Q: Let me begin by inviting you to sum up, if you would, the central idea of The Future of Faith.

A: Let’s say it’s a tripartite thesis in this book. One is that the resurgence of religion around the world and the various religious traditions, which is unexpected, global—there were people who were predicting the marginalization and even disappearance of religion in my early years as a teacher. That disappearance, marginalization, didn’t happen, and in various religious traditions, almost all of them, there’s been a resurgence for complicated reasons. I do not think that is a mere transient phenomenon.  I think it’s a basic change in the nature of our civilization, that it will continue, and so, therefore, programs like this one probably have a future. You deal with religion and ethics. The second part of the thesis, however, is that fundamentalisms, I use the word in the plural, which have often been associated with this resurgence of religion, at least in the popular mind, are on the decline. I do not think that they’re going to last out much longer. It’s a recent phenomenon, began in the early 20th century and has appeared in various different religious traditions, always as a kind of a reaction against something that’s going on in that tradition. They claim to be very traditional, but they’re not. It’s really a modern movement, and I think there’s evidence that, in every one of the religions, they are on the decline. The third part of the thesis, and I think it’s one of the most important, not the central part, is that we’re seeing a change in what I call the nature of religiousness, that what it means to be a religious person, or frequently now people will say a spiritual person, they have some questions, occasionally, or often, about the word “religion.” We’re seeing a fundamental change there so that it means something now different than it did 50 or 100 years ago, to say nothing of 500 years ago. And that’s the main thesis of the book. It’s a a mixture of some of the things we’re talking about here as well as some autobiographical illustrations—my experience with liberation theologians, my experience with Pentecostals, with the Catholic Church, in fact with the present pope, and also my early years of formation in a Baptist evangelical congregation. I think it’s important when people are reading about issues as important as this that they know something about where I’m coming from when I’m saying these things and what life experiences have led me to make the kind of statements that I have here.

Q: So how is it changing? Tell me what the elements are of this new thing that you see.

A: For Christianity, in particular, to single it out among the various world religions, there’s a movement away from a more belief-and-doctrinal formulation of religion into a more experiential, practical, you might even say pragmatic understanding: How do I get through the day? How do I get through my life? What resources do I have—spiritual resources? There’s a very distinct move in that direction away, from hierarchical kinds of structures in religion toward a more egalitarian form of religious organization. I think the major evidence for that is the enormously new and important role that women are playing which they didn’t play 50 years ago, and there are other evidences for this egalitarian tendency.

Q: Let me take you back to the emphasis on faith and the movement of the spirit and the presence of the spirit in people’s lives, or the hope for it, and contrast that to 1,500 years in which beliefs and doctrines were primary.

A: I contend in this book that for roughly the first 300 years, early Christianity was a faith movement. They didn’t have creeds until the early fourth century, until Constantine. They didn’t have hierarchies. There was enormous variety of different expressions of Christianity which we’re now uncovering, with the different scrolls that are found, have been there all that time. Then, around the early fourth century, with Constantine in particular, there was a massive movement toward hierarchy, a clerical elite, and a creed. Now remember that the creed was insisted upon by the emperor. Not by the bishops, not by the pope. He wanted a creed so he had a uniform expression of Christianity as an imperial project. He wanted something that would bring the empire together. Now it didn’t work that well for him. Nonetheless, I think the creedal understanding, that is, the rather doctrinal and hierarchical understanding, goes back to that very, very unfortunate term under Constantine, which then set the pattern for the next centuries. Now we’re in a new phase in which that is no longer the case, a third phase.

Q: Define for me, if you would, just what are the principle components of this turn toward emphasis on faith?

A: I call it an age of the spirit, with the age of faith in those early years, and then the age of belief, and now this movement toward an age of the spirit, because the spirit indicates, at least in Christian history, the personal, communal, even subjective element as opposed to the hierarchical and doctrinal element in Christianity, and that’s where everything is moving, I think, clearly. The fastest growing movement in Christianity today is the Pentecostal charismatic expression of Christianity—vast variety of them. Nonetheless, what they have in common is an enormous emphasis on community and spirit and experience, and that’s drawing a lot of people away from these previous forms.

Q: Why do you think that is? I mean, why is there this emphasis on the spirit now, as opposed to creeds and beliefs?

A: Well, I think that, given the fact that we are often deprived, in modern technical society, of very much chance for deep, personal experience—we pass each other by in elevators—the yearning for some kind of personal experience, even the yearning for some kind of let’s call it an ecstatic encounter with God or with the divine is there, and the Pentecostals offer this, and they offer it in a community where people support and take care of each other, where there’s also healing. A lot of people are drawn in by the healing. So I think it combines elements that have an enormous appeal. It has no hierarchies. That’s why it branches out in so many different directions.

Q: But you have said that this is not just among Pentecostals, that this movement of the spirit, this emphasis on the spirit, is very broad.

A: It is very broad. I think in the mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church the emphasis on community and experience, and also the language of the spirit—and one of the favorite ways for women theologians and ministers now to refer to God is using the language of spirit, because the traditional language of the sovereign God and so on seems, and is, rather hierarchical and masculine.

Q: People have said when they’re referring to this experiential part of the heart it is often described as the heart versus the head—that for a religion to be healthy, it has to have both the spirit and some kind of structure, creeds, or beliefs, to hang all the rest of the feelings on.

A: I agree with that completely, and I think what we’re seeing now is a compensation for centuries in which the main emphasis was on doctrinal assent, hierarchical control suspicious of laity and lay movements, and now we’re seeing a kind of reaction to that, if you will, which inevitably is going to have to find some balance. I study the Pentecostal movement pretty carefully. The younger Pentecostals now are saying, “Hey, we ought to deal with the head a little bit here, too, you know,” some doctrinal or philosophical basis. So you’re noticing that, and they’ll work on that, as well. But what it is is really a complementary movement.

Q: I was particularly interested in your idea that the so-called apostolic succession after Jesus  wasn’t something that right back to his giving the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter, but it was something that was created by human beings some centuries later, and I’m wondering if you could describe how that happened and then tell me, particularly, how you think that affects the authority of the Catholic Church.

