OUCRL Leads a Student Delegation to the Fourth Annual President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge National Gathering
OUCRL Leads a Student Delegation to the Fourth Annual President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge National Gathering
September 22-23, The George Washington University
https://www.facebook.com/events/821462544548055/
Rev. Mark Forrester, along with a delegation of three Vanderbilt students, took part in a called gathering of interfaith campus leaders by President Obama. Below are two of our delegates offering reflections of this inspiring event!
Attending the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge was a great experience as Vanderbilt’s Interfaith Council president. I focused my attention at the convention mostly on how to improve the programming that we already have in place to foster interfaith dialogue on campus. The large group plenaries at the beginning of each day offered insight into the importance of engaging in interfaith dialogue, particularly through community service. Data presented on the statistics of universities who do so, highly suggested that campuses are much better off when they engage in this type of activity. This left me feeling motivated to boost interfaith interactions on Vanderbilt’s campus.
There are a couple tangible ways in which I look forward to advancing interfaith activity on campus. First off, as the council’s president, I have the ability to choose specific conversations topics as well as conversations styles that are used in our bi-monthly meetings. Because of this convention, I now feel more encouraged to change up our meetings a bit in order to create a variety of interactions among the people who attend these meetings. I also aim to foster more dialogue between religious organizations on campus. I will do this by encouraging more collaborative events and establishing regular meetings with representatives from these organizations. This gathering in DC has left me excited about the prospect of further promoting interfaith dialogue on Vanderbilt’s campus!
Aleezah Merali
President of Vanderbilt Interfaith Council
The time I spent with the Vanderbilt contingent to DC stirred up my interest in interreligious discourse. As a pastor-in-training considering a vocation in both congregational ministry and college chaplaincy, I was inspired to move beyond what often feels like oversimplified claims that pluralistic dialogue is held captive by fundamentalist monologue. As a person of faith who wants to build bridges between all expressions of faith, I find interreligious discourse a fascinating route between even pluralists and fundamentalists. From my Christian perspective, if both higher education and “the church” want to have any relevance in resisting the devastating impacts of globalized consumerism in the 21st century, bringing people’s thought worlds and faith expressions into “learning communities that matter” might just be their single greatest task.
Allyn Steele
M.Div. Candidate, 2015
Vanderbilt Divinity School