Just came across this wonderful piece by Eboo Patel about finding his spiritual home in Islam through first being attracted to the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. (Thanks to Islamicate).

This made me think of a metaphor Brian McLaren quotes in a recent Radical Grace, about the phenomena Christians are calling the Emerging Church: “we aren’t dealing with a new slice of the pie, so to speak, a new segment or sect or division of the church. Instead, what we’re dealing with is more like the outer ring or layer of a tree. If the northwest side of the tree is Roman Catholic, and the northeast side is Eastern Orthodox, and the southwest side is Evangelical and Charismatic, and the southeast side is Traditional Protestant, what we’re dealing with is a conversation among people who find themselves on that outermost ring. They’re discovering that they have more in common with someone also in the outermost ring from the other side of the tree than they may have with their neighbors on their own side, a few rings further in.”

Only the tree is bigger than that. The outer ring includes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and others who find they have more in common with each other and with likeminded Christians than with hardliners of their own religions. If you doubt me, read Tikkun. What other magazine brings them together so well? What do these outer ring types share?

Karen Armstrong writes in The Great Transformation that most of the “Axial Age” philosophers — such as Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah — “had no interest whatever in doctrine…. What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved. Religion was about doing things that changed you at a profound level…. The only way you could encounter what they called “God,” “Nirvana,” “Brahman,” or the “Way” was to live a compassionate life. Indeed religion was compassion.”

That’s what Eboo found in the Catholic Worker and then in Islam.