Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, the next in our series of conversations at the intersection of faith and public life. We have with us today someone who is a young and very exciting voice coming out the American Muslim community but speaking to whole array of religious traditions with a wonderful vision of how the faiths can come together. Eboo Patel is the founder and executive director of an international nonprofit called the Interfaith Youth Corps which we are going to hear more about in just a minute. He is also a former Rhodes Scholar who earned his doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University and he has authored a very fine memoir called Acts of Faith that has been endorsed by all sorts of people such as President Clinton and Sojourners’ Jim Wallis. By the way, he is also a blogger these days on a blog hosted by some of our friends at the on faith blog in collaboration between the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine. Eboo, it’s wonderful to have you with us today. Thanks for making time for it.

Mr. Patel: It’s wonderful to be here. Thank you.

Dean Lloyd: Well tell us about this Interfaith Youth Corps . Your memoir introduces a whole context for why you create it by let’s start with what it is and what your hopes are for it and then we’ll dig back into it a little bit.

Mr. Patel: Sure, well, the Interfaith Youth Corps is the heart of what we hope to be a global youth movement of young people from different faiths coming together to build understanding and to serve others. I’m from the great city of Chicago and in that city in 1893 there was an event called the parliament of the world’s religions and the person who closed that event spoke these words that from now on the great religions of the world would make war no longer on each other but on the giant ills that afflict humankind and we at the Interfaith Youth Corps see it as our mission to really advance that idea in the world and to train people to take action on that idea so that they can start there own interfaith tutoring programs and their own interfaith house building programs, their own interfaith environmental programs and then to network the young leaders that we’re training around the world into this global interfaith youth movement that can make war on the giant ills that afflict humankind.

Dean Lloyd: The parliament of faith’s 1893 took a long time to get something going didn’t it? How was it that you picked up that vision and began to make it your own, what caught your imagination there?

Mr. Patel: Well, I think first of all growing up as a Muslim in America in the western suburbs of Chicago –

Dean Lloyd: In Glen Ellyn…

Mr. Patel: In Glen Ellyn, right, one of the things that was just a fact of my life was that I had friends from all different backgrounds. At my lunch table in high school, there was a Nigerian Evangelical, a Cuban Jew, a South Indian Hindu, a Lutheran, a Mormon, and a Catholic and it just, that was just the way for us. And I think that that fact of my life was contrasted as I was paying attention to the news in the 1990s and noticing the amount of religious violence in the news. In the 1990s in so many ways was a decade of religious violence. The first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin the Israeli prime minister in ’95, the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics in ’96, the emergence and growth of Al Qaeda, India and Pakistan exploding nuclear bombs which had a religious connotation and I thought to myself if people from different religious backgrounds can seem to get on just fine at my lunch table, why is it that I keep on seeing a different story in the world, a story of religious violence in which young people are often at the front lines of that violence. I think I recognize something else at that time also which is that so many of my heroes and these are a lot of our heroes – Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Jane Adams, Desmond Tutu … the Dalai Lama, they were young people who had started movements for interfaith cooperation, and so I started asking myself the question in the late 1990s kind of in my early 20s what would it take to start a movement that would make the kind of positive relationships at my lunch table and these prior great chapters in world history a reality in the early 21st century.

Dean Lloyd: You speak quite a bit in your memoir about people who have gone off track the wrong why for whom religion has become a destructive force. Your book opens with Eric Rudolph, who is the bomber at the Atlanta Olympics, whatever year that was, and you ponder his life and the choices that ended up being the choices he made. Say something about what’s the parable in that story, what is it that story says to you.

