by Whittney Barth

Dr. Diana Eck and the Pluralism Project are updating their award-winning resource to explore the religious diversity of the United States.  The first edition of On Common Ground: World Religions in America was released as a CD-ROM in 1996, providing teachers, students, and scholars with an innovative interactive resource in three parts: “America’s Many Religions,” “A New Religious Landscape,” and “Encountering Religious Diversity.”

The Pluralism Project is now poised to launch On Common Ground 2.0 (OCG 2.0), a web-based version of this time-tested pedagogical structure. OCG 2.0 explores religious diversity through introductions to many of the world’s religions, maps of religious centers in the context of the changing religious landscape of the United States, and essay explorations of the challenges that arise in the context of this new religious landscape.

Like its predecessor, OCG 2.0 highlights the Pluralism Project’s ongoing research into the changing religious demography of the United States and the implications of religious pluralism on public life, religious communities, and private institutions.  These findings are presented in a timely, interactive format suitable for students, educators, clergy, community and business leaders, and citizens interested in understanding the realities America’s multi-religious cities and towns. OCG 2.0 is the product of collaboration among student researchers, staff, and faculty. Ryan Overbey, Pluralism Project post-doctoral fellow, serves as the lead technology specialist.

The “America’s Many Religions” section will include essay sets covering fifteen religious traditions and their development in the United States, with select updates to reflect the complexities of a post-9/11 era.  Additionally, a new essay set on Atheism/Humanism will be included to explore the growing presence of these communities in American public life.

The “A New Religious Landscape” section will employ Geographic Information System technology to map the religious landscape of select cities and regions across the country, integrating census data and active links to organizational websites to offer the user a rich and dynamic educational experience. The organizational web links embedded in the maps emphasize the Pluralism Project’s commitment to empowering and encouraging communities to share their own stories.

Finally, the “Encountering Religious Diversity” section will include an updated essay collection that presents a few of the challenges that arise when campuses, hospitals, city halls, and church basements become workshops for religious pluralism.

OCG 2.0 is slated to launch late next year and is made possible by a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc.  If you have worked with earlier editions of On Common Ground, the Pluralism Project would like to hear your On Common Ground story.  How did you, your community, and/or your classroom utilize this resource? We invite you to share your thoughts with the Pluralism Project by e-mailing staff@pluralism.org or contacting us through Facebook. Want to stay “in the know” on OCG 2.0 updates? Follow us on Twitter @pluralismproj.

Let your story be part of 2.0.

Whittney Barth is the Assistant Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University

by Bud Heckman

How do we know when we have arrived in the interfaith movement?  When religious pluralism is normative?  When religious differences don’t cause conflict or even concern?

Things have been changing rapidly in the expanding field of interfaith relations. Therefore, it may be worth measuring our progress by some milestones of our achievement rather than by an elusive final destination.  I want to suggest six different markers of hope which I see, and I want to invite you to share your own markers of hope and stories of success.

I see great progress in: academic legitimization, institutional development, research expansion, intra-field cooperation, government partnerships, and specialization of work.  A brief example on each milepost:

Academy – When Diana Eck addressed the American Academy of Religion (AAR) as President five years ago, I glumly noted to her that, out of the hundreds and hundreds of workshops at the AAR, only two referenced “interfaith.”  Through the Pluralism Project, Diana built an entire industry out of the study of religious pluralism with dozens of scholars and researchers in her network. Yet the academy was largely stuck in the dry approaches of comparative religion and history of religion. This year’s AAR program, however, is so chock full of practical “interfaith” things that a person could go to just such workshops for the full five days.

At the same time, seminaries are re-inventing their approaches to the religious “other,” following the groundbreaking lead of the folks at Hartford, Auburn, and Claremont Lincoln.

Colleges and universities are similarly signing up wholesale for the array of services of the Interfaith Youth Core to transform their campuses and tomorrow’s leaders.

Institution Building – Interfaith organizations are growing like spring grass.  In 2003, I started research with a team of interns at Religions for Peace USA to count and categorize interfaith organizations.  We took Chris Coble’s earlier research and expanded it to find 17 different kinds and more than 1,000 interfaith organizations in the US.  Eight years later, a new breed of taxonomers is telling me they have more than 25 categories.  With my colleagues at Coexist Foundation USA, we just catalogued nearly 2,000 interfaith entities.

