In one room, young Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, secular humanists, and others cluster in a circle to learn strategies for facilitating constructive interfaith discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Down the hall, more young people — bareheaded or wearing headscarves or kippot — crowd together to discuss multifaith intentional living communities, learn about the Baha’i faith, create videos about youth-led interfaith activism, and train to volunteer as advocates for undocumented immigrants.

Talk about a rich space for conversation.

All this happened during one morning of the Interfaith Youth Core’s 2009 conference, which took place October 25-27 at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. The conference brought high school and college students engaged in interfaith work together with religious leaders, politicians, and authors interested in interreligious cooperation. Speakers included Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard; Tikkun Daily blogger Joshua Stanton, who founded the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue; Rami Nashashibi, the inspiring director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network; Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who has worked with Tikkun to garner support for a Global Marshall Plan; and others.

Interfaith dialogue is a delicate dance. I was fascinated by conference participants’ attempts to build interreligious bridges without effacing or toning down their religious and cultural differences. Conference speakers repeatedly emphasized the importance of embracing conflict in this way.

Skye Jethani, the managing editor of the Christian Leadership Journal, recently wrote a blog post about how this approach to interfaith work is characteristic of Interfaith Youth Core founder (and Tikkun author) Eboo Patel’s work but is fairly unusual in other circles:

Rather than calling for Muslims and Christians to abandon what is distinctive about each faith in order to “get along,” Patel said just the opposite. He called both Christians and Muslims to draw from what is unique in each tradition, stand firmly in one’s own beliefs, and find the desire to cooperate with others. That’s a message I had not heard much in my training.

At the closing plenary, Patel recalled a panel discussion during which Rabbi Or Rose (also a Tikkun author) looked over at Jethani and said “I reject the centerpiece of your theology, that Jesus is the son of God … but I have learned a great deal from it about the immanence of the divine”; Patel held up this interaction as an example of true interfaith engagement.

The youth’s eager and earnest attempts to engage with each other reminded me of Dave’s earlier post about the importance of engaging in constructive conflict — of engaging with others in a full-hearted, nondefensive, non-attacking way without resorting to a sort of whitewashed, apathetic politeness. The young adults at this conference were struggling to figure out how to do that. Sometimes it seemed to work, with youth opening up to each other and speaking their minds. Other times participants seemed cautious, prioritizing polite connection over frank (and messy) engagement.

Numerous people described the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as the elephant in the room that lurks during many interfaith conversations. At one point, Patel said, “We don’t deal with the elephant directly — we pull its tail occasionally, we tickle its trunk.” Interested in how ideas about Israel/Palestine factor into interfaith (particularly Muslim/Jewish) discussions, I attended several panels on this issue. I’ll talk more about this soon in a separate blog post. I also recorded a short video interview with Eboo Patel that I’ll put up shortly, along with some thoughts about moving interfaith work away from charity-based models and toward more politicized struggles for justice.

All three photos courtesy of Flickr/IFYC

Now that the conference is over, all the youth are traveling back to their own colleges and high schools and neighborhoods to carry on their interfaith work. It’s clear that the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) has a strong infrastructure involving leadership trainings and fellowships in place to ensure that the work continues beyond the end of the conference.

Former IFYC fellow Frank Fredericks, who graduated from NYU in 2008, previously founded World Faith, a youth-oriented social action organization that supports fledgling interfaith organizations in conflict-wracked areas. The momentum of this week’s conference led World Faith to commit to begin work in the Indian state of Gujarat.

Other conference participants have pledged to serve as interfaith leaders on a local level. Here are just a few commitments that participants have shared via Twitter:

“I commit to leading the interfaith movement by starting an interfaith group in Oxford” — Arzoo Ahmed

“I commit to finding ways to weave interfaith cooperation into my community organizing work” — Brandon Sammut, Teach for America

“I commit to sharing what I learned about interfaith as a Biblical practice w/ my fundamentalist Christian community” — Levi Petrone

“I commit to promoting Thanksgiving Coffee, an interfaith initiative, as a fundraising tool for anti-malaria efforts” — Sarah Baker

“I commit to starting an interfaith council on campus and to making it sustainable” — John Prust, Boston University