A: Well, I think the evidence is now in that the whole idea of apostolic authority, apostolic succession, came in much later, let’s say in the 200s and 300s, when Christianity was growing and people were looking around for some way to assert, especially the early bishops, their own authority, and you can see this emerging. The bishops would say, “Well, I go back to Matthew” or “I go back to Peter,” and they would even construct or write gospels and statements that were really—we would call them forgeries. They didn’t have that term in those days. And the interesting thing now is we’re beginning to find these things. You know, that whole stash of documents in Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, and all those things, which are late. They’re not early. They’re not the apostles doing that. But it was an invention. It was an invention to secure the authority of the church leaders who needed to have some kind of historical backing. I think it means a rather serious rethinking of the basis on which churches that claim the apostolic authority continue to assert their authority. Now, whether they are going to do that or not is another whole question. But when you find out that the historical basis for this is a little shaky, does that affect the way you exercise authority today? I think it should.

Q: Not only how you exercise it, but how the rest of us look at it. Does the scholarship you refer to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church?

A: Well, yes. I think it does. You know, there was a document around just about the time of the Renaissance called the Donation of Constantine. You may have heard of it, and it was supposed to be a document by which Constantine gave a lot of the property in central Italy to the church, and they used that to claim the church’s sovereignty over that. It was proven to be a forgery, and the Catholic Church made the adjustment, and eventually they gave up, many years later, secular sovereignty over central Italy and in some ways the moral authority of the pope became greater after he didn’t also have to be a secular sovereign. I think the Catholic Church can adjust to this quite well, and maybe it’s a very good thing that they have this coming. Now, I don’t know. I’ll be interested to watch, but they have to deal with the fact that the early historical grounding for apostolic succession is really no longer held by most scholars.

Q: In 1965, you published a book called The Secular City in which you thought that the role of religion in modern city life was becoming pretty less important than it had been, and some people said you were wrong about that assertion.

A: The original title of that book was God in the Secular City. Most people don’t know that, and the thesis of the book was the decline of institutional religion should not be viewed as a catastrophe, because God is not just present in religious institutions. God is present in all of creation, in other kinds of movements and institutions and to be discerned, presence of God to be discerned there and responded to.  The publisher said no “God in the Secular.” It’s too complicated. Let’s just call it The Secular City. So I’ve lived with that title now for—that was 44 years ago, and I have learned a few things since then. I wouldn’t swear by every sentence in that book. Nonetheless, the central thesis of the presence of God in all of creation and historical institutions, culture, and politics and family I would certainly hold to enthusiastically and say that what I say in this book is the decline of creedal Christianity and hierarchical Christianity is also not a catastrophe. Maybe it points to a really important renewal of facets of Christianity that have been repressed over many, many years. I think it does.

Q: What are the implications of an age of the spirit for everybody who’s religious?

A: Well, I think it means, among other things, that we’ll be seeing, and should be welcoming and affirming, a much wider range of expressions of Christianity. I’ve often been thought of as normative over these 1,500 years of what I call Constantinian Christianity. We see it happening frequently, now, all around the world, especially since Christianity is no longer a western religion. That’s a central and important change in the composition of the Christian world—dates back to only about 20, 25 years. The majority of Christians in the world are no longer in the old steer of Christendom in which Constantinianism was the rule. So we see all kinds of very interesting new theological and liturgical and ethical movements emerging, often around what we used to think of as the periphery. But it’s not the periphery anymore.

Q: And what are the implications of that for the influence of religious life?

A: Oh, I think the influence of religious life is continuing. Not necessarily institutional, hierarchical religious life, but the influence of people who are religiously informed and inspired and supported in communities, working in various kinds of even nonreligious structures and movements. I think that’s on the increase and will continue to be.

Q: The spread of this kind of emotional Christianity throughout the southern part of the world—what do you think that implies for the future of Christian practice in the United States?

A: You know, the term “emotional” doesn’t quite do it.  I would prefer personal, experiential. Emotion is part of that, but the experience of community and hope and of affirmation is part of it, too, but they are experiences. I think it’s already having its impact. Somebody has talked recently about the reverse missionary movement of Christians coming from South America, or especially Korea, into the United States and influencing American—or Africa, most recently, African religious movements coming in and influencing American Christianity. I think that’s really going to be a big development in the future.

Q: Influencing it in what ways?

A: Well, toward a more communal and more experiential direction, largely. There may be other influences as well, but I think that’s mainly the way it will influence.

Q: In your teaching and writing career, you’ve been well known as someone wit an uncanny ability to spot new developments in religious life. One of them, certainly, was liberation theology.

A: Liberation theology emerged in Latin America as a way of understanding Christianity, a new way of understanding it from the perspective of those who had been excluded and not part of the clerical elite or the theological elite. They talked about the preferential option for the poor—not just doing something for the poor, but helping the poor to understand the claims they can make on the basis of the gospel. I have a chapter in the book on that as illustrative, precisely of this movement away from the control of hierarchies and creeds, because the basic structure of liberation theology, or what they call the ecclesial base communities, small groups of people, tens of thousands of them, all over Latin America and in other places, getting together, sharing, reading, sharing food, singing, studying biblical texts and thinking about how that would apply in their own lives, and it made, and continues to make, a very significant impact not just on that continent and not just among Catholics. It’s going strong, especially among people who had their first experience within these base communities and are now in other kinds of institutions, especially political, and journalism and education and things like that. That’s where its impact is being felt at this point.

Q: We talked about Pentecostalism a little bit. What are the real implications of that for us?

A: The most important development in the world Pentecostal movement is a movement toward social ministries. They didn’t used to be interested in that in their early years. They were really very much fixed on “my own experience” and, really, getting to heaven. There’s a recent book on Pentecostalism in which the author has coined the term progressive Pentecostalism. They went around and studied congregations all over the world, especially in the nonwestern world, and found that the ones that were involved in community service, in clinics, in hospitals and schools and all of that mainly were Pentecostal and charismatic churches. And they said this is the major trend now. This is what’s happening. So this combination of social ministry and experiential worship is a dynamite combination, and I think that is really going to be influential on North American and, eventually, even European Christianity, which, we all know, needs kind of an injection of life at this point, and it could happen there as well.