Research – The Coexist Foundation has invested a great deal in research through Gallup on perceptions of Muslims and the global success of interfaith relations.  But our research is just one of dozens of efforts.  The researchers at Hartford Institute for Religion Research have had a decade-long look at interfaith relations and are showing from 2 to 4 fold growth in shared experiences of “worship” and common action across faith lines.  ARDA, Glenmary Research Center, Public Religion Research Institute, and many others are producing equally important data.

Cooperation – In response to the public relations disaster of Park51 last summer, six New York-based interfaith organizations worked together this year under the umbrella of Prepare NY.  This first-ever multi-organizational interfaith effort has resulted in hundreds of dialogues and in a more peaceful, constructive, and meaningful celebration for the 10^th Anniversary of 9/11.  Religions for Peace USA joined with Groundswell, Hebrew College and other institutions to release a statement together about our shared focus after 9/11.

Government Partnerships – Religions for Peace has pioneered fostering government-religious community partnerships, which hold much promise for scaling interfaith relations.  Recently , I had the pleasure of serving on the Interreligious Cooperation Task Force of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and had the pleasure of seeing the new ways in which government is becoming responsive to religious communities. The US Government is just one among many governments who have taken a unique interest in advancing interfaith relations.   Qatar, Norway, Indonesia, Finland, Kazakhstan, and Saudi Arabia are but a few of the countries doing creative new things to foster multifaith cooperation.

Specialization – The waters were much murkier twenty years ago, before the resurgence of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, and even ten years ago, before the 9/11-inspired surge of interfaith growth.  Organizations were less clear about their niches, their unique value added.  With today’s clarity and specialization of mission comes better funding, cooperation, and focused impact.

No longer the infant, the interfaith movement is more like the awkward teenager, showing signs of becoming a promising adult, but not there yet.  What is next?  We have room to grow.

Funding is one of the most critical areas that must come along further, if we can say we have succeeded.  My recent research shows an array of new funders starting to test the waters of supporting interfaith relations.  While the continued down global economy and shifts in focus for a handful of the original funders for the movement may give some pause, The Coexist Foundation has been working hard to be one of many in a hopeful countercurrent of support at this critical hour.

The Coexist Foundation is awarding an endowed annual US$100,000 Coexist Prize for an unsung hero/heroine in interfaith relations, and we wish to celebrate the stories of your success that are worthy of being told.  Video stories will be made of the finalists and shared at the announcement of winners next Spring.

We have to continue to progress along the above lines and make advancements in other areas.  For instance, we have to: more effectively engage traditional and new media, articulate standards and measurable outcomes, and help a new, forward-looking generation come into mid-life leadership roles in the movement.

With our common efforts, religious pluralism can become the norm.

____________________________________________

Rev. Bud Heckman is the Director of External Relations at the Coexist Foundation and the Executive Director of Religions for Peace USA.  Your comments are welcome:  bud@coexistfoundation.net.

The Pluralism Project at Harvard University is hosting a photo contest highlighting religious diversity in the United States.

From the Pluralism Project website:

We invite you to participate in our second annual Pluralism Project Photo Contest. We are looking for high-resolution digital images that convey the vibrancy of religious diversity in the USA. We are particularly interested in images in the following categories:

• Religious practices and rituals
• Religious centers, including festivals, center openings, and parades
• Participation of religious groups in American civic life
• Interfaith encounter or social action
• Women’s leadership and participation
• Emerging leadership within Muslim and Sikh communities
• Historic and present day images of the Atheist/Humanist, Bahá’í, Confucian, Native American, Shinto, Taoist, and Zoroastrian communities in the US

One grand-prize winner will be selected; the winning photographer will receive a $250 cash prize and an extended exposé in the spotlight on our homepage, www.pluralism.org.

Click here for full details

by Whittney Barth
from State of Formation

I am currently a master’s student at Harvard Divinity School in a program I chose in large part because of the religiously diverse student body. Students, faculty, and staff gather weekly to take part in a Noon Service hosted by one of the student organizations on campus. The hosts alternate: one week we are meditating with the Buddhists, the next we are singing gospel with the African and African American students’ association. As you might imagine, Noon Service is a time for sharing and for celebrating our community’s diversity. Yet I have also found that Noon Service can be a time of challenge and growth.

