8

Building the Interfaith Youth Core

How are we, in the United States, to embrace difference and maintain a common life?

MICHAEL WALZER

I arrived at her doorstep soaking wet. It was pouring rain, and the windshield wipers on my car had suddenly stopped working. I couldn’t see a thing driving south on Lake Shore Drive to her condo in Streeterville. I had to lean out the driver’s side window, grab one of the wipers, and move it up and down with my hand to clear a space on the windshield.

Kevin had been telling me about this woman for years. Her name was Shehnaz, and she had gone to law school with Kevin’s friend Nikki. Every time Kevin would talk about her, I would shrug it off. “You’re being an idiot,” he would say. “She’s a civil rights attorney, she’s beautiful, she’s Indian, she’s a Muslim, she owns her own condo, and she will probably agree to see you on my recommendation. You, on the other hand, don’t have a job and don’t own anything except some books on anthropology. Don’t you think that you should try to improve your lot in this world and ask her out?” Finally, I took his advice, and here I was, all wet.

Shehnaz laughed when I explained my car situation. She handed me a towel and motioned for me to sit on the couch across the room. I settled in, looked up, and found myself thinking about poems that praised deep beauty.

We talked about her job as a civil rights lawyer. Her clients were mostly poor minorities with lengthy rap sheets who had been beaten up by Chicago police officers. “Everybody has rights in this country,” Shehnaz said flatly. “That’s what makes it great. If we let the rights of one group erode, we endanger the very existence of those rights for everybody.”

She was working on a new case: a mosque foundation was being harassed by a suburban council, and she was preparing a First Amendment/religious discrimination suit. “When it’s your people being discriminated against because of their religion, you realize how important the Constitution is to everybody,” she said.

We went for dosas at Mysore Woodlands on Devon Avenue, ate with our hands, laughed about what it was like growing up in the western suburbs of Chicago with Indian Muslim parents. She had gone to high school in Naperville, fifteen minutes from where I grew up. We had probably passed each other at the Ogden Six movie theater. We had graduated high school one year apart and overlapped at the University of Illinois. “You never read my column in the Daily Illini?” I asked her over milk shakes at the Zephyr café. “You never came to any Indian Student Association meetings?” she shot back. I decided it was better that she hadn’t known me in college.

It was a work night, and I thought maybe I should drop her back home. But I didn’t want to leave her. I decided to push my luck. “Kurt Elling sings at the Green Mill tonight,” I said. “Wanna go?”

“All right,” she said softly.

That was Wednesday. Thursday we ate chow foon at Hong Min in Chinatown and went to see Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited at the HotHouse. Friday we watched the film Girlfight. Saturday we ate Thai fish cakes at Rosded in Lincoln Square and caught the band Funkadesi. I ran into some people I knew from college at the show. “Is she with you?” they asked.

“Yes,” I said, just loud enough for Shehnaz to hear. She didn’t turn around, but I thought I saw her smile.

We walked outside. She saw the moon, slowly took her hand out of mine, ran her palm down her face, and whispered the shahada: “La Ilaha il Allah, Muhammadu Rassoolillah.”

The first thing I did when I got back to Oxford was tell my landlord that I needed to break my lease. I called Kevin and said, “I’ll be home before New Year’s.”

“But you just left.”

“I met the one,” I told him. “I’m coming back to Chicago.”

Chicago, a somber city? What was Saul Bellow talking about? I returned to an exuberant city—a blue-collar metropolis getting an artists’ makeover; an American city taking its place in the world; a town unafraid to decorate cow statues and call it public art; a city that was one part Indiana and one part Manhattan.

It was a rich time to be back in Chicago. The Cubs, Sox, Bulls, and Bears each got a new coach—two of them black, one Latino. Millennium Park was emerging from the big mud pit on Michigan Avenue, an urban playground that felt both a part of downtown and a world away. In a basement on the South Side, Kanye West was producing beats, practicing rhymes, dreaming of new layers in hip-hop. In another basement not far from there, a Senate campaign was under way, and a local politician named Barack Obama was about to become a national icon.

I loved the thousands of trees and flowers that the mayor had planted. I loved the way the sun played off the lake on a cold winter day. I loved the Russian Jews and Pakistani Muslims who spent their Thursday afternoons on the park benches on Devon Avenue. I loved the women who filled the corridor between O’Hare Airport and the Blue Line back to the city with gospel songs.

I thought about Louis Armstrong stopping to listen to a group of jazz musicians who were playing “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue.” “Man, you’re playing that too slow,” he told them.

“How would you know?” one asked scornfully.

“I’m Louis Armstrong. That’s my chorus you’re playing,” he said.

