Fostering hope for an interfaith future, and creating new tools for achieving it

Yet one more reason I attend meetings of the Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-culture issues is hope. This meeting really got me thinking about how realistic my hopes are for the success of the group members’ efforts to help create a truly interfaith and power-balanced culture.

The world “realistic” has acquired a negative connotation—many people automatically associate it with the injection of pessimism into a situation considered too naïvely optimistic. Ironically, our culture’s worldview is one of the least realistic. A perfect example of this is what media scholars call “mean world syndrome,” in which people think crime rates are higher than they actually are, because that’s almost all they hear about in American mainstream news.

So, what we need now to make our view of the situation more realistic is an injection of optimism. Very Twilight Zone stuff. A lovely irony in this situation is that many of the people involved in the MPC—people striving to foster support and publicity for local peacemaking efforts—are long-time journalists from mainstream news outlets.

This month’s meeting was held at Temple Beth Shalom in Oak Park, Michigan; as usual, the first third of the meeting was an explanation of the history of the place and of the community that gathers there. I appreciated learning more about Judaism, especially in the context of Passover, and about the differences among different forms of Judaism. The MPC meetings are amazing cultural experiences—I always learn something new about my home state, which makes me appreciate and value the Detroit area’s history, as well as its present, even more.

As I’ve said before, one of the biggest benefits of attending the MPC meetings is hearing about initiatives and organizations I otherwise may never hear about, because our mainstream media simply does not talk about such things. This meeting put interfaith initiatives in the corporate world on my radar.

“There are interfaith initiatives in the corporate world?”, I thought to myself. I heard in passing once about interfaith awareness within Ford Motor Company, but assumed it was a small employee club or part of some interoffice morale improvement effort. We hear such horrible things about corporations and corporate culture, that many of us have the jaded assumption anything philanthropic that corporations say or do is disingenuous and for the primary purpose of making themselves look good. Our host, Joe Lewis, has been participating in interfaith work in the corporate setting for a long time, as part of Ford Motor Company’s interfaith network.

A project highlighted at this meeting was the use of photography in helping to achieve interfaith and peacemaking goals. The new House of Worship Photos Project is an effort to develop a photographic record of all the diverse houses of worship in southeastern Michigan—from run-down storefront ministries to mega-churches, from mainstream Christian churches to temples of religions many people don’t realize exist in their area.

I keep finding out about more and more Buddhist temples, Sikh Gurdwaras, and Hindu temples “hidden” in plain sight in the middle of culturally-homogenous-looking residential neighborhoods. The in-progress Web site will give detailed instructions for how photographers can submit their work to the site. In the meantime, ReadtheSpirit.com has more information. Credit will always be given to the photographers, but the photos are licensed to Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons permits the general public, media, congregations and individuals to use the photos for education and publicity purposes, and prohibits their use for propaganda and hate purposes.

Another hot topic discussed at this meeting was the rise in popularity of “minibooks”—the publishing of 40-60-page books, the type of writing that used to be available only or primarily in magazines. The growing popularity of minibooks, particularly by authors who historically public nothing between full-length books, has the potential for making certain topics and ideas far more accessible to more people.

For younger and busy readers who are accustomed to finding out what they need to know in short, few-page online articles, and who tend to shy away from few-hundred-page tomes about unfamiliar topics or difficult issues, a book that’s less than 100 pages may be far less intimidating.

One topic many Americans may be intimidated by a few-hundred-page book about is Muslim customs. Read the Spirit just published the minibook The Beauty of Ramadan: A Guide to the Muslim Month of Prayer and Fasting for Muslims and Non-Muslims, by Najah Bazzy. People fear what they don’t know. It was pointed out this book is the only of its kind, so it’ll serve as another valuable tool for helping to improve interfaith relations by correcting misconceptions about faiths the media is full of little but negative stereotypes about.

The women’s interfaith group WISDOM had three upcoming events to announce at this meeting. One of its initiatives is the House of Worship Visit series, with two upcoming destinations. April 22’s is the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, and June 20’s is the SikhGurdwara Hidden Falls, in Plymouth Township. On May 16 the Birmingham Community House (in Birmingham, Michigan) will host a forum presentation on “Mental Health Issues and Challenges Facing Metro Detroit’s Diverse Faith Traditions.”

Though the number of attendees and friends of the MPC group is very small compared with the larger population, these people and their efforts are generating a tremendous amount of energy. The number and quality of, not to mention attendance at, the events they organize and host continue to grow.