Q: Why did the mainline Protestants suffer such a decline over the last 20, 30 years?

A: Well, I think one of the reasons is the mainline churches did allow themselves to drift toward a more hierarchical, less communitarian structure—away from where they were, let’s say, 50 years ago. People need to have a sense of belonging, and that wasn’t there. It was a little bit too audience-oriented: There’s the pulpit there, and here’s the congregation and a choir performing for—now the Pentecostals: everybody sings. Everybody testifies. Jimmy Durante used to say, “Everybody gets into the act,” and it’s richly participatory—if you want to be a participant.

Q: I’ve heard it argued that they became too intellectual and not enough spirit.

A: I think that’s another way of saying the same thing. The clergy—and I take some responsibility for this, having been involved in it for over 40 years—was trained in Christian thought, Christian philosophy, Christian theology, how you deal with the problem of the modern world and all of this, you know, and not enough in how to nurture the experience of God, the experience of the spirit and encounter with Christ, and so the churches which have brought that back in, I think, are finding that it appeals to people.

Q: And what about the place today of what we call the religious right?

A: By religious right I think of a particular political expression of conservative evangelical Christianity, and I think that movement, if it indeed ever was a movement, is now divided and declining in many ways. The agenda used to be driven by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and a couple other people. That whole generation is now either dead or really gone, in one way or another, and you have a whole variety of people now in the evangelical community, and they have a political agenda which is far more diverse. I mean, you think of the evangelicals for ecological causes, or the ones who got together to sign the petition against torture, and the opposition to the war in Iraq, where a lot of evangelicals became involved. I don’t consider that a religious right. I consider that religious involvement in the public sphere, which they ought to be doing. I mean, as Christians and as citizens, you ought to be involved.  But I think the last couple of presidential elections and by-elections have exposed the religious right as really kind of being, in part, a paper tiger. They just didn’t produce the votes. They were really kind of angry—the fact that they didn’t get a Republican nominee that suited their profile. And I think they’re in considerable disarray, and frankly I’m not mourning over that.

Q: Let me ask you to look around the country and size up what you see going on there. A lot of people think that there’s been a rise of selfishness that perhaps was of basic reason for what happened to Wall Street, what happened with sub-prime mortgages and in other parts of life. What do you see as the problems in this society right now? We’ll get to religion’s role. What’s wrong?

A: It’s the best of times and the worst of times, I think, and I’ll explain that in a minute. But there is no doubt that a rampant culture of market and consumer values really has a grip on many people in America, and therefore accumulating, getting things, getting ahead is for many kind of a principle life goal. I’m told we work harder in America than any country in the world. Productivity is up. But everybody seems to be driven by, especially, the lure of advertising, which says, “You ought to have this. You really need this. You owe it to yourself to have this and that,” and therefore mounting credit card debt, and these people who buy houses on mortgages that they’re not going to be able to afford. I think the role of religion at this point is to make very clear that this structure of values, of consumer values is not coherent with Christianity, with the gospel, with the life and example of Jesus. That’s not what he was talking about at all, so we in the religious community need to take a much more critical, even confrontational, role about this, I think, than we have in the past. There have been moments in the history of American Christianity in which there has been a more confrontational role between Christian values and the values of consumer society. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of my great teachers, was really a great spokesman for that, But that seems to have faded out as the churches have largely simply adjusted to this, even taken over some of those kinds of advertising techniques and consumerist values. But I think we have to get tougher about that and really remind people that this is not what we mean by a Christian way of living.

Q: There is what’s called a prosperity gospel, and lots of ministers preach that God will reward you with everything you want.

A: Yeah. Can you imagine that kind of sermon coming from the mouth of Jesus himself? No. I mean, it’s a rank contradiction, the prosperity gospel. When Jesus says blessed are those who serve and have compassion on the poor, beware of riches, it’s very hard to get into the kingdom of God—passage after passage. It’s right there. You don’t have to look very far for it. The contrast is quite stark, and yet you’re right. There are ministers and preachers who pick up on this prosperity gospel, promise this to people, and I think it’s really, let’s call it by its name, it’s a heresy and needs to be pointed out as such.

Q: You spoke about religious leaders needing to stand up to consumerism. What do you want the churches to do?

A: Well, I think it does start with the ministers and priests in the pulpit, with the congregations, and then I think churches have to speak publicly, and some of them have, about the dangers to the soul of consumerist values, the lethal danger that the accumulationist light poses for you spiritually. There has to be more of that, which is really quite the opposite of the prosperity gospel. I said this is the best of times and the worst of times. I notice increasingly among my students, both undergraduates and students in the divinity school, a deep suspicion of this life of accumulating, consuming, and a realization that a truly spiritual life is going to be more simple and more oriented toward building community rather than competition with the other guy to see who gets ahead. It’s a canard about all young people, that they’re all “me first,” “I first” oriented. I don’t think that’s true. There are many who are. But let me tell you that the urge to graduate from college, like this one, and immediately go down to a Wall Street investment firm is greatly shrunken this year from what it was last year. We’re learning something from this—that this is not only economically, but spiritually a dangerous way to think of your life. I think there’s real hope in a younger generation coming along with that viewpoint.

Q: You’ve been teaching here for 44 years, since ‘65. You’ve seen a lot, you’ve written a lot, you’ve studied a lot, you’ve taught a lot. What are the most important things you’ve learned?

A: I have learned how to think about Christianity as one of the possible symbolic ways to approach reality, among others. I used to think of other world religions as kind of exotic, and they’re out there, and they’re kind of curiosities. Now I have made a big adjustment, I think, in my life, and many people are, to say this is the way we see it. Other people see it other ways. This doesn’t invalidate, at all, our way of understanding reality. Rather, we have to look for the common threads, common values, and with these other folks, with Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims, even secular people. That is how to live with radical pluralism. The other big change that I’ve seen is the enormous growth in the hunger and interest in religion and spirituality among students at this university. It’s phenomenal. When I first came here, we didn’t even have a religious studies program at Harvard College. Didn’t exist. We had a very small divinity school. Since then, we have a religious studies program. We can’t add enough courses to respond to all the interest. Furthermore, if you clocked how many students here, on any given weekend, are worshipping, one way or another either at a church or a synagogue or a mosque or Memorial Church, there are more now than probably in the history of the college—a vast variety of ways of worshipping, and being spiritual, religious. It’s not singular. But—there it is. And I think they’re very interested. It’s intellectual curiosity. It’s also personal quest. And we have a responsibility, I think, to help them with that. I’m talking about the students now. But I think it’s also true in the public at large, maybe especially in the younger cohorts of the public at large.

