Eboo Patel | |
---|---|
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Oxford University |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Sociology |
Notable ideas | Interfaith America |
Eboo Patel is an American Ismaili of Gujarati Indian heritage and founder and president of Interfaith America (previously known as Interfaith Youth Core), [1] [2] a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation. [3] Patel was a member of President Barack Obama's inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. [4] [5]
Patel grew up in Glen Ellyn,Illinois,where he attended Glenbard South High School. [6] He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his undergraduate studies and earned a degree in Sociology. [7] He has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University,where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship.
Patel details his life and career extensively in his 2007 autobiography,Acts of Faith. In the book,Patel notes that he became interested in religious diversity in college,where he noticed that conversations on multiculturalism and multiple identities did not involve religious identity. After graduating from college,he taught at an alternative education program for high school dropouts in Chicago and,inspired partly by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement,founded a cooperative living community for activists and artists in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. [6] : 61–69 As an activist,Patel felt that diversity,service,and faith were important parts of civic life but found no community organization that touched on all three,specifically one that worked with young people. [6] : 74 In response,he developed the idea for the Interfaith Youth Core, [8] formulated through his relationship with Brother Wayne Teasdale and blessed by the Dalai Lama,that would bring young people of different faiths together around service and dialogue. [6] : 74
While a student at Oxford,Patel ran numerous interfaith youth projects in India,Sri Lanka,and South Africa. [6] : 123 He officially founded IFYC in 2002 with a Jewish friend and a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. [9] Today the organization employs approximately 30 people and has a $4-million operating budget. [9]
Patel and IFYC partnered with White House officials in developing President Obama's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge,which invited schools across the nation to make interfaith cooperation a campus priority and launched in 2011. [9] His second book,Sacred Ground:Pluralism,Prejudice,and the Promise of America,was released in August 2012.
Religious pluralism is an attitude or policy regarding the diversity of religious belief systems co-existing in society. It can indicate one or more of the following:
The United Religions Initiative (URI) is a global grassroots interfaith network.
Beacon Press is an American left-wing non-profit book publisher. Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, it is currently a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association. It is known for publishing authors such as James Baldwin, Mary Oliver, Martin Luther King Jr., and Viktor Frankl, as well as The Pentagon Papers.
Interfaith dialogue refers to cooperative, constructive, and positive interaction between people of different religious traditions and/or spiritual or humanistic beliefs, at both the individual and institutional levels.
Interfaith marriage, sometimes called interreligious marriage or "mixed marriage", is marriage between spouses professing different religions. Although interfaith marriages are often established as civil marriages, in some instances they may be established as a religious marriage. This depends on religious doctrine of each of the two parties' religions; some prohibit interfaith marriage, and among others there are varying degrees of permissibility.
Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. is an American theologian who served as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009. Cox's research and teaching focus on theological developments in world Christianity, including liberation theology and the role of Christianity in Latin America.
Diana L. Eck is a scholar of religious studies who is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, as well as a former faculty dean of Lowell House and the Director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard. Among other works, she is the author of Banaras, City of Light, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Became the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, and "India: A Sacred Geography." At Harvard, she is in the Department of South Asian Studies, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is also a member of the Faculty of Divinity. She has been the chair for the Committee on the Study of Religion. She also served on the Humanities jury for the Infosys Prize in 2019.
David Frank Ford is an Anglican public theologian. He was the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 1991. He is now an Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity. His research interests include political theology, ecumenical theology, Christian theologians and theologies, theology and poetry, the shaping of universities and of the field of theology and religious studies within universities, hermeneutics, and interfaith theology and relations. He is the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a co-founder of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.
John A. Buehrens is an American Unitarian Universalist minister and author.
Vern Barnet is a Unitarian Universalist pastor and was the weekly newspaper columnist on religious topics in The Kansas City Star 1994-2012. He is the founder of the Kansas City (area) Interfaith Council.
The Abrahamic religions are a grouping of three of the major religions together due to their historical coexistence and competition; it refers to Abraham, a figure mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Quran, and is used to show similarities between these religions and put them in contrast to Indian religions, Iranian religions, and the East Asian religions. Furthermore, some religions categorized as "Abrahamic" also share elements from other categories, such as Indian religions, or for example, Islam with Eastern religions.
Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur is an author and activist focused on faith-based initiatives and gender equality in Islam who currently serves as the chief of staff and chief communications officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She works with Malaria No More, a leading non-profit formed to advance the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by ending malaria-related deaths by 2012. She also consults on a variety of interfaith projects and volunteerism efforts.
Moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD) is a term that was first introduced in the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by the sociologist Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton. The term is used to describe what they consider to be the common beliefs among young people in the United States. The book is the result of the research project the National Study of Youth and Religion.
In traditionalist interpretations of Islam, the permissibility for Muslims to engage in interfaith marriages is outlined by the Quran: it is permissible, albeit discouraged, for a Muslim man to marry Non-Muslim women as long as they are identified as being part of the "People of the Book" and it is not permissible for a Muslim woman to marry a Non-Muslim man. Thus, traditional interpretations of Islamic law do recognize the legitimacy of a Muslim man's marriage if he marries a Non-Muslim woman, but only if she is Jewish or Christian. On the other hand, a Muslim woman may not marry a Non-Muslim man. Additionally, it is required in Islam that the children of an interfaith marriage be Muslim.
Elijah Interfaith Institute is a nonprofit, international, UNESCO-sponsored interfaith organization founded by Alon Goshen-Gottstein in 1997. The organization is headquartered in Jerusalem, with offices and representatives in different countries,
Jack Moline is an American Conservative rabbi who retired as executive director of Interfaith Alliance in 2022, having served in the post since January 2015.
Interfaith America is a Chicago-based non-profit founded in 2002 by Eboo Patel. The organization’s stated mission is to make interfaith cooperation a social norm. Today it operates with approximately 30 full-time staff and a $4-million budget. It has worked on five continents and with over 200 college campuses domestically.
The Interfaith Center of New York (ICNY) is a secular educational non-profit organization founded in 1997 by the Very Reverend James Parks Morton. ICNY programs work to connect religious leaders and their communities with civil organizations and each other.
The InterFaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit is a faith-based civic organization founded in 2010 by members of a Detroit-based interfaith group known then as the Interfaith Partners. Its headquarters are in Oak Park, Michigan.
Interreligious studies, sometimes called interfaith studies, is an interdisciplinary academic field that researches and teaches about interfaith dialogue and encounters between religions. It often involves religious scholars in interfaith activism. This concept has injected itself as not entirely interfaith dialogue; which is more often religious than academic in nature. The field emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of the collective efforts of theologians and interfaith practitioners, during a period of interfaith activism, especially in the North America.