The next day he walked by the same corner, and the musicians had hung up a sign: PUPILS OF LOUIS ARMSTRONG.

Jazz got educated in this town. The blues went electric here. And one of the originals, Buddy Guy, still played a show almost every night of the week during the month of January at his club, Legends.

I went back to my old barber, an Iraqi who had been forced to fight in Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War and was given asylum in the United States. His son came bounding up as he threw the smock around my shoulders. The boy wanted to show his father some new trick on his Game Boy. “My God,” I told Amir, “is that Dexter?” He was three the last time I saw him—shy, still a toddler. Now he had a head of thick, wavy hair and eyes set off by long Arab eyelashes. I asked Dexter about school, about his grandparents; next thing I knew, my hair was done.

“Hey, Eboo,” I heard. It was a black girl’s voice, soft but not shy. I was munching on a falafel sandwich made by the Palestinian grocer near El Cuarto Año, where I had my first teaching job. “You don’t remember me?” she asked, her voice playful. “It’s Roxanne. You were my teacher second semester, right here,” she said, gesturing toward the school building. “I got my GED. I got a job now, and my son’s doing real good—he’s in preschool.” She smiled.

I woke up one morning and took my Chicago Tribune out of its blue wrapper, and there was a story that brought me to tears. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, an Argentine Israeli maestro, had shown up at a student assembly at a school in the Palestinian territories and played the piano. Simply brought his gift to a group of students who are given too little, communicating that they, too, are worthy of beauty.

Kevin and I got off the Red Line at the Fullerton stop. “Do you remember what I said to you here five years ago?” he asked me. “I told you I was dropping out of college, that I was just going to work on my poetry. I asked you if you thought I could make it as a poet.” I remembered. Kevin had just been asked to be part of HBO’s Def Poetry. He had been making his living as a poet—performing on college campuses, teaching workshops at high schools, organizing poetry slams in community centers—for a couple of years now. He was working on a new piece about Chicago, and he wanted to read it to me.

The people who organized the mayor’s annual Leadership Prayer Breakfast heard about the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and invited me to give the Muslim prayer at the event. Somehow, I got seated next to the mayor. “Are you Indian?” he asked. “My daughter just spent six months in Kerala.” For the next twenty minutes, we talked about India. When the waiter came around to pour him more coffee, Mayor Daley said, “No thanks, Oscar.” I stared at him. How did the mayor of Chicago know the name of the guy who pours coffee at the Hilton Towers? He shrugged and said, “He and I went to grade school together.”

Home. The place where your barber doesn’t have to ask what to do with your hair. Where the music you love came of age. Where the leading citizens fill you with pride. Where your best friend’s dreams are coming true. Where your former students recognize you on the street. The piece of earth that your hands have helped shape.

Chicago is accustomed to making big dreams into reality. It was on the near West Side of this city that a young Jane Addams created Hull House, a “cathedral of humanity” for recent immigrants that became both a symbol and a laboratory for the inclusion of newcomers into American democracy. A few decades later, on the South Side of Chicago, a brash young leader named Saul Alinsky applied the methods used by labor unions to neighborhoods, building what became known as “community organizations” where common people worked together to demand their due from entrenched business and political elites. And it was here that the first Parliament of the World’s Religions took place, in the year 1893, sparking the interfaith movement in the West. In Chicago’s “make no little plans” spirit, one of the Parliament’s leaders declared, “From now on, the great religions of the world will no longer declare war on each other, but instead on the giant ills that afflict all humankind.”

Jeff Pinzino, my friend from college, was the first person to introduce the IFYC vision to Chicago. He had led the interfaith Habitat for Humanity project with me in Hyderabad, India, in January 2001 and saw firsthand how service built understanding between people from different religious backgrounds. He returned to Chicago determined to establish a foundation for the IFYC. And as with everything else he’s done, Jeff went about it full force. He quit his job, left Stone Soup (the artists and activists community we had started together in 1997, where he had been living for nearly four years), and started gathering a network of supporters for the IFYC. Jeff laid the groundwork for two IFYC projects that continue today: the Chicago Youth Council (CYC), made up of students from different religions who gather weekly to do service projects and engage in interfaith reflection, and the Day of Interfaith Youth Service, which brings together hundreds of youths from different religions to do a large-scale service project on one day. He financed the operation mostly with his own credit card.

I spent the first few months of 2002 finishing my dissertation. I passed my oral exams and received my doctorate in June, right about the time that Jeff felt his work with the IFYC was done. He had been offered a job with a foundation that had been impressed by his experience as a community organizer and the entrepreneurial spirit he had shown in building the base of the IFYC in Chicago. It fell to me to pick up on the momentum that Jeff had created. My job was essentially to continue the Chicago Youth Council and Day of Interfaith Youth Service projects; expand our network of relationships to include religious leaders, scholars, and journalists; and secure funding for the organization. I prayed for the day when working for the IFYC would be my full-time job. In the meantime, I took a faculty position at the Urban Studies Program, where I taught courses on religion to students from midwestern liberal arts colleges during a one-semester immersion in Chicago.

