An introduction to Interfaith Engagement. Join our guests to learn about what interfaith Engagement is and isn't and why interfaith engagement can be so valuable for our communities and country today.
Episode Transcript: An Introduction to Interfaith Engagement.
Frans: Interfaith engagement sometimes can lead you to to discover what you really deeply believe and and evaluate and appreciate your own beliefs in relation to the other. I think the only way to do that is by have people talk to each other and have people dialog and have people see each other as fellow human beings rather than as the other, who is completely different from you.
Penny: This episode, An Introduction to Interfaith Engagement, is the first in a little mini-series inside of the Diversity and Inclusion for All Project. This particular mini-series is focused on interfaith dialog and Muslim-Christian engagement.
Welcome to the diversity and inclusion for all project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Today I have with me two guests from Calvin University; they are both history professors and have some great insights and experience and expertise in interfaith work and in Muslim-Christian engagement. The first guest is Frans van Liere, and my second guest is Doug Howard.
And I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves with a few sentences or a story or two and tell us how they came to interfaith work and to Muslim Christian engagement. Frans, I'm wondering if you could begin and introduce yourself a little for our listeners.
Frans: OK, well, my name is Frans van Liere. I've been a professor of medieval history at Calvin College for 20 years. I grew up in the Netherlands and where I studied medieval studies and theology. My path to interfaith work really comes from my research and my research involved Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages and especially Jewish Christian contacts about the interpretation of scripture in in the Middle Ages. Through that, I got more and more interested in relations between Jews and Christians today, especially also because my research led me to interact with with Jewish friends who were involved in the same research.
And in Grand Rapids at Calvin, this led me to become engaged in the West Shore Committee for Jewish-Christian Relations, a local committee that was engaging in interfaith dialog and interfaith understanding. That's the the basis of what later became the Kaufman Institute.
And their interests eventually broadened and also to include Christian-Muslim and Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations. So I've been engaged with that committee for about about 20 years now, I think.
Penny: And the Kaufman Interfaith Institute is a West Michigan institute that really does a lot of work to bring interfaith awareness and learning to our community.
So I've really appreciated over the years being able to benefit from having the Kaufman Interfaith Institute in our community. And you're really involved with them a lot. Right?
Frans: Right. At least in its inception and in the transition from the West through a committee to the Kaufman Institute. I was very, very active in that. And I still act as the liaison of Calvin College through the Kauffman Institute.
Penny: Thank you so much. Doug, I wonder if you could introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us how you came to interfaith work.
Doug: My name is Doug Howard. I've taught history and religion at Calvin College for thirty three years. I came to interfaith work really through my life. I was the son of an Air Force officer and our family was stationed in Turkey twice in my youth.
And I lived there for about three years. And we lived in the city of Adana, which is in the south of Turkey. And all of our neighbors in our apartment building and all the people around us were Muslims. We lived in a completely Muslim context, except that I went to school on the base and my father worked there. So at that time, I did not understand Islam and really certainly had never studied it. What I grew to understand intuitively, without really even thinking about it, was that Muslims were simply people, normal people like like you and me. Then later on in my life, I when I began to study the Middle East and Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, I worked alongside and with other people, many of whom were Muslims, some were Jews, some were Christians. Most were sort of not religious at all.
I wasn't really interested or involved in interfaith work in any direct way until an incident that happened at Calvin in 2007, where a man claiming to be Muslim, a former Muslim terrorist, came to speak. He was not honest about his background and I realized in that episode that I had experience and understandings from my work and from my life that others didn't have and would have benefited by, and so that night, ironically, I met a lot of Muslims in the community that I hadn't known before, and the whole unfortunate episode led to increased awareness of interfaith needs and and a lot of good friendships and good relationships. And I've been involved in with the Muslim community here in Grand Rapids really ever since. And I've taken on a more overt and direct teaching of Islam and of interfaith relations in my professional life since that time.