Sure, these events receive little or no mainstream publicity, and inevitably the success of some ends up being overestimated. Overall, though, the efforts of groups such as the InterFaith Leadership Council, WISDOM, and the Song & Spirit Institute for Peace show real promise for spilling over into mainstream consciousness, with the slow development toward the critical mass of people required to activate a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift from the glorification of violence to the glorification of peace may not happen anytime “soon,” but it will happen, as long as people don’t give up hope.

It’s important to remember that if these efforts are being carried out at the grass-roots level in southeastern Michigan, they likely are in other localities, too. If you live in another state, I hope what I write here will inspire you to investigate the existence of such organizations and events in your area. They’re hard to find without already knowing someone who’s involved with them, but hopefully my reports will give you some ideas in how to look for them and get involved. Maybe you yourself will be the one to start such activities where you are.

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Image: “Young Patriots Park #5” by Karla Joy Huber, 2007; colored pencil

Networking in 4-D: A quest for jobs, volunteering, friends, and cultural experiences

The first Michigan Professional Communicators with interest in religion and cross-cultural issues (MPC) meeting I attended, I was a new college graduate just starting my job-seeking networking. At my second MPC meeting, I shifted my focus from looking for potential employers or friends-of-potential-employers to listening for volunteer opportunities that would enable me to make a beneficial contribution to society while enhancing my communications credentials in the real world.

At this meeting, I added a third dimension to my networking experience and goals: making friends. Forming connections for the sake of connections, considering these people my friends, people I pray for, people whose own successes and struggles I appreciate hearing about. I also brought my two best friends with me to this meeting, so I cared not only about developing my own connections but about them making connections too.

Another aspect of my changed perspective was that I’ve chosen to focus my professional development on education. I tutor in two writing classes at Oakland Community College, and I also work with private students.

So, since I put that in the cosmos, that’s what the cosmos is sending back to me: The focus of the presentations at this MPC meeting was education.

This meeting introduced us to two organizations to add to the impressive assortment of community-building groups and initiatives represented in the MPC. These two don’t have an emphasis on interreligious bridge-building, but undoubtedly they encounter cross-cultural and interreligious teachable moments in their work with underprivileged children from various ethnic backgrounds.

The first group is the Education Trust-Midwest, an organization primarily focused on academic research, which is used to create and maintain academic initiatives and programs that help eliminate the achievement gap between higher-income and lower-income students. They “highlight and celebrate high-performing, high-poverty schools,” Executive Director Amber Arellano said at the meeting; this is a “very rare combination” since the current trend in elementary education is to put all the funding and best human resources into the highest-performing—which are incidentally also the highest-income—schools. In addition to research, EdTrust also advocates for specific improvements in schools, one example being negotiation with teacher unions about creating or increasing enticements (such as better pay) to recruit the best teachers.

The second group is Beyond Basics, a non-profit organization that aims to “eradicate illiteracy” by working directly in Detroit Public Schools to help children through reading groups, one-on-one tutoring, and publishing small books of each child’s writings for the child’s family.

As you’ve read in my previous posts, MPC meetings are always held at places of cultural and / or religious significance in Detroit. This one was held a few miles outside Detroit, at Bloomfield Hills’ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This venue was chosen largely because of all the recent national attention the Mormon faith has been getting, particularly since there’s a Mormon running for president. (It was also pointed out the writer of the Twilight series is Mormon.)

During the guided tour and question-and-answer period that preceded the meeting, the bishop and other LDS representatives who spoke cleared up several common misconceptions about their faith—including about the roles of women, about polygamy (which hasn’t been practiced for over 100 years, except by a splinter group they don’t consider true Mormons), and about if Mormons are actually Christian. They are, but they aren’t Catholic or Protestant—they are their own third category. Some authentic Web sites listed in the information packet the church handed out can be found here, here, and here.

In addition to seeking job connections, volunteer connections, and friends, the MPC has also been a great cultural experience for me, given me—and now my best friends—the opportunity to learn about and see the insides of cultural centers and places of worship I would probably have no other opportunity to go to—primarily because (with the exception of the Detroit Institute of Arts) I never knew they existed. I look forward to finding out where the March meeting will be held, and I hope you look forward to hearing about it.

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The Michigan Professional Communicators meeting is part of the Interfaith Leadership Council of Metropolitan Detroit, and is held once every two months.

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Illustration by Karla Joy Huber, 2004; marker, colored pencil, watercolor, metallic gel pen, flower petal