One of the first things I did was to call on Chicago’s senior social movement leaders and intellectuals. For any new movement to be successful, it has to learn from effective movements of the past. Bill Ayers met me at 7:00 a.m. at the Gourmand café in the South Loop and gave me a jewel of advice: “Find the smaller stories that tell the larger story of your movement, and always begin with one of those.”

I discovered that Martin Marty, one of America’s most important scholars of religion, was speaking at a banquet one night. I bought a $60 ticket, stationed myself outside the banquet hall, and tapped him on the shoulder when he walked by. “Professor Marty, my name is Eboo Patel, and I’m starting an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core based largely on your theories of building religious pluralism,” I said. “I paid $60 for a ticket to this banquet to be able to introduce myself to you. Will you give me a half hour of your time to tell you more?” A few weeks later, we met for an entire afternoon and talked about the importance of religious communities “risking hospitality” with one another. Hospitality became the first shared value for which the Interfaith Youth Core created a curriculum.

Ron Kinnamon, a former YMCA executive, saw an article about the IFYC in the Chicago Tribune and invited me to have lunch with him. We talked for several hours about the YMCA model of youth leadership development and the changes in America’s religious demographics. “We in America know something about being a Judeo-Christian society, but we know nothing about living in a multifaith society,” he said. “I think it’s going to be young people who lead us into this new reality, and I think I just found the vanguard organization of that movement.”

Mike Ivers, a former Catholic priest who ran a faith-based organization called Goodcity, saw the IFYC as next in line in the tradition of Chicago social justice movements. “Build the base of your organization here, buddy,” he told me. “Once you get the model right, export it to the world stamped MADE IN CHICAGO.” Goodcity served as a fiscal agent to Christian nonprofits, providing them with the necessary financial structure during their growing years. The IFYC was the first non-Christian organization Goodcity took on. “Interfaith work is Christ’s work,” Mike told his board members, who were a little nervous about the move. “This is the future of the church. This is the future of the city.”

I visited Marjorie Benton, one of the most forward-thinking philanthropists in America, in her beautiful home in Evanston. “Don’t neglect fundraising,” she told me. “Money is the fuel of strong organizations. The earlier you build a funding base, the easier it will be for you as your organization grows.” She had touched on the single most frustrating aspect of building the IFYC.

My initial forays into the foundation world had been entirely futile. Most program officers didn’t return my phone calls or e-mails. When I finally set up a few meetings, I discovered how skilled program officers were at telling people no. They listened politely for a few minutes, then asked a set of questions that dealt with issues that were on their minds. For most of them, anything that dealt with religion was passé. They were part of the urban liberal school of thought that expected the Vatican to become Disneyland Rome soon. One told me that I needed a business plan to be taken seriously. Another suggested that I make a video of the programs the IFYC had run in India and South Africa to show to private donors. A third asked how the IFYC was engaging the issue of sexual orientation in our work. A fourth wanted to know whether we had a youth employment strategy.

None of them really paid attention to the big idea of the Interfaith Youth Core—the dream of young people building religious pluralism. We were immediately put into the box of soft human relations programs, the kind of thing that takes place in a junior high school cafeteria and involves PTA moms and camp songs. “You should just, you know, do local fundraising for your programs,” one foundation person suggested as he ushered me out of his office.

I had a sudden urge to grab him by his suit jacket and say, “Do you think Osama bin Laden built Al Qaeda on bake sales?”

After months of frustration, I finally met a foundation person who saw the potential of the IFYC. Zahra Kassam, a young Muslim at the Ford Foundation with a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, immediately understood the IFYC’s vision and methodology. She asked smart questions about how the IFYC planned to go to scale and measure effectiveness. I sketched out my ideas on both issues, then decided to take a risk. “I feel like people at foundations are always asking questions designed to discourage me,” I said. “Right now, the IFYC is a group of committed young adults who have run several effective interfaith youth projects around the world and are building a set of sustainable programs in Chicago. We would love to tell you we know exactly how to measure and scale our program, but how are we supposed to figure that out until we have the resources to properly run the program in the first place?”

Zahra was a program associate at the Ford Foundation, one of a group of talented recent college graduates who served primarily as research and support staff for the program officers. But Zahra’s circle of program associates had their own ideas, too. They realized that Ford program officers tended to give grants to people and organizations with which they had some type of personal relationship. In fact, unless you ran a big-name organization, the only chance you had of getting a Ford Foundation grant was by getting the attention of a program officer. That meant either knowing the program officer directly or knowing someone who did.