Penny: I know that over the last few years, I've had the really the honor to work with each of you in different ways and interfaith initiatives at Calvin University. And I really appreciated your years of experience and expertise, both like knowledge and academic expertise, and then a lot of personal stories of your engagement across those lines of religious difference. I'm wondering if if you can share with us a little bit why this work, this work of inter-religious engagement or interfaith engagement sometimes is called interfaith relations, why this is so important or why it can be so valuable for us in our communities and in our country in this present moment.
Doug: Right. I see two reasons personally for my work in this area. The first is what maybe in the whole country and maybe people around the world realize, and that is it’d be really good if we could all get along better. So especially if Christians and Muslims could come to a better understanding of each other, our community engagement would improve and maybe there would be a good basis for peace between communities of difference. So that's one reason for my interfaith work, I want to help people get along in the public sphere.
But another reason for me personally is that I am Christian, yet my engagement with people whose beliefs and practices around religion are different than mine…they increase my awareness of who God is or what God is, so that my my understanding of God deepens through engagement with other people.
So there's there's a kind of theological and personal spiritual need that's answered by interfaith engagement for me.
Penny: That's really interesting, Frans. I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your perspectives on why this work, this interfaith work can be so valuable for us.
Frans: Obviously, religion can be an enormous force for good in this world, but it's also a source for incredible contention and tensions between people, even even hatred between people. The first time that I experienced that very closely was in my travels to Israel, where I had both Muslim friends and Jewish friends.
I noticed that that my Jewish friends absolutely would not go in certain areas of Jerusalem, because that's where they saw that as enemy territory. And they had the idea of, you know, when you go walk over there, people will immediately attack you and kill you.
And I happily walked into those areas, into those neighborhoods and found that the people there were very welcoming and friendly. But of course, they had a similar enmity towards towards Jews. So this incredible mistrust and enmity, even even hatred …it's fueled by by religion and the same kind of mistrust and enmity. I also noticed, for instance, American Christians have towards their their Muslim neighbors. I think that that if religion can be the cause for so much hatred and mistrust, whereas really it should be a force for good and for understanding and for love.
How can you make sure that it is the force for love and understanding and a force for good? I think the only way to do that is by have people talk to each other and have people dialog and have people see each other as fellow human beings rather than as the other who is completely different from you?
Penny: I think that some people, when they hear about interfaith work or something like Muslim-Christian engagement, they can be a little skeptical or maybe even a little bit scared. And I'm wondering if how how you could help us think about Muslim-Christian engagement, especially if if we are a little hesitant or a little scared and like maybe that's not so good for me. How can we understand that in a more helpful way?
Frans: Very often the idea, the perception about interfaith work and interfaith engagement is, oh, now I have to give up my own beliefs and now I'm a Christian but now through interfaith engagement, I have to adopt certain Muslim beliefs or I have to give up some of my essential beliefs. And I don't think that's what interfaith dialog and interfaith engagement is about. It's not about giving up your own beliefs.
In fact, it's more about listening to the other and trying to understand the other. Develop empathy, compassion for the other, then understanding of where this other what what moves this other, his deepest motivations. And I think the only way to do that is if you have also a good idea of what your own beliefs are.
It requires complete honesty. So you don't you don't hide your own beliefs. You don't try to dissimulate your own beliefs or abandon your own beliefs. Quite the contrary. I think that interfaith engagement sometimes can lead you to to discover what you really deeply believe and and evaluate and appreciate your own beliefs in relation to the other.
Because I do think that belief is is relational. It's it's not just about people's relationship with God. It's also about people's relationship with each other.
Penny: I think it's helpful for me to think about to learn about a set of beliefs of another people and whether that's, you know, Jews or Muslims or Buddhists, and then see how that same and how those things are similar and different to how I see God or how the priorities I have for living my life in the world. And I think you're right, Frans, I think it really helps me actually be able to describe my own beliefs better when I've been in conversation with people who do see things a little differently. So it's actually kind of helped me grow in my own faith and my understanding of how I do see the world and how I do understand God. So that that's really helped me out a lot. I know.
