The day before 9-11, the anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers, hundreds of people gathered at Howard University in Washington, D.C. for the Fifth Annual President's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. http://www.ed.gov/edblogs/fbnp/files/2013/07/Invitation-to-Gathering.pdf
The significance of the date was not lost on anyone. None of the questions posed at the Challenge gathering evoked the word terrorism, yet anxiety quivers beneath the surface of interfaith gatherings. We know we are on holy ground, one that demands our best in order to overcome our bias and stigma, anger and self-righteousness. That capacity to peacefully navigate our deepest differences is at the root of saving us all from the destruction that is playing out around the world.
Is it possible to use a lens of human dignity even in those relationships with people with whom we have deep differences and particularly when the divide is religious belief and practice? I want to thank the Obama Administration for suggesting that we can and that we must.
The Campus Challenge Gathering offers an opportunity for college and university students, staff, and administrators to share experiences, learn from experts, and meet Obama Administration officials who share a commitment to community service with an interfaith engagement component. This year, guests from other countries were invited to join and explore models of interfaith service and engagement. The event is designed to be helpful for institutions of higher education that are just beginning programs in interfaith community service and for those with long traditions in this work.
Why did the administration focus on colleges and universities? Because they are the crucibles for social movements and change. It is in these spaces that people often have their first encounters with people distinctively different than themselves, decide how they will vote for the first time and contemplate whether the belief systems within their families and churches are the ones they will retain or change.
Forty years ago, I graduated from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, the third most conservative city in the United States. But for my college experience, I would not be writing this blog and certainly would never have found my way to the Challenge at Howard University on the stage with Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith Youth Core.
College is where I acquired a principle around which I have organized my life--Every wall is a door. A college teacher introduced me to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and this simple illustration he wrote. It grabbed me and has never released me from its extraordinary hope.
While I came to college with the idea that human life was sacred, I did not know that this premise was widely shared across the worlds major traditions or that Mahatma Gandhi, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Dalai Lama shared a common theology with Jesus Christ. College gave me that information.
I think President Obama chose very well when he launched the Challenge to benefit students on college campuses. Part of the mission of US higher education is to sustain democracy and to create contributing citizens.
When I was at the Harvard Kennedy School in an executive program for state and local officials, I had time to indulge my love of books at the second hand store at the Quad. It was there I found Citizenship in Diverse Societies by Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Editors). It was published in 2000 and never made a best seller list but it should have. As I listened to the voices of hundreds of college students and professionals at the Challenge, one of the statements in that book was very present. I've paraphrased it to include all of us who were at the Challenge and all of us who call ourselves American citizens. It is my challenge to us.
Our future depends not only on the justice of our institutions (the church, government, education), but also on the qualities and attitudes of our citizens; e.g. our sense of identity, and how we view potentially competing forms of national, regional, ethnic or religious identities; our ability to tolerate and work together with others who are different from ourselves; our desire to participate in the political process in order to promote the public good and hold political authorities accountable; our willingness to show self-restraint and exercise personal responsibility for our economic demands and personal choices that affect our health and the environment; and our sense of justice and commitment to a fair distribution of resources. Without citizens who possess these qualities, the ability of liberal societies to function successfully progressively diminishes
The hard questions arise when we ask what governments (we) can do or should do to promote these qualities in the "citizens" of our campuses and communities? How should we ensure that students are active rather than passive; critical rather than deferential or apathetic in the face of injustice; responsible rather than greedy or short-sighted; tolerant rather than prejudiced? How can we ensure that citizens feel a sense of membership in and belonging to our community rather than alienation and disaffection/ How can we ensure that students identify and feel solidarity with others rather than indifference or hatred towards others?
There is one opportunity/challenge required and available for pluralistic modern society--public discourse--not just the willingness to participate or make ones views known but the willingness to listen seriously to a range of views which, given the diversity of our society will include ideas that the listener will find strange and even obnoxious and after listening deeply and thoroughly, the willingness to set for one's own views intelligibly and candidly as the basis for a politics of persuasion rather than manipulation or coercion.
Thank you, President Obama, for encouraging the opportunity for public discourse to thrive even in times that seem devoid of civility and reasonableness.