Mr. Patel: I think it’s a pretty simple story, and the question is who is getting to young people first. This is a religious violence in the world is largely a solvable problem and it’s a problem of influences, institutions and leadership. Eric Rudolph had a whole set of influences in his life which guided him towards religious extremism. It’s the same in the case of young Muslim extremists; it was the same in the case of Yigal Amir, the young Jewish extremist who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. And so the question we ask at the Interfaith Youth Corps is, how can we catalyze a set of positive influences in the lives of young people around the world so that there faith moves them in the direction of interfaith cooperation as opposed to religious extremism. And let me just offer a little bit of sociological context for this right now. We live in a profoundly young era. 85% of the Palestinian territories is under 33. The median age in Iraq is 19.5. There are more children in India then are citizens in the United States as a whole. We also live at a time of a religious revival and so Hinduism in India, Islam in the Middle East and in countries like Indonesia and Nigeria, Pentecostalism is sweeping across Latin America. I think a third fact is we live at a highly interactional moment in human history, the most interactional moment we’ve ever seen on the planet which is to say that more people from different backgrounds are coming into contact with each other than ever before. And so what you effectively have is somewhere on the order of three billion young people asking themselves the question, what does it mean to be an Indian Hindu, or an Israeli Jew or an Egyptian Muslim amidst all of these other people on the planet. And that is, that’s a profound question and that a very complex territory. And what we can’t do is forfeit that unbelievably profound energy to people who would make human bombs of these young people. We can’t forfeit those three billion young people on the planet into the arms of the Meir Kahane’s movement in the Middle East or Hamas or Al Qaeda or the Christian Identity movement. We have to make sure that we are influencing those young people in a direction that says my Indian Hinduism, my American Evangelisms, my Egyptian Islam commands me to be in positive relationship with you to serve the planet. It’s a solvable problem and, in fact, if we get it right, we energize and mobilize remarkable generation of young people to make things better on the planet.

Dean Lloyd: You describe a kind of faith line that runs between religious totalitarianism on one side and religious pluralism on the other. What do you think it is that tilts things one way or another for these young people?

Mr. Patel: Let me say a word or two about this idea of the faith line because I think its such an important concept for our century. I get this notion from a great line by W. E. B. DuBois, the great African American scholar who said that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line. And most people…

Dean Lloyd: The problem of what?

Mr. Patel: Would be the problem of the color line.

Dean Lloyd: The color line, yeah.

Mr. Patel: Right, he wrote this in 1906 and most people looking at that statement assumed that the color line separated black and white or yellow and red or Easterner and Westerner. But Martin Luther King, Jr. came around a half century later and said no, no, the color line separates those who live together as brothers and those who would perish together as fools. He did the most profound thing you can do which he redefined the situation. And if you pay any attention to the evening news, or the morning newspaper, you see people killing each other to the soundtrack of prayer – the Middle East, Northern Ireland, West Africa, sometimes in Middle England and Middle America. And so you ask yourself the question, as the color line clearly remains still with us, what is the faith line going to mean in the 21st century and I think the biggest mistake we can make is to get the definition of the faith line wrong, is to assume that it means Christian versus Muslim or secular versus believer, or Abrahamic versus non-Abrahamic. I think the first thing we have to do is get the definition of the faith line write and that is as King said, those who would live together as brothers versus those who would perish together as fools. We at the Interfaith Youth Corps call these religious pluralists versus religious totalitarians and I have a one line simple definition of each. A religious pluralist is somebody who wants to build a society where people from all backgrounds live together in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. A religious totalitarian is somebody who wants only their group to dominant and everyone else to suffocate. The fact is there are Muslim totalitarians, there are Christian totalitarians, there are Jewish totalitarians, there are Hindu totalitarians and there are Muslim pluralists, Jewish pluralists, Hindu pluralists, Christian pluralists. And I think the question is how can those of us who are on the side of pluralism, and that’s the vast majority of humankind, how do we make our case compelling and clear to a generation of young people who are growing up and standing on the faith line.

Dean Lloyd: And how do you find access, I would think, to help them claim the teachings and texts of tolerance in each tradition because there clearly there in all of them, but they may be suppressed in some of the ways they’ve heard it.