Q: On this question of being open to the wisdom in lots of other religious traditions: If a Christian says, well, I’m a Christian, but of course that’s just one way among many others, what does that do to that person’s confidence and passion about his own faith?

A: Well, it requires a transitioning. It requires a maturation. I think we all grow up with serving ourselves, the center of the world. Then we learn that there are other centers gradually. Not only do I not think it diminishes the validity or power of the faith, in some ways I think it enriches it. I wrote a book about this some years ago called Many Mansions. You know, Jesus says at one point, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” I would even argue that the plurality of religions in the world is a check on any one of them, including ours, not to get too pretentious and think that we have the whole truth. One of the most dangerous things in any religion is to identify my understanding of the truth, my take on it, with the truth itself. The truth itself is something out there, it’s absolute, but my take on it is relative. Otherwise, I’m guilty of the sin of pride. I mean, I identify my view with God’s view. God is larger than this. God is much larger than any particular understanding of God.

Q: So I can be just as faithful, I can be just as active.  I can be just as convinced of the importance of what I’m doing with my life if I say mine is just one tradition among many others?

A: Some of the most faithful and zealous Christians I’ve run into in the last 20 years traveling around the world are precisely those Christians who are living in India, Korea, China, Indonesia, Africa where they are surrounded by people of other religions. It has not in any way diminished how they feel, or their faith. They believe that they have unique contribution to make. It’s different from these other. But it hasn’t diminished it at all. In fact, in many ways it’s enhanced it. And I have a feeling that’s the way it’s going to go.

Q: You are an American Baptist married to a Jewish woman. You have one son by that marriage, and I think a lot of people would be interested in how you accomplish the religious education of your son when the mother is Jewish and you are Protestant?

A: Well, as you can imagine, my wife, Nina, and I talked about this a lot before we were married. We did not want our marriage to be one of these religion-free zones. She’s a serious, practicing Jewish woman. I’m a serious Christian. And we decided that what we would do was to try to learn about and participate in each other’s traditions to the extent that conscience permits. And so that’s what we’ve done. And we also decided before that I would respect the Jewish custom, and indeed Jewish law, that the child of a Jewish woman is Jewish and should be raised with that understanding of himself or herself.  And I said, “Look, I agree with this. I endorse it—on one condition: that I also, maybe mainly me, will be responsible for his religious education and formation.” And I was. When he had his bar mitzvah, she’s the one who sent out the invitations and prepared the reception. I was the one who prepared him in studying his Torah passage, and he gave a wonderful exposition of his Torah passage at the bar mitzvah. Now I have to say that, of course, as the son of a Protestant Christian theologian, he got very interested in Christianity and is, I would say, very sympathetic to it and has studied, at Princeton, early Christianity and some recent thought. He’s interested in the phenomenon of religion at large. But he considers himself Jewish, with this interest in religion in general and Christianity, of course, as his father’s particular way of life. So we think it worked out very satisfactorily. Both of us are quite pleased with the way it’s gone. And when I am asked by people about this, “What would you have done if you were Jewish and you’re marrying a non-Jewish woman?” I don’t know. That’s a theoretical question, because the child would not then, by Jewish custom and law, have been Jewish. That would have to be negotiated otherwise. But that’s the way we did it and are continuing to do it. We mark the Sabbath every week, with the lighting of candles and prayers. I go to the Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. She comes with me to various Christian festivals, as does Nicholas. We have successfully shared in each other’s spiritual traditions, I think, and it can be done, and it’s also very enriching. I mean, I really believe that I understand Christianity better for having participated in Jewish life—and remember, Jesus was a rabbi—than I would have if I hadn’t done that.

Q: How do you pray? What are your practices? How do you attend to these things through the day?

A: I start the day with a prayer, just turning the day over to God, thanking God for this day. We have prayers at all of our meals, a mixture of Jewish prayers and Christian prayers, depending on how we feel. We mark the Sabbath. I have told my friends I’m in search of the perfect congregation. I haven’t found it yet. So I’m one of those people who bounces from one congregation to—I’m somewhere every week, but I go back and forth between the Baptist church which I belong to here, and an Episcopal church in our neighborhood, a black Pentecostal church, and sometimes Memorial Church, the university church here, and I get something from all of them. I feel a little guilty that I’m not sort of committing completely to one of them. But that’s how I do it.

Q: You have the reputation of being a pretty staunch liberal theologically and in every way.  Is that fair, or has it changed at all over the years?

A: I’m a chastened liberal, as they say, both theologically and politically. I have been greatly enriched in my fairly liberal understanding of Christianity by my evangelical boyhood, by very significant experiences among Catholics, especially liberation theologians, and others, by my experience with Pentecostals. So I’m an unusual kind of liberal in that—maybe that’s what a liberal should be, one who can affirm and learn from a lot of different sources. But I suppose the label is still a useful one, yeah, and not one to be shied away from.

Q: Have you become more committed to that position as the years have gone by?

A: More committed to the position of being open to learning from various sources? Yes, yes, I have. I started early with that, and it’s really kind of a hallmark of who I am. I think you have to be anchored, though, and I’m really pretty anchored in a form of Protestant Free Church Christianity. That’s pretty secure. That allows me, then, to be open to think other things that I can participate in without feeling that I’m floating away. I have something secure as an anchor.

KIM LAWTON, anchor: Interfaith marriage has become commonplace in this country. But, for a long time, when it came to the wedding ceremony, many couples felt they had to pick just one religious tradition, the bride’s or the groom’s — or none at all.  Today, brides and grooms are finding new ways to incorporate both their religions. Betty Rollin has our story.