Last year, the atheist, agnostic, and humanist group led a Noon Service, and as a part of their program they invited the choir to sing a song entitled “I Ain’t Afraid.” The song included lyrics that emphasized that no sacred text or sacred being aroused fear, rather it was what the followers of those texts and beings do in their name that was frightening. I left feeling perplexed and hurt. Was this really the kind of experience my colleagues had within our community? Did they feel like those of us within the community who espoused religion were to be feared as hypocrites?

Click here to read the entire article

From State of Formation

In February of 1998, I returned to the wintry campus of St. Olaf College, a small Christian liberal arts school in rural Minnesota, after a five-month global study trip. It was a bewildering reverse culture shock back into my Norwegian Lutheran heritage; the familiar had changed. I longed to have the world back at my frozen fingertips.

I eagerly enrolled in a world religions course taught by Dr. Anantanand Rambachan, who would later become the first non-Christian (Hindu) chair of the Religion Department. For course curriculum, he was using a CD-ROM (yes, that was cutting edge technology in 1998!), On Common Ground: World Religions in America,produced that year by The Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Sitting at a clunky green Mac in the basement computer lab, I discovered that the religious landscape of India was also now at home in Minnesota…Montana…and Massachusetts!

Click here to read entire article.

From RNS

(Boston, MA)—Whether a controversy over the development of an Islamic Center near Ground Zero, or the addition of Diwali to the school calendar in Burlington, Vermont, the dilemmas that arise in multi-religious America require new methods for teaching and learning about religion. Through its Case Study Initiative, the Pluralism Project at Harvard University is exploring how this time-tested pedagogical method is uniquely suited to religious and theological studies.

Using the issues that arise in the contexts of civil society, public life, and religious communities as basic texts, case studies engage participants in active learning, which research has shown is more effective in teaching critical thinking skills than lecture-based learning alone. Through partnerships with other institutions, scholars, and organizations, the Pluralism Project is currently developing and test-teaching an expansive set of case studies on multi-religious America.

This year, the Pluralism Project hosted its first-ever summer fellowship program to develop new cases for the classroom and to adapt existing cases for use in community-based settings. Four doctoral-level fellows and two community associates participated in field research and case writing on issues such as: the challenges of food for an interfaith residential program on a college campus in California; the workplace discrimination experienced by a turbaned Sikh after 9/11 in NYC; the controversy over holiday decorations in a public school in rural Vermont; the protracted battle between Native peoples and their neighbors over offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts; and post-9/11 challenges faced by Muslims and Sikhs across the United States.

Click here to read the entire article.

The Pluralism Project at Harvard University has released a video as part of its “Educating Religious Leaders for a Multi-Religious World” initiative. The video focuses on the 2009 Parliament in Melbourne and the Council’s partnership with the Henry Luce Foundation. This partnership allowed for students and faculty of 15 theological institutions in the U.S. to participate at the Melbourne Parliament. While there, they expressed their findings as well as questions they encountered as members of a broader experience leading up to the events in Melbourne, which included coursework at their respective universities centered upon this theme of preparing religious leaders in a multi-religious world.

Click here to be taken to The Pluralism Project’s site.

Use of new communication venues necessary to spread message of hope

by Deb Christian

Click here to read the full article and watch Diana Eck’s address

CHICAGO (RCCongress 2010), April 9 — Pluralism: more than one of something; diverse; opposite of a single approach or method.

“Pluralism begins with difference. Real religious pluralism means our engagement with one another requires building sturdy relationships,” said Diana Eck, developer and director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, in a Friday keynote address to participants in Religion Communication Congress 2010.

Noting the challenges faced in the United States with its complex religious landscape, Dr. Eck noted that, “religious faith is a powerful force in people’s lives and choices. We must find new ways to spread the message of hope through new communication venues in our world.”

The Pluralism Project tries to bring changing views on religion into the open. “Who are ‘we the people…’ now,” she asked. “This is a new world of encounter for many Americans.”

“We are not all the same. Pluralism begins there. Trying to understand these differences is a great human challenge,” Dr. Eck said. “The world is changed with faith practices of those we know little about. How do we deal with religious differences?”

Click here to read the full article and watch Diana Eck’s address