Mr. Patel: Right, well, the way we do this at the Interfaith Youth Corps is through action. So we train people around the world to start their own interfaith action projects and bring young people together, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, to build a house. Then we ask those young people what is it from your religious tradition that inspires you to do this? And its remarkable how profound young people can be as theologians when they are speaking in the context of action. You will get these amazing stories about what inspires them to serve others. Let me just give you one, was by a young man on the north side of Chicago and I was leading an interfaith discussion after an action project and it was coming up to Christmas and I said to him Tarik tell me, you know, we’re coming up to Christmas. It’s a time when you as a Christian are thinking more of your faith. What is it from your religion that inspired you to do this action projects we just did and his response was, well as Jesus was a gift to us at Christmas, so must we be gifts to other people. And that’s…he taught so much about Christianity to those Jews and Muslims and Buddhists at that moment but I think he also reconnected to his own tradition in a different way and I think that’s one of the most profound things about interfaith encounter, is how it encourages people to reconnect with their own tradition.

Dean Lloyd: You’re traveling a lot around to campuses, college campuses, especially these days. Tell us what it would be like for you to enter into a campus. What would you try to do in the course of a weekend or a week or whatever your time is there?

Mr. Patel: Right, that’s a great question. So at the Interfaith Youth Corps we really do three things and each of these elements is exhibited at one of our campus visits. The first thing is we articulate the idea. What would it look like to build religious pluralism. I was just with my friend and your friend and former conversation partner Brian McLaren and he talks about what he does in his work in Christian speaking and theology is he puts out there a new reference point for people. So the first thing we would do at a campus is give a big keynote address to hundreds of students and faculty and staff about what an interfaith youth movement could look like. And we talk about the 1893 parliament of the world’s religions and we talk about the faith line and we talk about the role of young people in the civil rights movement and we say we could build this in this century. Do you want to be a part of it? And the next day a group of those young people come back and we train them. We train them in what we think is the trinity, if you will, of the interfaith youth movement. The first part of that trinity is perspective. You have to have a perspective of a faith line that doesn’t divide Muslim from Christian, but that divides pluralists from totalitarian. You have to read the New York Times through that framework. The second thing we train them is a knowledge base. Do you know the texts of your own faith that inspire you to come together with others? Do you know the shared values that cut across faiths? The third thing that we do is train them in a skill set. Do you have the concrete skills to bring people from different backgrounds together in a common project and to facilitate a conversation about there faiths? So we would run a training on that perspective, knowledge base and skill set of interfaith youth cooperation. And the final thing we do is say there are young people like you at campuses and in cities and in communities across the world and we want you to be connected to them. The heart of a movement is a network and so we’re putting those young people on those campuses into this global network of young people around the world who are starting their own interfaith service projects and we have a wonderful website for this called the Bridge Builders website where these young people share the projects that their running and they ask each other questions, you know, how do you deal with this challenge or how do you get funding for this, or we’re trying to get media for our project, does anybody have any ideas? And so that’s what a campus visit looks like. It’s really the Interfaith Youth Corps in concentrate.

Dean Lloyd: And so you think the most effective way for it is not simply by sitting and talking and discussing texts but actually working together. That seems to be where things start happening.

Mr. Patel: Well, I think it was St. Francis who said, preach the Gospel, if necessary use words. Right. So, I think that it’s important to preach interfaith cooperation but only after you have shown what it looks like in concrete.

Dean Lloyd: And you help them in training every tradition has its dangerous texts, its destructive texts, its exclusive texts. You actually work in your training to help the people who will be the leaders to talk about those texts and help them to think about well in our tradition, no one comes to the father but by me is a text that has caused a lot of complex conversation among Christians and it’s one that’s pointed to a lot as one of the exclusive texts. The question is do you get into that kind of theological reflection with them?

Mr. Patel: Right, the answer is no, and I’ll tell you why. We have a lot of respect for and deference to what we call the private space of a religious community. And frankly, it’s not my business as the leader of an interfaith organization or as somebody whose not part of the Christian tradition to suggest to a Christian how they should view a particular text, what their interpretation should be. You should only, I’m the way, the truth and the light. What we want to do is to say part of what religious should be about in the public square is coming together with people from different backgrounds to build understanding and to serve others. That doesn’t mean that your theology has to change…

Dean Lloyd: You just jump right over the texts?