The program associates, being younger, were constantly trying to get the program officers they worked for to support the artists and activists from their generation. But because the program officers did not know these people personally, the support rarely materialized. So the program associates approached a vice president at the Ford Foundation and requested their own pot of funding with the intention of making grants themselves. Thus was born the Emerging Voices, New Directions program. In the summer of 2002, Zahra called to tell me that the IFYC was being considered for a $35,000 grant from this fund.

I knew that this was a make-or-break opportunity for the IFYC, so I did what most nonprofit directors do when they are desperate: I over-promised. For $35,000, I told Zahra, the Interfaith Youth Core could teach a graduate-level course on the theory and practice of interfaith youth work and run a national conference that brought the leaders of various interfaith youth projects from across the country together to discuss best practices. These projects, I told Zahra, were crucial for our nascent field, and the IFYC had the knowledge base and networks to accomplish these tasks.

When the Ford Foundation grant was finalized, I rejoiced to my friend Joe Hall, and he gave me a golden piece of advice: a grant from a major foundation can be worth three times the amount of the actual check if you leverage it right. Sure enough, as soon as I told foundation program officers in Chicago that Ford was funding the IFYC, they paid attention in a whole new way. In a matter of months, we received grants from the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Chicago Community Trust. After two years of spinning our wheels in the funding world, we raised more than $100,000 in a few months.

Now we had to get the right team together. Because of my teaching job, I took only a small monthly stipend from the organization for the first year, and Jeff and I set out to look for a full-time staff person. Neither of us had ever hired anybody, and we had no idea what criteria to use or how to go about the process. Thinking about the huge amount of work the IFYC had committed to, Jeff said to me, “Whoever we get better love our mission and never need to sleep.”

In the end, she came to us. April Kunze had been involved in some of the young adult interfaith gatherings that Jeff had organized when he was first establishing the IFYC in Chicago. She had heard about an interfaith conference in Brazil and called to see if the IFYC could sponsor her to go.

“I know this is a strange request,” she told Jeff when she called. “I mean, the last time I checked in on the IFYC, you had like $74 in your bank account.”

Jeff arranged a meeting of the three of us, and one unlikely request was met with another. “Here’s the deal,” I told April. “The IFYC actually has some money now, and we can send you to this conference in Brazil, but there’s one condition: you have to go as our staff member.”

“I’m not sure I get what you are saying,” she said slowly, looking closely at us to see if we were joking.

I told her about the Ford Foundation grant, the Chicago-based money that had followed, the huge task we had in front of us.

“Tell me more about the position you are hiring for,” she said. “What’s the job description?” She fired off a bunch of other questions about the “professional environment” and “opportunities for advancement.” April clearly had more experience in these types of matters than either Jeff or I did.

We were at a bit of a loss. We hadn’t really thought about any of those things. “Basically,” Jeff told her, “you and Eboo are going to be responsible for running the projects and building the infrastructure of this organization. Eboo’s the executive director, but he’s got a full-time job teaching. So you are going to be carrying a lot of the load.”

April left an excellent job with a foundation to become the IFYC’s first full-time paid staff person, at 50 percent of her previous salary. It was, I believe, the luckiest break the IFYC has had in its organizational history. April brought an unbelievable range of skills to the IFYC. She created budgets, built bookshelves, wrote grant proposals, ran strategic planning sessions, hired and managed staff (and fired them when she needed to), designed youth programs, and kept spirits up. While I was off giving speeches, April was in the office creating a database to store the names I collected. When the media invitations started to roll in, April suggested devising a plan for how to use the media to build the interfaith youth movement. When I sent her a panicky midnight e-mail about a grant report that I had forgotten about, I got a 5:00 a.m. response saying that she had already turned it in. She is that unique combination of brilliant visionary, team leader, and expert manager—a social entrepreneur in every sense of the word. When young executive directors of new nonprofits ask me for advice, I tell them this: find a number two who complements your skills and whom you would trust with your child. Give him or her anything he or she wants in terms of salary, title, and perks. Your organization can’t survive without that person.

Even more than April’s skills, it was her heart that made her a perfect fit for the IFYC. She was proud of being an Evangelical Christian, but she was uncomfortable with what that designation had come to mean in contemporary America. She had spent her Minnesota childhood singing praise songs, attending Bible camp, and going on missionary trips to Africa. Her mother had adopted several children out of a conviction that being Christian meant giving what you could to the less fortunate. The Kunze family was far from wealthy, but their home was safe and loving; their form of service was inviting people into it.