BETTY ROLLIN: Sunitha Mani is an Indian Hindu, born in America. Her mother calls her a modern girl. Even so, as she prepares for her marriage, she is going the traditional route, and then some. It begins with her getting painted with henna, a process called “mehndi.” Sanjana, the marital makeup chief, explains:

SANJANA PURSNANI (Makeup Director, Sona Salon): When it dries up and it starts flaking it gives you that mahogany, like a red burgundy color. So in India the bridal colors are red. We usually wear red, maroon, burgundy, so they say that the bride’s hand shouldn’t show color of her skin.

ROLLIN: Sunitha met her husband-to-be, Ronjit Sandhu, who is a Sikh, at college eight years ago.

SUNITHA MANI (Bride): The henna artists told me yesterday the darker the henna the more your husband and your in-laws love you, so my hands are dark, but not down here so much.

ROLLIN: The groom’s mandate on the wedding night is to find his name hidden in the design.

RONJIT SANDHU (Groom): The night of the wedding, I’m supposed to find — I’m supposed to search for my name in the henna, and then if I can’t find it, basically I’m not allowed to consummate our marriage.

Bride and groom

ROLLIN: The next pre-marriage ritual performed is the puja, where the bride’s family’s Hindu pandit prays before a sacred fire.

Pandit BALU DIXIT (Hindu Temple, Albany, NY): We pray to Lord Ganesha asking for his blessings, so that everything goes very smoothly without any obstacles.

ROLLIN: When Sunitha’s parents married, not only were they required to be of the same faith, but they were expected to marry the person their parents chose.

KANTHI MANI (Mother of Bride): We got married, what, 36 years ago. I think it was through communication between my parents and his parents, and they looked at the horoscope, and once it was agreed, he came to visit me, and that’s it. I hardly knew him until I got married.

ROLLIN: And how do the Manis feel about their daughter marrying outside their faith?

Dr. SRINIVASAN MANI (Father of Bride): Whatever makes our daughter happy and secure in the future, that’s what matters, rather than our discomfort.

ROLLIN: The groom’s father, now a widower, and his aunt also have had some concerns.

Satwant Kaur Banga

SURJIT SINGH SANDHU (Father of Groom): Not having the same culture and the language, sometimes it’s hard to interact.

SATWANT KAUR BANGA (Aunt of Groom): I think that as soon as you hear of a child marrying into a different religion, even though Sikhism absolutely tells there’s only one God and all people are equal, the cultural differences — they creep in after the children come in.

Mr. S. SANDHU: Ideally, you know, you want your kids to be raised as Sikhs, but then again once you are out of India, you know, our kids now are raised in this culture. So in this culture, their culture is the same.

ROLLIN: Ronjit has his own ideas about what his childrens’ religion will be.

Mr. R. SANDHU: I think they’ll definitely be raised under both religions. You know, they are going to go to temple, they are going to go to gurdwara, the Sikh version of a temple. They will essentially learn, you know, about the histories behind both of the religions. Her parents are very religious, so whether we wanted them or not, they will probably share everything they know. They share it with me openly, so I’m sure they will definitely do it with our grandkids.

ROLLIN: The couple decided there was one obvious way to smooth over the religious differences: two weddings — one Sikh, one Hindu.

The Sikh wedding came first, with the groom making his entrance on a white horse named Max. The procession is called a “baraat.” The bride’s extended Hindu family awaits his arrival.

The families greet each other with an elaborate garland exchange. And here comes the bride.

Wedding elephant

And three hours later, here comes the bride again.

Two weddings — one in Sanskrit, one in Punjabi. Countless rituals; two receptions; decorations involving hundreds of yards of fabric; banquets; music of two cultures; 400 guests and a costumed horse.

Putting this together takes a commander-in-chief, otherwise known as a wedding planner. That would be Sonal Shah and her small army of lieutenants.

SONAL SHAH (Interfaith Wedding Planner, Save the Date Event Consultants): Don’t forget to tell everyone to take their shoes off, cover their head.

When she began her profession one religion was the norm. Not anymore.

Ms. SHAH: In the last five years since I started doing wedding planning, interfaith marriages have just skyrocketed. Out of the 25 or 30 weddings we do in a year, right now about half of them, if not more than half, are interfaith marriages. One of the biggest problems that we face is the whole meat/non-meat issue. So, you know, we did a wedding last year where the groom was Irish and the bride was Gradrati Indian, and her family, you know, strict Jains — no meat, no potatoes. And his side of the family is Irish, so obviously they want those things. We really just try to come to a consensus.

(to Ms. Shah): What did you do?

Ms. SHAH: We ended up going with the non-meat. But obviously they weren’t happy about it because their guest list consisted of everybody that, you know, ate meat and potatoes!

ROLLIN: At the Mani-Sandhu wedding there was also a meat issue, since Hindus are vegetarians, but meat won out.

And then there is the animal issue. At a recent wedding Sonal supervised in Washington, D.C., a Hindu groom wanted to make his entrance on an elephant.

Wedding guest

Ms. SHAH: It definitely posed a lot of challenges. But, yes, we found an elephant. We had the elephant brought over on a semi to downtown Washington, D.C. on Pennsylvania Avenue. So it was very exciting. But it was, literally — the last six months of the wedding all we were worried about was this elephant.

ROLLIN: Back at the Mani-Sandhu wedding, Sonal has made sure that the two weddings faithfully represent the two religions.

At the Sikh wedding, men and women sit separately on the floor — shoes off, heads covered. The service centers around the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Ms. BANGA: The bride and the groom, they go around the guru, keeping in mind that the guru or God is the center. All their life, because of this way, they will be very easily able to mend their differences if that’s what they keep in mind.

ROLLIN: At the Hindu wedding the bride groom also do a walk-around.

Pandit DIXIT: So that completion of the seven rounds around the fire signifies that they are married, and that concludes with the ceremony where the groom offers a necklace, ties a necklace to the bride and usually they put a little dot, like a kumkum, a sindur of the forehead of the bride, and that means she’s a married woman from then on.

ROLLIN: At the end of the Hindu service, the Sikh elders were invited to join in blessing the bride and groom, showering them with rice, flowers, and spices for fertility, happiness, and peace.

