating with one another.
Antiracism and its close cousin intersectionality were the conceptual canopy that allowed participants in those diversity workshops to spend far more time discussing the various ways they were oppressed and accusing other people of being oppressors than they did sharing stories of the meaning and inspiration they derived from their own ethnic, religious, or racial identities.
The regular people who worked at my local Y showed me how everyday institutions can bridge divides and level the playing field.
Interfaith America staff and members of our Emerging Leaders network offer a wealth of stories and perspectives on engaging religious diversity, both on campus and beyond. Visit our Magazine for more pieces by our staff.
As we grow more dependent on the media to tell us who we are, creativity becomes an imperative to tell a different story — one that inspires instead of divides.
Unum doesn’t erase conflict or pretend we all agree. It’s not utopia. It’s the hard, daily work of choosing coexistence over chaos.
We need the best and brightest of physicians and researchers to help sustain our leadership in health care and other scholarly fields.
We can be a country that remembers its founding promises. Or we can slide quietly into an unknown American age where speech is punished, dissent is surveilled and fear replaces freedom.
To upend some of the real challenges that plague our democracy, we have to start with simply humanizing one another.
What if we built institutional cultures where both intentions and impact matter – where we take seriously the impact of prejudice while assuming that those who perpetuated it can learn and grow?
By radically listening to their story and acknowledging their hurt, skipping the preaching, and trusting them to grow— Shaner offers an encouraging example of how we can bridge intractable divides.
We’ve been sold a bill of goods that we’re more divided than ever, that somehow, someway, we are heading towards a second Civil War. I don’t believe it, and it doesn’t have to be the outcome.
Learning to bridge differences is more than a set of skills. It’s a way of life.
Rising prejudice and polarisation are pressing issues in American civic life, and they may have a shared solution: colleges and universities making pluralism a central principle in campus life. Campuses ought to be models for pluralism and launching pads for leaders who can lead in an increasingly divided nation and world.
In this moment, campus professionals and students must lead with care, creating space to honor the distinctive pain of both Israelis and Palestinians.
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