April went to Carleton College and was elected president of the campus Evangelical Christian group. She was on an e-mail list of religious leaders in Minnesota, and one day received a message from a Muslim imam in Minneapolis whose mosque had been burned down in a hate crime. The imam thought it would be a powerful statement if religious communities across Minnesota helped rebuild the mosque. April agreed. She began preparing for her campus group to raise money and volunteer for the effort, but several members rebelled. It was a sign of the divine that the mosque had burned down, they said, because it showed the Muslim community that God was displeased with their “devil worship,” as one member put it. The task of the Christian at this time was to show these people the true path, not to help them rebuild their false shrine.

April could not believe her ears. She battled back but lost. She was deposed as president of the group. “If this is what being part of a Christian group is about, then I don’t want it,” April thought. She kept the light of Christ burning in her heart, but she refused to be involved in anything that had to do with organized Christianity. Instead, she threw herself fully into the work of social justice. When she graduated from college, she moved to Chicago and enrolled in Public Allies, a leadership program in which young people are placed as staff members in urban nonprofit organizations and engage in team-based community development projects. April quickly developed a reputation as a visionary with follow-through in Chicago’s activist circles. She was hired as a senior staff member at a community development organization in one of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods and went about transforming its youth program, then creating a whole new youth organization called the Crib Collective.

But she felt that something was missing from her life: a community of faith. She discovered that pursuing social justice with only her private faith was an impossible path. She missed the church, but she was not willing to risk the rejection she had experienced from her fellow Christians when she had reached out to the Muslim community. After hearing Jeff talk about the Interfaith Youth Core, a space that connected faith, social justice, and diversity, she jumped at the chance to get involved. Her problem in the campus-based Christian group had been appearing not Christian enough as a result of her attempt to reach out to Muslims. Now she was worried that she would appear to be too Christian because she firmly believed that Christianity was a uniquely true religion and that Jesus was Lord and Savior. She confessed that worry during our initial interview. “I have the deepest respect for your faith,” I told her. “I sure hope you think it’s true, because otherwise there would be no reason to stay committed to it. I think my religion is true, too. So let’s make a deal. We can both believe our religions are true, we can even privately hope the other converts, and we can work together in this organization to serve others. In that way, we, an Evangelical Christian and a devoted Muslim, can model what we say this organization is about: people from very different faith backgrounds finding common purpose in helping others.”

______

In my first year as a teacher, I had a school director who had barely any experience in inner-city classrooms. Whenever she made a suggestion to the faculty about how to teach, we would roll our eyes and whisper, “If she had any ground-level experience in teaching, she wouldn’t make so many stupid suggestions.”

I realized how easily I could fall into that trap. I could spend all my time meeting with program officers and speaking on panels and never actually run any interfaith youth programs. I wouldn’t get any personal experience of how the theories I was spouting worked in practice. I would make unreasonable demands on staff members who actually ran programs and give them advice that sounded good but had no traction. And sooner or later, people would say, “That guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s never spent any real time actually doing the work.” And they would be right. The principals that teachers respect the most are the ones who have been effective in the classroom and have an appreciation for what teaching really takes. Following that model, I decided I was going to be deeply involved with every one of the IFYC programs in the early stages of their development.

The first challenge was to get religious leaders on board. I met with people at the American Jewish Committee, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, and several other religious institutions. All of them were supportive of interfaith work in theory, and many had actually played a leadership role in adult interfaith programs, but they were universally apprehensive about involving their young people. “We barely have enough time to teach our kids about their own religion,” they would say. “It’s just not a high enough priority to spend that precious time exposing them to others.” Underlying all of this seemed to be a suspicion that interfaith programs would somehow make other religions so alluring that there would be mass conversions, that hordes of young Jews would trade the message of Sinai for the lotus position and the Bodhi tree. After hearing this concern over and over again, I realized why most interfaith organizations could gather religious leaders but could not convince them to bring their youth groups: there is such a strong emphasis in most interfaith programs on collectively increasing spiritual peace and social justice that the importance of strengthening religious identity gets drowned out. Religious leaders are not particularly concerned about losing their own identities, so they do not consider involvement in interfaith work a threat to them. But they have a whole different set of concerns when it comes to their youth.

A senior person at the Archdiocese of Chicago put it like this: “I love the idea of interfaith cooperation. We certainly need more of that in this world. But my primary concern is that Catholic kids become better Catholics. I want them to know more about the Catholic tradition and to be more active in Catholic practices and institutions. Look, I think my religion has the banquet. I agree that all religions are holy and have something to offer, but I think Catholicism has the feast.”