Doug, I'm wondering if you could share your insights on like what interfaith engagement kind of is and isn't, because there are different ideas about that out there. And it might just help to clarify what interfaith work really is and and what it isn't.
Doug: I like to think about interfaith engagement. As something like learning another language. So when you've grown up speaking your native language and you begin to learn a second language, you realize after a bit that they're not only are different words for familiar objects that you know in your own language, but there are different ways of phrasing things, different ways of talking about similar experiences and different ways of phrasing, familiar constructions, and then even more deeply there are new ways of thinking about the world that are expressed through and in a different language.
So to me, beginning to meet other people whose faith is different from your own and engaging with them and becoming friends with them is similar to that, you realize at some level, they have a different way of seeing the world, and you begin to learn different vocabulary about faith and about God and about ritual and about meaningful things in daily life, and you begin to see and realize different ways of being a human being. And that doesn't mean that you lose your native language by beginning to learn words and phrases and thought patterns in a new language. In fact, I think it's the case that you your understanding of your own native language deepens by learning another language. And also your awareness and understanding of language itself is enhanced by learning more than one language. I think interfaith relations is like that.
Frans: I really like that language metaphor, because you know religions don't don't exist in the abstract. Religion don't exist without people who believe in those religions. So religions, you know, you can open a book to a theoretical approach and say, OK, this is what Jews believe, this is what Muslims believe. But that's not really what these religions are. Religions are really existing only as lived religions as they are expressed by by people who are part of that religion. And that's very often when you can have, you know, lots of variety. You know, you can open a book and say, OK, Muslims believe X, and then you need to meet a Muslim. And you ask him about it and say, well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Or he can say, yeah, I don't really believe it that way, but I still consider myself a Muslim.
So religions are the living organism and religions don't really exist. Uh, what exists is people who are part of a religion. The emphasis is on the people rather than on the religion.
Penny: I'm wondering if there's a story, an experience that you think would be helpful for other people to hear, to better understand either what interfaith is or isn't, or how interfaith engagement and dialog could be helpful or beneficial for us as individuals in our communities and in our country today.
Doug: I lived in Turkey as a youth for my junior year of high school. Moved back to the States. My senior year of high school, I graduated from Marquette Senior High School in Michigan. Then I went off to college at Western Michigan University when it went down there. I went potluck on roommates. And when I when I got to campus, I didn't have a roommate at all.
So for the first two weeks of the fall semester, I lived alone in my room and thinking what the university does, give me a roommate. Is there something about me that, you know, do I smell, am I badly behaved?
Well, it was nothing like that. They just hadn't come up with a roommate for me yet. Well, two weeks into the semester, my first roommate showed up and he was an 18 year old kid from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
All they had with him was a suitcase. He spoke very little English. And his name was Saad Darah. And he was my first college roommate, and as he learned English, we got to know one another and he was a practicing and devout religious Muslim, and I was a practicing and devout religious Christian.
And we became friends and I learned with him that learning a language and learning a religious tradition often went hand in hand, so he was learning English and it said funny things to me. So, for instance, one time he headed off down the hall to the to the communal bathroom carrying a towel and a bar of soap, and he said, I'm going to wash my body. And I said, no, Saad. You're going to take a shower. And he said that he had learned that phrase, wash my body was correct English and he learned it from his English teacher in in Arabia.
And as I had to tell him, look, I don't know, you know, about your English teacher, but I can tell you that what we say here. Is you’re going to take a shower? So the process of learning English for him became also a process of learning about what Christians do. And it's not just about taking a shower, but but I gave him a copy of the New Testament in Arabic. He read it. He said it wasn't such a great translation. He actually came to church with me one time and I got to know him and his buddies, and they moved off campus in the second semester. They invited me over. I, for the first time, had dinner around a meal mat on the floor using our fingers. And I watched them pray and we talked. So friendship, interreligious communication, learning languages, all were a part of the same process.