Mr. Patel: No, it’s not that. It’s making salient the dimensions of a tradition which encourage cooperation and understanding in the public square an a recognition that traditions are internally complex and even sometimes to the quote-unquote rational mind contradictory but that it is the place of people within that tradition…Dean Lloyd, that would be a conversation you would have with a young Christian, say how would I interpret this text. That’s not an appropriate conversation for me to have. It is appropriate, I think, for an organization to say America will be stronger if people from different backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, are engaged positively with each other in the public square. That doesn’t mean that the way you worship in church changes, that doesn’t mean even that your theology changes. It just means that you also work with others.

Dean Lloyd: So you’re really highlighting that dimension of every dimension of every tradition that is clearly there in each tradition…

Mr. Patel: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Dean Lloyd: Inviting them to live out of that. Let’s step back for a minute and talk a little bit about you as an American Muslim. Growing up in Glen Ellyn which is a very, I would think, protestant part of Chicago…

Mr. Patel: Except for my lunch table it would appear….

Dean Lloyd: That’s right. What has been like for you being an American Muslim and your book…your memoir says, on a spiritual journey of your own from various ways of relating to your own various traditions and your background and finding your way toward reclaiming your own faith.

Mr. Patel: Right, well, I mean, the book tells stories about my earlier life in junior high and high school which were quite challenging as far as being a person of dark skin and a different religion in a suburb outside of Chicago and people are very welcome to read that, but what I really want to talk about right now is how for the last ten years of my life being a Muslim in American has been almost exclusively empowering and there’s many reasons for that. Number one, religion in America is so vibrant and religions in America are so vibrant. We’ve had so many remarkable religious figures in this country who have inspired people beyond their own faiths and so I take so much of my inspiration from the Catholic hero Dorothy Day, the Muslim hero, Muslim scholars in America like Fazlur Rahman at the University of Chicago, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Joshua Heschel and I think that America encourages us to take inspiration from others and to ask the question what would it look like for Islam to learn from Christianity in America and to create new expressions, new modes of being in this century. And so through my friendships with people like Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren and others, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, I am learning and we Muslims are learning an enormous amount about building a Muslim community in America that can contribute to this country, be authentically Muslim and be authentically 21st century. My friend and mentor Imam Feisal Abdul-Rauf said that Catholicism changed when it came to America, and Judaism changed when it came to America, and he sees Islam doing the same and I fully agree with that.

Dean Lloyd: In what way do you see it changing?

Mr. Patel: Well, one of the interesting things to think about Islam in America is this is the most diverse Muslim community that exists then has ever gathered in a single polity in human history. Frankly, outside of the Hajj which is the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, there is no place on earth where more Muslims from different backgrounds gather. Shiites and Sunnis, African Americans and Arab Americans, Sufis and Salafis, and one of the things that’s happening right now in Islam in America is building what I call a big tent Islam which recognizes that it is a sociological whole with internal theological differences, but that we don’t play the game of denouncing other people outside of the tent because they for example might Shiite and we are Sunni or they are Sufi and we are Salafi. We recognize that we are a whole community, and that a big part of what this community is about is contributing to the country that we’re in and I believe that I saw my friend Idan here who leads the Muslim Public Service Network, is she here? There she is. And much of what is emerging out of young Muslims right now is from the program that Idan which gathers about 20 remarkable young Muslim college students every summer do to service work here in DC and these are young Muslims from all different backgrounds and then those young people, and they build this kind of small version of a big tent Islam under Idan’s watchful eye every summer, and then the go out and they become program officers at foundations, they become leaders in mosques. They become founders of NGOs and they take that spirit of a big tent Islam which can contribute to the culture and place in which it is in and they start spreading it around the country and you’re seeing more and more of that happen and the Interfaith Youth Corps very much absorbs that ethos of how can we take what’s happened in American Catholicism and American Judaism and currently happening in American Islam and make that kind of an interfaith phenomenon also.

Dean Lloyd: Now the different traditions are engaged in conversation with each other at the leadership level or is it mostly at the local level?