“I totally understand your position,” I told him. “The truth is, most religious people feel that way. I certainly believe that Islam has something unique and powerful that holds my allegiance, and I believe one of my most important responsibilities as a Muslim is passing down my tradition to the next generation.” I saw him easing a little bit in his chair. By proclaiming our strong commitment to our respective faiths, even intimating that we believed what we each had was superior, we had cleared the way for an honest conversation. Neither of us was offended by the other’s faith commitment. To the contrary, it had created a common bond—two men of deep but different faiths talking about religious cooperation.

“The problem is that today’s youths—Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever—no longer live in the so-called ‘banquet hall’ of their faith communities,” I said. “They are coming into contact with kids from different backgrounds all the time. If they don’t have a way of understanding how their faith relates to the Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Evangelicals, and others that they spend most of their lives around, then there’s a good chance that their religious identities will atrophy.”

He grew very attentive. I think he felt that I had put my finger on something important: how to maintain faith identity in a religiously plural world. I explained to him that one of the top priorities of the Interfaith Youth Core was to help young people strengthen their religious identities by creating a safe space where they could talk about faith.

“How do you make sure that they don’t just argue about who is going to get into heaven?” he asked me.

“At the IFYC, we call those the ‘mutually exclusive’ discussions,” I responded. “The truth is, our religious traditions have competing theological claims, and we simply have to accept those. There is little point in arguing about whether Hagar was Abraham’s legitimate wife or his concubine, or whether it was Isaac or Ishmael on the rock. Even when we feel like we have found theological common ground—like Abraham as the patriarch of Jews, Christians, and Muslims—we quickly discover that even those paradigms have their limits. There are a million Hindus in this country, and over three million Buddhists, and neither of those communities would be called Abrahamic. But they live in America, too, and we have to have a paradigm that includes them.”

“So what’s the IFYC approach?”

“We call it shared values—service learning,” I said. “We begin by identifying the values that different religious communities hold in common—hospitality, cooperation, compassion, mercy. We bring a group of religiously diverse young people together and ask them, ‘How does your religion speak to this value?’ One kid will say, ‘Well, I really admire how the pope embodied mercy when he forgave the man who tried to assassinate him.’ A kid from a different religion will say, ‘There is a story like that in my religion: when the Prophet Muhammad returned to Mecca, he extended mercy by forgiving many of the people who had waged war against him.’”

“Are you trying to teach the kids that all religions are the same?” he asked, again growing suspicious.

“Not at all,” I responded. “We are showing young people that religions have powerful things in common, but they come to those shared values through their own paths. Each religion has something unique to say about universal values through its particular set of scriptures, rituals, and heroes. This is a methodology that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of interfaith work. The Scylla is the notion that we’re all the same: I wash my hands before I pray; you wash your hands before you pray; everything else is details. We don’t believe that’s true. We believe the differences between religions are extremely important. As a devout Muslim, I certainly want to preserve the uniqueness of my religion. But you can go too far in that direction, right into the jaws of Charybdis, which is the thinking that religious differences are so great that we can’t even talk. The middle path, the only route to collective survival really, is to identify what is common between religions but to create the space where each can articulate its distinct path to that place. I think of it as affirming particularity and achieving pluralism.”

The Catholic leader sighed. “I’ve got to admit, it sounds great in theory,” he told me. “I’m just afraid kids today don’t know enough about their own religions to be able to tell the stories that you expect from them.”

“I did my doctorate on religious education programs. One of my biggest discoveries was that kids know a lot more about their religions than their teachers think. It’s a matter of what kind of space you create and how you ask the questions. That’s why the IFYC always gives young people the chance to actually act on the religious value they are talking about through a service project. It’s amazing how many faith stories of compassion kids remember when they are building a house together for a poor family, or what their insights into hospitality are when they are tutoring refugee children.”

I had much the same conversation at the American Jewish Committee, Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, Catholic Theological Union, Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary, and Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago. Once these various religious leaders felt assured that the IFYC had a sense of how precious religious identity is and had a methodology that both preserved their own religion’s particularity while building interfaith understanding, they were happy to give me the names of contacts in their communities who worked with teenagers. These leads were generally my peers—well-educated professionals in their twenties who volunteered as religious education teachers and youth advisers. I would explain that Emily Soloff at the American Jewish Committee or Father Demetri at the Greek Orthodox Metropolis had suggested I call about getting their youth involved in a new interfaith service program. I would give them the background and methodology of the Interfaith Youth Core and ask them whether they had young people who wanted to participate in our Chicago Youth Council. Inevitably, they would say, “Why don’t you come to one of my youth meetings and ask them yourself.”