The bride’s hands are painted with henna.

Mr. S. SANDHU: As long as, you know, they will respect each other, not only as an individual but also respect each other’s customs and religion, you know — let the kids learn the better of both sides, and I think they will be stronger.

ROLLIN (to Mr. S. Sandhu): Did it take you awhile to come to this?

Mr. S. SANDHU: Yes. You know, your initial reaction is, you know, you would rather have things, you know, go your way, let it be simple. But reality is not always simple.

ROLLIN: This three-day celebration does come to an end, and Ronjit and Sunitha will be off to Hawaii for their honeymoon, knowing that they have the blessings and acceptance of both families.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Utica, New York.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Nigerians may want for many of life’s basic needs. A house of worship would not seem one of them.

In the largest city, Lagos, there are traditional, old-line churches. But there also are hundreds of banners and posters that invite worshippers to newer smaller congregations. None is more unusual than this one — both Christian and Muslim.

The lectern holds both Quran and Bible. Invocations come loudly from both.

CONGREGANTS: Allahu Akbar!

Pastor Shamsuddin Saka

DE SAM LAZARO: Roughly half of Nigeria’s 140 million people are Muslim; the other half profess some form of Christianity. It’s been a political fault line over the years, and tensions have often erupted in deadly violence. Just last November, more than 300 people were killed in the town of Jos.

Pastor SHAMSUDDIN SAKA (Chrislam Minister, speaking at service): Listen to me. I want you to realize that Abraham had many children.

DE SAM LAZARO: But the 1,500 or so practitioners of what their preacher calls Chrislam see no religious fault line between the two faith groups. Shamsuddin Saka — he’s called Prophet — tells his audience they are all children of Abraham through Judeo-Christian tradition and through Islam.

Pastor SAKA: Abraham is the father of Christianity, the father of Islam. So why the Christians and Muslims are fighting?

DE SAM LAZARO: Saka was born Muslim, and it was after returning from a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca that he was inspired — he says instructed by God — to launch his new ministry

Pastor SAKA: That was about 19 years ago. Then there is a lot of people killing themselves in Nigeria 19 years ago. So I was praying and lying down and the Lord told me, “Make peace between Christian and Muslim.”

DE SAM LAZARO: He said he’s written letters to political leaders and traveled to affected areas when religious violence has broken out, urging reconciliation around common beliefs. But Saka’s most visible impact is in his immediate neighborhood, where he has brought the faiths together in a blended liturgy. It begins each Sunday morning with Quranic prayer in an open floor space that, like a mosque, has no pews. These then give way to prayer with the congregation seated in chairs — well, sometimes seated.

Dr. Ishak Akintola

DE SAM LAZARO: This prayer is intense, a trance-like frenzy similar to a Pentecostal Christian service. It climaxes by a sermon from Saka that on this day took almost two hours.

Pastor SAKA (speaking at service): Alleluia!

CONGREGANTS: Alleluia!

DE SAM LAZARO: As different as Christianity and Islam are, there is some common ground.

Dr. ISHAK AKINTOLA (Lagos State University): The Bible, you know, concentrates on teachings of love, that’s what Jesus says in Mathew chapter 5, that you love your neighbor and you even love your enemy. Now you find the Quran saying exactly the same thing.

DE SAM LAZARO: The Quran says the same thing?

Dr. AKINTOLA: Yes, yes. “Pay evil back with goodness.” If you do that, those who used to hate you before, those who are your enemies before will so become your friend. So the Bible [and] Quran say the same thing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Islam was brought here by Arab traders 10 centuries ago, Christianity by European colonization starting in the 15th century. Each has been interpreted and adapted to local needs and customs. That’s noteworthy in the way Islam is sometimes practiced here, free of the rigid dogma often associated with it.

Dr. MARA LEICHTMAN (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University): According to Islam, the Prophet Muhammad was the final prophet but certainly not the only prophet, and they believe in Jesus and all of the other prophets of Judaism and Christianity that came before the Prophet Muhammad. So it’s nothing foreign to a Muslim to believe in Jesus, to pray to Jesus or some of the other prophets, to light a candle for the Virgin Mary, for example, as I’ve experienced Muslims do in churches in Senegal. They believe, in some cases in Africa and various African counties, in what I call “spirituality without boundaries.”

Dr. Mara Leichtman

DE SAM LAZARO: In a land where spirituality is a dominant force in people’s lives, she says economic hardships may also push people to try new ideas. Nigeria has vast oil wealth but only a few have benefited. Per capita income is about $85 a year, for example, and life expectancy a mere 45 years

Dr. LEICHTMAN: If they’re poor, if they’re suffering from HIV AIDS, if they’re trying to understand a changing political situation, finding a new religion is one way of coping with the situation, of looking for new leadership of trying to have control on their own through prayer, through different rituals of something that may not necessarily be controllable.

DE SAM LAZARO: Many who come to Chrislam are praying for what Saka calls deliverance — from illness, for example. Cawakalit Adecunji, who was born Muslim, came to Chrislam 15 years ago when she couldn’t have children.

CAWAKALIT ADECUNJI (through translator): I now have children. I came and saw that miracles are performed here. Those who didn’t have children have children. Those who are lame are walking, and the blind are seeing now.

DE SAM LAZARO: At the service, there are petitions for miracles of health and wealth — or at least improved finances

Pastor SAKA (speaking at service): Delay is not denial

DE SAM LAZARO: Delay is not denial, Saka tells his congregants, as he urges prayer and patience. Some people do come up to testify to miracles in their lives — a child conceived or a business deal. Such “deliverance” is mostly associated with some Christian churches, but Saka says it’s not foreign to Islam.

Pastor SAKA: Islam is a religion of peace, of love, of miracles. When you’re talking about miracles, Islam is a miracle itself. The founding of the Quran itself is a miracle.

“Miracles are performed here.”

DE SAM LAZARO: And congregants have taken to heart Saka’s message that to get back one must first give, but he denies that he personally benefits from these gifts. In this milieu of extreme haves and have-nots, Saka insists he always had.

Pastor SAKA: Listen to me, I’m a millionaire before my call. You know, we don’t collect much money. We collect 50, 10 naira, 20 naira. And this money — this is not my only source of income.