Mr. Patel: Yes. Yes. Absolutely and you know one of the other things that I think to say about this is that America has been blessed really with the best Muslim scholars in the Western world. And many of these interestingly are white and black converts to Islam which means that they absorb Islam into their American ethos so to speak. Now I’ll tell you a funny story about this. I was doing a talk maybe six months ago here in DC and one of the people in the audience was Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, who is perhaps the most celebrated Muslim theologian not only in America but in perhaps the whole Western world and I quoted Woody Guthrie in that talk. I said, “I’ve been all around the world. I’ve seen lots of funny men. Some will kill you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen.” And sheik Hamza came up to me afterwards and said, “It’s not kill with a six-gun; it’s shoot with a six gun. You misquoted Woody Guthrie.” And just think about that. This person who speaks Arabic perfectly, who spent many, many years in West Africa, who has a television show in Saudi Arabia, who is looked to by literally hundreds of thousands of young Muslims across the world as kind of an authoritative figure in Muslim law and theology, can quote obscure lines from Woody Guthrie, because at heart he is an American and a Muslim and I think what these set of Muslim theologians show, Dr. Omar Abdullah, Ingrid Madsen, Sherman Jackson, several of these people, is not only a way of being American and Muslim in the same being which some people seem to think is impossible, but they also articulate a Muslim inspiration to advancing the American project. So you will hear Dr. Omar who is probably the most senior of these Muslim theologians, or you’ll hear Ingrid Madsen talk about how vibrant a place America is for Muslim life precisely because it’s a vibrant place for Jewish life, and Protestant life, and Catholic life and Agnostic life as well. And so we’re really blessed with that set of theologians and they do come from different spiritual and intellectual and theological strands within Islam and I think that collectively they kind of form this community of believers with theological differences but with a common vision for Islam in America.

Dean Lloyd: I want to ask one more question and then open it up to you all in the audience so you can be thinking of what you’d like to ask Eboo Patel. A question about the place of American Muslims now five…seven years after 9/11. Soon after that there was a lot worry about Muslims being treated as the other in America even as American Muslims, do you think the country has moved beyond the kind of trauma of that time and the kinds of perceptions that became part of it then?

Mr. Patel: I think the jury’s still out. But the jury can be influenced and I think that this is a really important concept for us to absorb is that there…you know, Milton Freedman, the University of Chicago economist who was kind of the guru of the free market, some of his theories are being questioned right now, I understand, but he has a line that I think is very instructive and he says that only a crisis produces change, and the change that occurs in a crisis is the one driven by the ideas that happen to be lying around. So here’s our question. In the crisis of a post…a September 11th chapter in American and global history, what are the ideas that are lying around about religious diversity and interfaith cooperation? One idea is that your Muslim neighbor is the enemy and you should be afraid of your Muslim car mechanic, your Muslim doctor, your Muslim small business owner. That’s incidentally a lot of people to be afraid of. There are somewhere between three and eight million Muslims in America. I think I hesitate to say this in this wonderful Cathedral but I think that’s even more than the number of Episcopalians in America, but you do have much more beautiful buildings in this country.

Dean Lloyd: Everybody beats up on us…

Mr. Patel: No, no, no…. I don’t know where Muslims would be if it wasn’t for Episcopalians, honestly, both in the United Kingdom and in here. But I think the point that I’m trying to make is there are a lot people who are trying to put out the idea of a faith line that separates Muslims from Christians. And I want to give you and example of this just because I think we have to know about these things. Recently, a group sent 28 million copies of a film called Obsession to people in swing states as an insert in their Sunday newspaper and the message of the film is effectively your Muslim neighbor is the enemy, be afraid of your Muslim doctor. We got a call at the Interfaith Youth Corps from a pastor colleague of ours in the Midwest who said my church has let our basement be used by a Muslim group for sometime now so that they could pray on Fridays and last Monday I got a barrage of phone calls saying why are letting dangerous people use our church? And I’m like going this was never a problem before, what happened? Well they had received copies of this film in their Sunday newspaper. And the point that I’m making is that other people are trying to put their ideas of fear your Muslim neighbor into the culture. We have to put our idea of America as a beloved community, of a city on a hill where the steeple, the temple, the synagogue, the gurdwara, the minaret, they come together as a model of interfaith cooperation for the world and that’s what we’re trying to do at the Interfaith Youth Corps and I really think that we can win this. And what I mean by that is that hope can beat fear. The idea that we’re building pluralism and that’s the vast majority of humankind and we’re marginalizing the small minority of extremists, that vision has every chance of winning but we have to invest in that vision. We have to invest in that and we have to realize we’re not dealing on neutral territory. Other people are very much investing in a vision of fear and a vision of extremism and a vision of division and we can’t let them win.