And so I spent a lot of time in the basements of synagogues, churches, and mosques, telling teenagers about the Interfaith Youth Core. I was prepared for reactions ranging from skepticism to teenage boredom. Instead, I received almost unanimous enthusiasm. “You mean, we do projects together with kids from different religions and talk about our own faith and listen to them talk about theirs?” a high schooler at the Muslim Education Center asked me.

“That’s basically it,” I said.

“Man, what a cool idea,” she said with a smile.

I thought back to my own high school experience, and how faith was the one topic that we didn’t talk about at the lunch table because none of us knew how. I realized that these kids were excited about the Interfaith Youth Core because it was giving them a space and a language to talk openly about something that was such a big part of their lives but was too often hidden from others.

It did not take long to find eight young people to become the 2002–2003 Interfaith Youth Core Chicago Youth Council.

The CYC met on Monday afternoons at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Rogers Park. I bought kosher snacks on the way to meetings, drove kids home afterward, and prepared interfaith homework assignments such as “Find a faith hero in your tradition who exemplifies the shared value of hospitality and make a five-minute presentation on him or her next week.” Each year the CYC chose a service project where the members could put their shared values into action. One year it was working with homeless people; another year it was tutoring refugee children. The students would do the service project one week, then go through a guided interfaith dialogue the following week. When Mariah Neuroth took over the CYC in 2003–2004, she added a new dimension: at the end of every year, the CYC created an art project that embodied the group’s interfaith service learning experience. The year they worked with homeless people, they made a video scrapbook on different religious ideas of home. The year they worked with refugee kids, they wrote a children’s book that wove religious motifs through a refugee’s story.

The CYC was where I saw the IFYC theory come to life. I watched devout kids from different religions deepen both their own faith and their relationships with others. I was astounded by how theologically insightful young people could be during interfaith discussions. A Muslim participant asked a Christian why his church collected gifts for needy families at Christmas. “Well,” the Christian responded, “Christmas commemorates the birth of Jesus, who was a gift to us, a people who needed spiritual guidance. The best way for us to celebrate Christmas is to follow the example of Jesus and try to provide gifts for the people around us.”

I watched the CYC members become interfaith youth leaders. They were interviewed about interfaith youth work on television and radio programs. They made speeches to gatherings of hundreds of other teenagers about the importance of building religious pluralism. And on more than one occasion, I watched them intervene when adult interfaith groups began drifting into useless theological and political disagreement, bringing them back to constructive discussions based on shared values.

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The IFYC also continued to run the Day of Interfaith Youth Service program, bringing hundreds of religiously diverse young people from across the Chicago area together for a day of volunteering and interfaith dialogue. A group of curious religious leaders and parents always tagged along. “I wanted to come see why my child has been so interested in religion lately,” one said. “A year ago, I couldn’t force her to go to Hebrew school. Now she can’t wait to go. She keeps telling me that she has to learn more about Judaism so she can have more to say at the Day of Interfaith Youth Service.”

I could not help but think back to all the adult interfaith programs I had been to, which always promised that the youth program would follow once the adults built trusting relationships. “When are the kids coming?” I would ask.

“Next week,” they would tell me.

It turns out that the opposite logic was true. If you center the interfaith program around young people, the adults and religious leaders inevitably show up.

Even though the Day of Interfaith Youth Service was a one-time, short-term event, it had a catalytic effect because entire youth groups would participate and return to their community with a whole set of questions about their own religion and how it relates to the faith of others. Watching eighty Muslims perform the late-afternoon salat caused a group of Jews to wonder whether their religion had an afternoon prayer practice. They discovered that Judaism did have such a ritual, called Mincha.

After the 2004 Day of Interfaith Youth Service, the students at the Universal Muslim School, a largely Arab American institution located in a suburb just south of Chicago, started an afterschool group to study Muslim texts that speak to religious pluralism. They also tripled their participation in the school’s volunteer program. “The Day of Service changed their whole lives,” one of their teachers told me. “So many parts of it were new to them: that there were other Americans who were religious, too; that Islam has such a strong tradition of pluralism and service; that they had so much in common with Jews and Christians. They were truly never the same again.”

The first National Conference on Interfaith Youth Work was held at the University of Chicago in 2003 and attended by some forty people, including college professors and chaplains, student interfaith activists, and Chicago-area religious leaders. Each participant presented a paper on his or her own interfaith youth program: the research-based Pluralism Project at Harvard University led by Grove Harris and Diana Eck; the interfaith student council that Victor Kazanjian had established at Wellesley College; Joe Hall’s program in the South Bronx that brought Catholic and Pentecostal kids together to make films on sacred journeys; the E Pluribus Unum interfaith summer camp created by Sid Schwarz. By the end of the conference, we discovered that nearly twenty different projects were represented in the room. “All this time, I thought that I was the only person doing this work,” one person said, a hint of shock in her voice. Anastasia White had been right. There was something so resonant in the idea of interfaith youth cooperation that it had emerged independently in many places at once and was beginning to take a variety of expressions. We had the chance to turn this into a movement. The challenge was to create a spread strategy and a strong network.