DE SAM LAZARO: His fortune came long before his call to ministry, he says, from a real estate business. The Hummer he drives was a gift from two followers whose petitions were answered, and he’s ready for the next automotive miracle.

Pastor SAKA: Do you like it?

DE SAM LAZARO: One miracle even the skeptics give Saka is this congregation and how people see themselves.

(to unidentified male congregant): Are you Christian or Muslim?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Whatever you call me, I am.

DE SAM LAZARO: Saka’s Chrislam is not widespread, but even the skeptics say he’s discovered the innate tolerance that’s often overshadowed by violence across religious lines in a service that’s part Muslim, part Christian — and wholly West African.

For RELIGION &ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Fred De Sam Lazaro in Lagos, Nigeria.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We had a chance early this past spring to visit members of a Chinese family as they honored their ancestors at their graves. It is the belief of many Chinese that there is an ongoing spiritual connection between them and their forebears. They venerate them, pray to them, and take gifts to their graves. Our guide was Jan Lee, a third-generation resident of Chinatown in New York.

JAN LEE: Chinatown has been described oftentimes as a village within the city. There’s a certain pride in passing on the culture and every tradition possible so that the younger generation understands where they came from.

The Chinese have a belief that you don’t exist on your own, that there is this continuum.

We observe certain traditions within our household, and that includes making sure that my grandfather’s altar, and now my father’s altar in my mother’s house, has food during the holidays, for instance during the Chinese New Year.

Home altar

We’ve been observing for many, many, many decades this tradition of going to the graveside and sweeping the graves and planting flowers and bringing offerings of food.

When my grandfather was planning for the future of the Lee family, he had the foresight to purchase a large family plot in Evergreen Cemetery. It had all the benefits of being not only a beautiful site, but a great place for cosmic energy — feng shui.

Once the candles are lit, it really signifies the connection between us as mortals and our ancestors’ spirits and that we’re opening sort of a gateway to communicate with them. And when we light incense, we pray. It’s the time when they get to join in the feast that we bring to the cemetery, and that includes offering them wine, and that includes burning money so that they have money to spend. It’s all the idea that, by burning it, you’re bringing it to them.

Jan Lee

We bow three times because there’s a belief that the spirit actually splits. In the Chinese belief, one of your souls will go to heaven or hell depending on your past deeds, and one is interred. But there’s also a part of the spirit that stays among us, and that’s the spirit that we call on when we need help.

Once the candles are finished, it signifies that the spirits have finished their meal and we can partake of the food that we brought.

I think everyone in my family still believes that my father’s with us. That belief comes from starting when we were very young going to cemetery and having a family altar in my family home.

The connection to the ancestors is something that I think we all feel important to us, so it’s never been an idea of obligation. It’s our choice.

OLIVER KISAKA (National Council of Churches of Kenya): Forty-five years for Kenya is very a short period of time for 45 tribes to have come together and meshed into one and perfected the art of democracy and common sharing of space. I think in that sense people should not be overly judgmental against any African country. They are trying to shift from systems they were used to, to a totally new approach when you are dealing with more than one culture. Democracy is not an African system. It’s a land system. It’s a good system, but it is not inherently African.

Most Kenyans are religious. The country would be about 95 to 97 percent religious, 70 to 80 percent of that being from one of the Christian traditions. Another sizable percentage, perhaps 15 to 20, being from the Islamic community, and maybe 2 to 3 percent being Hindu and others. So Kenya is generally a religious community. But how this religion works out in economics, how it works out in politics, how it works out in ethnicity, how it works out in aesthetics, how it works out in defining ethical values, how it works as a true worship, as a religion itself — those are the critical questions that we are now being called upon to engage. We have assumed we are a peaceful country. We have assumed that our religion is deep enough. The truth is that it is not deep enough.

Oliver Kisaka

When push came to shove, there were ministers who sided with their ethnic communities. In other words, they were not prophetic to their ethnic communities. The right thing would have been to tell the community “You cannot do this. You can’t burn other peoples’ property, even if you are aggrieved.” But they were silent.

Nobody in Kenya was not divided, doesn’t matter who — the teachers, the law society, the civil society organizations. Everybody was divided. It was a very difficult situation for the country, and we felt if someone was going to bring healing into the country someone was needed to take responsibility for their part. So we decided to go ahead and do so. We still hope the rest can actually come to that point, because anything else is really denial. We are in denial. We have treated one another as if we were not Kenyans, and there is no way we can heal one another if we are still pointing fingers across the table. We need everybody to say “I had a part to play in what this became.”

When we entered the crisis we decided, we analyzed it in three parts. We said it was a spiritual crisis, a political crisis, and a humanitarian crisis, because of the internally displaced people, and we then set up committees to respond to this: a humanitarian committee, a spiritual committee, and a political mediation committee. Each of these have been working since that time. We told the people we regret that we were divided and that our divisions were along ethnic lines. So we committed ourselves to be able to start afresh and do things differently for the sake of the country.

There has been a lot of call for healing, for renewal, and in a sense we are saying renewal for all of us. Without sounding careless, the Christian tradition is a tradition of renewal, is a tradition of redemption, is a tradition of forgiveness. The most difficult things for Christians to attempt to do is not to own up to what you are wrong about. If you are able to own up sincerely and turn around, there is forgiveness, and there is a new opportunity. So most of the ministers have dealt with this and are preaching healing, they are preaching reconciliation. They are using our experience as a lesson. They are saying we didn’t know it would get this bad. We have talked about Rwanda, but this is who we are. We cannot point fingers anymore. We must work on a new way of how we will live together. So the message is a message of reconciliation, is a message of “Let’s begin again,” a message of “We can’t pretend we were holier than others. Let’s own up, let’s face it, let’s address it.”

