Living One's Faith through More than Prayer

Brown students have a variety of ways to explore faith on campus.

by Nancy Hamlin Soukup

In the middle of Wriston Quad sits a three-year-old experiment in interfaith living - one of the few on the nation's campuses. Some residents have heard people stroll by Diman House late at night, see the sign - Interfaith House - and whisper, "Shhh, they're praying." But praying and meditation barely characterize the lively interchange involved when thirty-two Brown undergraduates of widely varying belief systems share living quarters.

Some of the architects of Interfaith House and leaders in this broader multifaith dialogue pulsating on campus will walk through Van Wickle Gates on May 28. Many see the recent creation of the house and their involvement in key multifaith initiatives on campus as foundational to their four years at Brown. Julian Leichty '06, an education and public policy concentrator, commented that he never thought he would have become so involved in interfaith work or religious life at Brown. But in his first year after attending the Protestant worship service, he was asked to join the Multifaith Council, which is comprised of student leaders from all religious and faith communities on campus.

At the council, Leichty met Matt Hamilton '05 and Sushil Jacobs '05. Together they decided to advance the idea of an interfaith program house. "The community we envisioned truly required that we live with each other," Leichty said, "allowing us to create a community of people with and without faith backgrounds who wanted to know each other deeply and enjoy common pursuits, especially around social justice, community work, and public service issues." The result was the formation of Interfaith House in 2003.

Another council member, Fatima Quraishi '06, was skeptical about whether she wanted to be involved in Muslim activities when she arrived at Brown. Yet Quraishi, a concentrator in development studies and the history of art and architecture, knew she did not want to break fast alone her first Ramadan here, so she went to the Brown Muslim Student Association (BMSA) and was hooked. "One could claim," says Quraishi, "that I got involved in the BMSA for food, in archetypal college student tradition. [But] before I knew it, I was committed to the organization." She has been both vice president and president of BMSA. For Quraishi, one of the memorable experiences of religious life at Brown was advocating for and then serving on the search committee for the University's first Muslim chaplain, one of the few institutionally supported positions of this kind in the nation.

Benj Kamm '06, a Middle East studies concentrator, was president of Brown Hillel this year and has served on the council. As Hillel president, he has worked with students and staff to oversee thirty-five-plus student groups. "Ultimately," he says, "the value of community, but especially a religious community, is its ability to support the community members in developing their identity and choosing how to live their lives. As a leader of a community which is simultaneously spiritual, religious, anti-religious, and mundane, I have learned to expand the frameworks through which I think about this task."

Eli Braun '06, a religious studies concentrator and past vice president of Interfaith House, says that he does not claim any particular faith; rather he has "oscillated between 'religious' and 'anti-religious' stances." "The idea of 'the religious,' Braun observes, "has pervaded my time at Brown, on Jewish, interfaith, and academic levels. ... I have approached interfaith dialogue with a joyful spirit, understanding that while communicating with another person of faith can be confrontational, it should also be done with laughter."

Another religious studies concentrator, Nathan Schneider '06, decided to find a different expression of interfaith, philosophical, ethical dialogue on campus by founding Ziggurat, an integrative journal of religious study and experience that is supported by the Religious Studies Department and the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life (OCRL). A Brown-RISD Roman Catholic community member, Schneider says that the journal, founded this year, seeks to create a conversation between academic and lived religion. "These things are relevant to each other, as so many of us have found, despite the constraints of the secular-sectarian imaginary lines that are presently in force," he says.

The OCRL sponsors and supports the interfaith initiatives in which these students have engaged while at Brown. The Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain of the University, reflects on Brown's unique capacity to provide space for this interfaith dialogue. "Our curriculum, structures, and history draw together those who have rare abilities to nurture the human spirit and intellect. We are a milieu of teaching and learning where students, faculty, chaplains, deans, risk more to become better, more honest poets, scientists, playwrights, priests, philosophers, healers, teachers, in the hope of better serving our world."

OCRL's decades-long commitment to ensure that a diversity of beliefs have voice and vitality throughout the University community continues through its ongoing support of these activities, an interfaith dinner gathering at Cooper Nelson's home, the fifteen campus-based religious organizations affiliated with OCRL, religious services, classroom dialogues, and even conversations over pizza in Diman House on late Sunday evenings. Praying is only one way to define interfaith life at Brown.