We decided that the papers needed to be collected into a book, which we called Building the Interfaith Youth Movement (published in 2006). Melodye Feldman of the Denver-based organization Building Bridges for Peace suggested that the growing interfaith youth movement needed an annual conference. Others agreed. Somebody else pointed out that we needed one common program that everyone did together. I talked about our Day of Interfaith Youth Service in Chicago. Julie Eberly said she ran a similar project at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston. “That’s the one,” said Patrice Brodeur, a longtime supporter of interfaith youth programs. And so the Day of Interfaith Youth Service was born, first as a national program and now as a global one.

A book, an annual conference, a national program: “Who is going to coordinate all of these things?” I asked. All eyes turned to me. “Does that answer your question?” Patrice said.

Overnight, the IFYC had picked up a national brief. The pebble had been kicked off the mountain, and it was beginning to gather speed.

Shehnaz’s mother swears that she knew we were going to get married the first time she saw us together. Her family is from the same part of India as mine, Gujarat, land of merchants and mustaches. They practice the Sufi-tinged interpretation of Islam common to Gujarat: put a black dot on the lucky person to ward off the evil eye, visit the graves of Muslim saints for blessings, chant the shahada when the moon comes out. It has strong similarities to the Ismaili understanding of Islam. From the start, Shehnaz was very comfortable around Ismailis. She liked that the community was both unabashedly modern and devoutly Muslim; that so many of the women were professionals and in positions of community leadership; that we were putting so many resources into nurturing Islam’s cultural and intellectual heritage, from Middle Eastern architecture to Central Asian music. She sat with me while I prayed the Ismaili Du’a and always expressed great admiration for the work of the Imam.

One night, at dinner, I asked whether Shehnaz was interested in taking the next step. “I mean, your practice of Islam is so similar to the Ismaili understanding. Plus, don’t you think it would make things easier, in the future and all?”

She gave me a look that said I had made two missteps. The lesser crime was suggesting we were going to get married without properly asking. “There’s no romance in insinuations. When you’re ready to do it, do it right, and pray that the answer is yes,” she told me flatly.

Second, and far more serious, she didn’t appreciate my telling her what her religion was. It was true, she felt a deep resonance with parts of the Ismaili tariqa, but there was also a disconnect. “I didn’t grow up with the notion of an Imam. My family believes in the message of the Qur’an and the life and teachings of the Prophet, and the way those became spiritually embedded in India. It’s actually not a small step to adopt the Ismaili position. It’s like a Protestant becoming a Catholic and adding to her belief in Jesus and the Bible the idea and authority of the pope.”

I was supposedly the professional in matters of religious identity and diversity, but Shehnaz had clearly thought about this issue more intelligently than I had. It was important to both of us to be with a person who shared the same language of prayer. Shehnaz was reminding me that there were multiple dialects within a language, and those differences needed to be respected within the unity of the broader tradition. She pointed me to a saying of the Prophet: “Differences within my community are a mercy.”

I wondered how my parents would react. My dad, typically, said he was thrilled I was getting married and, frankly, not a little surprised. My mother, also typically, got tears in her eyes, hugged me and Shehnaz, and said she loved us both.

Finally, there was the issue of Mama, in Bombay. Since I was eight years old, she had made me promise to marry an Ismaili. Mama had guided me back to the faith. She was the last person I wanted to disappoint.

I took Shehnaz to see her a few months before the wedding. I asked my father to tell her that Shehnaz was a Muslim, but not an Ismaili. I was too scared to break the news to her myself. My grandmother had always drawn from the broader Muslim tradition but insisted that we marry Ismailis. When we arrived on her doorstep in Bombay, Mama greeted us with smiles and kisses. She asked us to sit on her special sofa and put garlands of flowers around our necks. “I am so happy you two are getting married,” she said. “To my grandson, Eboo, Ya Ali Madad,” the Ismaili greeting meaning “May Ali help you.”

“And to my new granddaughter, beautiful, precious Shehnaz, Assalamu Alaikum,” the more general Muslim greeting meaning “Peace be upon you.”

“May Allah bless this union.”

Farid Esack, a South African Muslim leader, officiated at our marriage ceremony, drawing in both Sunni and Ismaili elements. Kevin gave the best man’s speech. Jeff said the blessing over the food. I thought, “This is forever,” as I put on Shehnaz’s finger a ring inscribed with a line from Pablo Neruda: “Rest with your dream in my dream.”