Dean Lloyd: Thank you. Question.

Q: First I’d like to encourage the audience to get in line, there’s about…I’d like to ask 20 questions. I don’t always want to be the first one but it seems to be that way. Second, you make the point in your book that you wrote because a lot of people are susceptible to fundamentalists as adults because their family and religious institution didn’t really inculcate the authentic core of their faith when they were children. All families are somewhat dysfunctional. Do you think that religious institutions in their, not only in their own interests of strengthening involvement with their faith, but in helping avoid fundamentalism later, should do things to strengthen the family and strengthen the family’s connection with the religious institution in the core of their faith?

Mr. Patel: Dean Lloyd, are religious institutions more functional than families?

Dean Lloyd: There’s enough dysfunction to go around.

Mr. Patel: I wonder was it Chekhov or Tolstoy who said that every happy family is happy in the same way every unhappy is unhappy in a different way. I wonder if maybe there is a sociologist see if it applies similarly to religious institutions. Absolutely. I think family is absolutely at the heart of any society. As somebody who had a son, you know, recently, I certainly, I have a fuller understanding of family. An understanding which involves a lot of hide-n-seek and chasing my son behind a couch these days, and I think that one of the areas in which religious institutions understand as a key priority is making sure that they are a place where families feel welcome and strengthened and are provided a vision which they can then pass down to the next generation and that’s certainly how my wife and I experience the Muslim communities that we’re apart of.

Q: Thank you, Eboo, very inspirational comments. I have a quick question. What is the youth line? What’s the cut off when you’re no longer youthful? But the second one is that I’m sometimes shocked reading the comments that come on your blog. There’s a tremendous well of fear and bitterness and I wonder how that affects the people in the Interfaith Youth Corps and you? How do you deal with what remains, I think, a current of unhappiness and bitterness about particularly Islam?

Mr. Patel: So thank you for those questions. What we say at the Interfaith Youth Corps is there are probably somewhere in the realm of three billion people under 30 on the planet with some connection to a religious tradition. And then there are…the rest of the planet cares about those three billion people, so we want to work with everybody in that regard. We spend a lot of our time with people who work with young people – teachers, pastors, counselors – who are asking the question how do I create programs that involve young people from different faith backgrounds to serve others or how do I do faith formation in my community so that it involves this element of interfaith cooperation. So we, you know, we I would say on a 25-person staff on any given day, our staff is in five different parts of the world. Right now we I have I think Brussels, Dar es Salaam, I’m in Chicago, I mean I’m in DC, sometimes I don’t know what city I’m in anymore, but I think we have a big program going on in Chicago this weekend and I would say probably 60% of those people are under 30 and 40% are over 30 so we’re constantly working with people on both sides of the youth line to strengthen how this new generation can view interfaith cooperation. And the question of how we view comments on our blog, my blog, and by the way I write this blog for the Washington Post called the faith divide which you can Google and it will come write up and I write a couple times a week and we have actually a youth guest voice every week also and I think that my friends Sally Quinn and David Waters and his wonderful wife are here and they run that website. It’s really, it’s a remarkable discussion of religious thinkers and leaders on the big faith issues of our time and I’m just I’m privileged to be a part of it. How do I deal with the, really the I don’t know some are ignorant and insulting comments about Islam, I just I think sometimes there a wonderful story about prophet Muhammad, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him. He would walk by this window every day and this woman would throw trash on him and would insult him over and over by that and one day she didn’t appear at the window and didn’t throw trash at him and he went and inquired about her and said, you know, what’s…where were you? No trash today? And she was ill and she was so struck that the prophet had taken the time to ask about her health, that was the way that he thought about her and that’s I guess what I aspire to is I’m not interested in responding to insults with insults. I am interested in expanding the circle of light and love and possibility that I think all of us get from our faith traditions and I have to say that I fail at that consistently but that’s the ideal. And, I mean, another one of my great heroes of this is Martin Luther King Jr. who after the Montgomery bus boycott where African Americans walked to work for over a year in order to really be able to sit ten feet closer to the bus driver on a bus, I mean it’s a relatively small victory that they won, you know King went through death threats, his house was firebombed he was asked, now that the bus boycott is over and you really won a relatively small victory, you know, are you still angry? What do you think you’ll do for revenge? And King said, this is not the time for revenge. This is the time for reconciliation. This the time of redemption. This is the time to build the beloved community. So I look at those people as audience members to further convince of this possibility and to further engage in this possibility.

