Greetings, internet world! I’m Ian and this is my first post. Yayyyy.
It’s probably not fair to start my post off with a big, perception-of-the-world shifting event. But why not start off with a bang, right?
A few months back the University of Puget Sound offered me the opportunity to go to Princeton University in New Jersey with two other Loggers for the fifth annual Coming Together conference. As a member of the Interfaith council and being involved in religious life on campus, I guess it made sense.
Since this is my first post, I’ll give some back story. I came in to college planning on having nothing or very little to do with religion/the religious community. But as the weeks wore on (and as I took a Religion class), I started to become fascinated by it. The history of each religion, how they interact, how they’re different from each other, how each religion influences peoples’ daily lives, etc. So I joined the Secular Student’s Association, the Hillel (Jewish Student) Organization, as well as the Interfaith Council (people from different religions spending time with each other to understand and appreciate each other as people and their religions). Second semester, I was hired as the Social Justice Interfaith Coordinator through the Spirituality Services and Social Justice office. While I entered college pretty anti-religion, it’s an important thing, Interfaith work. Think about it: with more cross-religion peace, there would be no Middle East conflict, no Ireland conflict, no war on terrorism (arguably), and you can basically take away 4/5 of the wars in history.
Cool, so that’s done; back to the conference.
Since neither you nor I would want to hear about absolutely everything that happened at the conference, I’ll give some highlights.
- The first night of the conference we went to the Museum on campus and got to see some incredible art with performances by different religious music groups on campus.
- Dr. Eboo Patel gave the keynote speech on Friday afternoon. I was one of the few people in the room who had seen him speak before (he came to Puget Sound in October for a Swope lecture: definitely an awesome thing about the school). He delivered a speech about interfaith dialogue and presented three steps to creating a good discussion, all essentially being: become friends with people.
- On Friday I went to Hindu, Muslim and Unitarian Universalist prayer ceremonies as well as Buddhist meditation and Shabbat services. All of them were incredible experiences, but the one that I loved the most was the Muslim Jum’ah. It was a gorgeous service and it really impacted me.
- Friday night we had a “Professor’s Night” with four professors at Princeton, all who spoke about their own religions/spiritual backgrounds and discussed how their respective topics (Politics, Dance, Religion and Judaic Studies) fit with Interfaith dialogue. After their talks they sat down at our tables and we got to have discussions with them. The Dance professor was my favorite, talking about her Jewish upbringing and how it compares to her current spiritual beliefs, as well as how the study of Dance fits in with Judaism.
- Most of Saturday was spend in student-led “Break-Out” sessions. I went to one on physical movement and dance in religion (which was quite interesting), one on the role on Humanism within Interfaith dialogue and one about Faith and Ethics.
- Oh wait! I led the one on Faith and Ethics! The two other students from Puget Sound and I led a discussion on how Faith and Ethics are related and how they both influence each other, as well as why we hold our stances on both of them. It turned out to be a great discussion with some really fascinating people speaking up.
Overall, it was an incredible experience. Life changing sounds dramatic, so I wont say that, but it was really truly unbelievable.
You may be asking yourself, “Self, why is Ian talking about another University in a blog post about UPS?” Well two reasons. 1. The University of Puget Sound actually hosted this same conference last year (and from what I hear it was better than the Princeton one) and 2. It was Puget Sound that offered me this opportunity. And without sounding like a spokesman for the school, that’s pretty awesome. So, thanks, SSSJ office.
An article about the conference was actually on the front page of the Huffington Post last week, which can be seen at the link below.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/qasim-rashid/a-muslim-a-christian-a-si_b_826157.html
But for now I am back at school, working hard, enjoying the snow we have. More posts to come.
