Over and over during my time as a Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI) fellow, I found myself asking the question: What is the point of interfaith work? I was not asking out of frustration or because I felt like my time in BILI was not well spent. Rather, I was asking out of genuine curiosity. What is so important about interfaith work that sixteen college students would devote so much time and energy into learning how to be better interfaith leaders? 

I spoke with some of my friends in the program, and we went back and forth trying to parse out the purpose of interfaith work. We do interfaith work because we are better united than divided. We do interfaith work so that we can provide for and protect those of us who are most vulnerable. We do interfaith work so that we can learn more about those we are around. We do interfaith work because religion and spirituality are key parts of many people’s identities. We do interfaith work because many of us see holiness in others. The list goes on and on. We came up with so many reasons that we feel individually called to do interfaith work, and yet the more we spoke about interfaith work, the less clear our definition of interfaith engagement became.

Could an event ever be focused only on interfaith engagement? Shouldn’t there be a purpose for bringing together a group of students beyond that they come from different faiths? Is an event that includes students from diverse backgrounds but does not specifically discuss religion or spirituality an interfaith event? These questions and many more filled our conversations, and of course we could not come to conclusions both as a group and individually on many of them. 

A big concern I had about Brown’s interfaith engagement prior to beginning BILI was it seemed like there were tons of avenues for students who wanted to be engaged in leadership, yet not many ways that the average Brown student could engage. We have numerous councils and boards, and within communities we have interfaith engagement leaders. Yet we did not seem to be having many events that were focused on bringing together students from different faith communities. We have Thursday Night Supers and the Religious Literacy Project, which bring together students from many different spiritual and religious backgrounds, yet each of these events is focused on learning from a presenter—someone outside of the Brown undergraduate community. 

As I think about what programs, events, and ideas I hope to bring to Brown and implement in the future, the questions I contemplated earlier in this article continue to hold me back. I thought about how nice it would be to form a community focused on bringing your whole religious and spiritual self, a community driven by student presentations and discussions about our different traditions. Yet, when I ask myself what the purpose of this group would be, it seems like it could result in surface-level interfaith engagement. Of course, show-and-tells are easy ways to learn more and feel gratified in our efforts. However, would such surface-level presentations result in surface-level relationships? Would difficult topics be off the table, such as matters that could bring discomfort to others in the group? Would this easy interfaith engagement prevent the initiative to form deeper, more meaningful ways for students to engage? 

Luckily for me, these are not questions that I need to—or really should be—asking and attempting to answer alone. Yet, the fact that I am able to ask these questions is the best representation of what I have learned participating in the Boston Interfaith Leadership Initiative this year. These are questions that will not be going away any time soon, and I intend to continue to reflect on the purpose of interfaith engagement for the rest of my time at college, in the workforce, and forever. Next semester, I hope to continue this conversation with many of the other engaged interfaith leaders on my campus and form a plan of action for how we can approach interfaith initiatives at Brown. I know we’ll continue to come up with no answers for these existential questions.