Q: Welcome to the National Cathedral. Assalamu alaikum.

Mr. Patel: Alaikum assalam.

Q: As I greet you this morning I am also remembering and honor our beloved and deceased interreligious colleague, brother, Dr. Wayne Teasdale. My concern and my question to you is about the spiritual questions and needs of young people which may or may not be different from the concerns of not quite so young people and working as you do with young people in so many countries, from so many faiths, I’d like you to speak to the spiritual longings and questions and possibly unique concerns of the youth today.

Mr. Patel: Thank you for invoking Brother Wayne who I write extensively about in this book, An Act of Faith, and I don’t know where I would be or what I would be doing if not for Brother Wayne. I think that there are certain people in all of our lives who you feel like God put them there at a crucible moment, at a crossroads, so that they could guide you in the right way and Brother Wayne was that man for me, or one of those people for me and I actually opened a chapter of the book with the line Brother Wayne wanted two things from me; one, was that I would take mushrooms with him. Two was that I would start the interfaith youth movement. He got one, and you’re watching it. But he was a remarkable, mystical, ethereal figure and he understood young people to get to the heart of your question. And what he understood about young people was that we were going to make an impact in the world. We were going to scratch our signature on the face of the earth and the question is, were we going to do it positively or negatively. Were we going to it, was our fire going to burn things down or is it going to cook things up and he guided my fire in a really constructive direction. And Brother Wayne made me think of somebody who lived not far from him, Gwendolyn Brooks, the great African American poet who wrote similarly about young people and she wrote this as if she was a young person. It’s from a poem called Boy Breaks Glass. “I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration.” And so much of what we do at the Interfaith Youth Corps stems from this core belief that young people are going to have an impact. What is the type of impact they are going to have? We treat young people as powerful creative remarkable beings with the ability to lead big things. We give them a lot of responsibility which is why I don’t talk about involving young people in our programs. I talk about training young people to start their own programs. We tell young people all the time that Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama when he was called on to lead the bus boycott was 26 years old and we see that possibility in the young people that we work with. So I think that that galloping thoroughbred desire to make an impact is something which is a unique salience to young people and that we speak directly to the Interfaith Youth Corps .

Q: Good morning and thank you, Eboo, for continuing to inspire us.

Mr. Patel: Hi, Meg good to see you.

Q: Hi, Eboo. I’m with the 9/11 unity walk and successful in rallying people here in Washington to come together to walk down embassy row in support of interfaith dialogue. We’re now looking to venture into involving youth through service work and what I want to know is what can you tell youth as to why this should be their cause? Youth are pulled in so many different directions, so why should this be something that they grab onto?