Frans: I think hospitality is is very important. It's an entry to to interreligious dialog. I visited Indonesia a couple of years ago and on on in my guidebook, I thought that the way I saw that there was this religious shrine of one of the first missionaries, Muslim missionaries to Indonesia in Surabaya.
So I just visited and I walked into there and everything is is different. You are faced with a number of cultural expectations that you don't quite know what they are. I knew that I was supposed to take off my shoes. But for the rest, I didn't really know what I was seeing. And then it was this man who came to me and who saw clearly that I was a tourist and a stranger and a and a non-Muslim. So he he started talking to me and he showed me around and he explained to me how I was to behave. He explained to me what I was seeing. And he talked about what this place meant to him. And he was he was nice to me. It was hospitable. He took me in. And I think, you know, he didn't expect me to immediately convert to Islam or he didn't expect …I didn't preach to him.
He was just nice to me and say, welcome, stranger. And he made me feel a little bit more at home in this strange place. So I think that hospitality and the basic sense of welcoming each other is is very important, is a start of of interreligious dialog.
Penny: I've had the kind of gift of being able to visit with and in some mosques in the Grand Rapids area just to like tour their buildings and their facilities and learn a little bit more about Islam from some people who are part of those mosque communities. And that is something that I think I found the different mosques that we've engaged with to be so hospitable. That's really a gift that they have. I think they feel like they all have to be ambassadors because they live in a predominantly non-Muslim, one could say, Christian culture.
And so my experience has been that the the community, the mosque communities are very hospitable and open to inquiries from groups of people just wanting to get to know them or about their community. And that's definitely something that I think a lot of people could look into if they're interested in starting a journey or beginning kind of interfaith engagement and work with their worshiping communities or their universities or groups or small groups. I'm wondering if you have other tips for us about how people could get started or engage across lines of religious difference in good and helpful and learning ways in our own communities?
Frans: Well, it's about empathy, right. And about reciprocity. When you are welcomed in the community of another and somebody is open to you and say, hey, let me show you around and give you some food maybe and explain what's going on here, it makes you think, well, how would I welcome a Muslim if he came to my church. You know, what would his impressions be and how would I want to present myself? How do I how do I practice hospitality to the stranger who's coming to my place? So that really made me think about how I can practice hospitality and how I can be more hospitable to the stranger who comes to me.
Penny: One of the things that motivates me to be involved in interfaith work is just getting to know other people, like you said, Frans, that getting to know people and how they see the world and how they live their life and how their faith shapes everything they see and do.
But I think for us as a community, too, it can be really important, because when we don't know something, especially something about some other group of people, then that space, the space between us can be filled with fear and mistrust and get really get filled up with our worst ideas or stereotypes about that other group of people. But when we learn, we learned some factual like some head knowledge. And then when we get to learn, we get to know people. Right? Then the space between us gets filled with a mosaic and a richer and a more robust spectrum of types of information and ideas and emotions that I think are more helpful to help us live together in communities really where we can, you know, as Eboo Patel says, who's one of the interfaith leaders in the United States, that we really can get to know each other and work together so that we can build a society where we live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. And that's that's good for all of us.
We hope that you've enjoyed this first episode in our little mini-series on interfaith dialog and Muslim Christian engagement. We hope that you'll be able to join us for future episodes where we will explore and a little more depth, different areas of interests and topics in Muslim-Christian engagement. We hope that you'll join us for future episodes inside of this mini-series. And our topics will include, for example, Allah and God, same or different, and how; Jesus and Muhammad; and some discussions with women who identify as Muslims and we’ll be talking about the issues related to women in Islam. So stay tuned. Hit the subscribe button if you haven't already. And I hope to have you as one of our listeners in our future podcasts.
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