Mr. Patel: I was just with…wonderful to see you again, and I’m thrilled that your youth group is here and I’m really looking forward to spending some time with them after this conversation, so thank you for bringing them and thank you for coming and thank you for your commitment, Meg. I was just with Rev. Andrew Young in Atlanta three or four days ago and was one of the first people involved in the civil rights movement, he was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest colleagues. He later went on to be Carter’s ambassador to the UN and Mayor of Atlanta for a couple of terms and one of the things he told me was what it felt like to be involved in the civil rights movement before anybody knew it was the civil rights movement. What he was… and he spent his time, he was actually a youth organizer with I believe the national counsel of churches was one of first positions and then went on to be with the SCLC and the thing that I thought about when he was talking was we are in the prologue to a glorious book called the interfaith youth movement of the 21st century, and it’s…we get to be a part of a movement before anybody thinks it’s a movement. I think it’s kind of like begin at Hull House in 1889 when it just opened or its like building…it’s like doing legal work or African American leadership work in 1953, before Brown vs. Board in ’54 or before Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and what is more exciting than to be young and at the beginning of not only your own journey but of a nation’s journey and a world’s journey and that’s where we are right now in this. We are in the prologue to a glorious book called the interfaith youth movement. And we need the best young people of this generation to kind of see over that hill and to say I am bringing people to the beginning of something and one day we’re all going to look up and say holy cow there are millions marching with us and I was one of the first.

Dean Lloyd: The last very brief question.

Q: a lot of religious extremist groups and fundamentalist groups are actually reactionary to some degree to these types of movements, to the effort to create multicultural, multi-faith groups in environments that it’s a perceived threat and I’m wondering when you’re encouraging groups to develop multi-faith communities you also let them know that okay you could receive the very backlash you are trying to fight against and it can be very demoralizing to receive that. Do you also inform people that you could get the very reaction you’re trying to fight against from your own friends and family in religious communities?

Mr. Patel: That’s a pointed question and thank you for that. Anybody who reads my faith divide blog just has a little window into some of the vitriol out there about promoting this stuff. I’ll just say two things on this. One is I think the most remarkable thing that those of us in the interfaith youth movement experience is how many people are craving this message so the vast majority of our time is spent not with people who are saying that’s wrong but people who are saying my gosh you have articulated what I have had in my heart and in my soul and in my mind for years, I just never had the language for that but you have made it real for me and so I think most of our time is spent being affirmed but if all you ever are is affirmed, life is not as poetic as it might be and so there is time when we feel insulted and sometimes assaulted and I think from that we understand that that we are, if, in fact, the interfaith youth movement is a new book, it is part of a series of books and that series of books is the book of human pluralism, the book of human liberation and if you look at previous chapters in that book, whether its in India or the struggle in South Africa, or the civil rights movement here in America, you see that. People experience frankly far sharper and more dangerous assaults and I’ll just close with a quick story and it’s about a young girl named Ruby Bridges, was 6 years old and she was one of the first people to desegregate the segregated schools in New Orleans in the 1950s and the great child psychologist and a mentor of mine, Robert Coles, professor at Harvard, writes a story about her – did his research on her and he would watch, he would spend time in Ruby Bridges’ home and would watch her walk to school every day surrounded by federal marshals and all these people would gather and they would shout the most horrible things at this little girl and they would throw things at her and I mean just something that nobody should experience particularly not a 6-year-old girl. And Professor Coles was so struck by Ruby Bridges’ calm and her equanimity in the face of these insults and one day he watched Ruby turn around and say something to her tormentors, and Coles who is a psychologist said, she broke. Everybody’s got there breaking point and young Ruby broke. And later that day he said, Ruby, I saw that you got a little angry and you turned around said something to those people. What did you say? And she said, oh, I wasn’t angry, Dr. Coles. I just said what my grandmother always teaches me. I said Lord forgive them, they know not what they do. I feel like if a little girl who desegregated the New Orleans school system and is being called the ugliest names on the planet could have that spiritual sense we could learn something from that.

Dean Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation. I hope you will be with us next week when we address another critical issue of our time which is homelessness. Philip Mangano who is head of the U.S. interagency council on homelessness believes he has a solution to homelessness. So come here about it next week. For now though, please linger for some coffee at the west end of the Cathedral or by all means join us for our service here that begins at 11:15. Please join me one more time in thanking Eboo Patel for this wonderful conversation.