One of the sad things of the missionary experience, it outlawed African-ness. If African culture is seen to be anti-Christian and yet I cannot be a white, then what does it leave for me? It leaves me a big vacuum. I have forsaken my African values, I cannot quite live the Western values I lived, so where does that leave me? I think that the minister today, I as a minister must wrestle with that and help Kenyans develop new values that can allow them to be African and be Christian without feeling a sense of contradiction. Our preaching ministry cannot be business as usual for us to be able to address ethnicity. Somebody else must stand up and tell the people that although where we are today it seems that we can’t live together as tribes, that is something we can work out. I think we have the God-given capacity to address any human problems anywhere. Human beings are known for that. The first and second world wars were very bad wars, but Europe still lives together. Europe works together. They have just raised their stakes a little higher, determined how to live together. I think what it’s calling for is for Kenyans to develop a way of living together, and religion has a great path, because then it can give the right theological undergird for this kind of living together.

Religion in Kenya is not zero. It held at some point. It was pushed from the ideal, but it did not go beyond a certain point, meaning there is a deposit of it. We can easily be so negative about this situation that we paint Kenya as a country of hopeless people who don’t know where they are going. I think Kenyans are very hopeful people. I think that the problem we faced is that people were trying to say something, and nobody was hearing them.

Q: You’ve been here 18 years. How do the students at Brown today compare with the students who were here when you first came to Brown? Are they the same?

A: They are both the same and different. They are the same in the sense that Brown has long attracted an entrepreneurial intellect, somebody with a lot of imagination, somebody who tends to be engaged, and that’s still true. I would say these students have been raised with an unusually strong sense of responsibility, which tends to make them more conservative. They are less likely to just raise an issue and protest about it. They are more concerned about how you build structures, and how people get along, and what the complexities are of that.

Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson

Q: Why is that?

A: I think their world has done some falling apart. I think they are less secure about the fact that if they simply raise a concern in a strident way that there are institutions around them that can support that protest without their also being engaged in some kind of construction. But maybe it is because they are my children by age — my own son is 24. I watch, I think perhaps those of us who went through college in the ’60s and the ’70s had the attitude of the strident raise the voice, raise the protest. I’m not sure we appreciated what the construction piece was about. As we’ve gone along in our lives we’ve probably taught them that.

Q: Are students more interested in spirituality than in joining organized religion, as the surveys suggest?

A: I think that’s true. I also want to push back against some of those surveys just a little bit because I think one of the reasons those surveys are showing that is because surveys are finally being taken of these attitudes, and I’m not so sure that is a change as it is that we are noticing it. The Astin studies [by UCLA professor Alexander Astin] out in California didn’t used to ask these questions about spirituality. Once they started asking, they began to see numbers like 70 percent of the student body thought issues of spirituality were important issues.

Q: Why do you think college students are more interested in inner spirituality than in attending religious services or belonging to a church or synagogue?

A: I think that distinction is important, and I think it’s verifiable. If you took a group of Brown students and did what we call a forced choice exercise — go to one end of the room if you are religious, go to the other end of the room if you are spiritual — two-thirds of the students would be on the spiritual end. But if you asked people along the spectrum to speak about why they stood in the position they stood in, the kids on the religious end would say “I’m not so sure about whether you can be spiritual if you are not religious somehow,” and the students on the spiritual end would [say] the institutions of religion have failed, they seem coercive, they seem disingenuous, so we’ve gone to this end because the sacred content of life is still important, but we don’t really trust the institutional conveyance of that. And then we of course would bug them with, well, does that mean you don’t want to read the sacred literature? “Oh no, no, no, we think those are important.” I think there’s a new probing of the way people develop spiritually and religiously which is new to the academy. I think it’s new to the press. I think it’s somewhat new to the public, and I think it’s actually revealing some very interesting aspects about this generation which are truly different — not so different than when I arrived at Brown in 1990, because it was already underway. This generation is much more eclectic in its practice. We have students currently studying for the rabbinate who would tell you that the reason they are doing that is because they sat Zen while they were at Brown. Their grandparents probably wouldn’t have done that, and their grandparents might worry about whether that’s a legitimate way to arrive at rabbinical study. So we are seeing much more borrowing of practice across lines of tradition, and I think that’s a function of the invitation these universities have made to people from a variety of places in the world, cultures, languages, religions. Students become each other’s teachers.

Q: How can students who were teenagers at the time live through 9/11 and not have it affect them spiritually, not make them more vulnerable?

A: There I think you’re completely right. That’s what I meant to say with some strength earlier about the fact that they are very much more unsure of how the future will unfold. They feel as though there could be some great challenge to them personally, ethically, morally, and how will they be ready for that challenge? We don’t have to convince them that could be a question for them. They know it is a question already, and for many of them the resources they want to probe are the ones their families introduced them to by birth. They may have been raised and confirmed in traditions, but now as adults [they are] standing away from their families, but not in opposition [to] their families. That’s actually the piece I mean to point to. Students are much more likely to have rich and warm relationships with their families that they are continuing to develop. We see students far more religiously engaged than their parents.

Q: Are more of them more interested in service and in doing good works for others?

A: In [the chaplains and religious life] office we actually have a rabbinical colleague who is placed at our Center for Public Service. Our students, particularly the ones whose religious engagement and religious identity was more in the liberal world — Reform Jews, mainline Protestants, somewhat secular Catholics and Muslims — we found those students in record numbers engaged in all kinds of community engagement and service. They were building homes. They were responding to disasters. They were organizing tutoring. They were working literally in all kinds of relief occasions in the city. We felt it was very important for them to have somebody working with them who would help them reflect about those activities. Brown University has attracted people who want to ameliorate human wrong. The worth of life is not a topic that I have to raise with students. It’s one that they want to probe in their classes; they want to probe it in religious organizations. Whether I am teaching, whatever it is I’m doing, that is a question that captivates students here. I think it captivates this faculty. I think that’s a continuing passion here. People are really fired up here to do the good. They are not opposed to making money. I don’t mean to say we have saints who have come, and we are going to be totally unmaterialistic. We definitely have a business culture that’s percolating, but it feels to me that it’s percolating around how do we do the good and make a living?

Q: It seems like we’re going through a period of religious intolerance. Has that affected college students?

A; It has affected us. I mean, for instance, right after 9/11 we had students coming to the chaplain’s office saying I’m concerned about my woman friend who wears a hijab. How will it be for her here? Will she be okay passing through the airport in Rhode Island? Would it be appropriate for me to offer to travel with her? I want my friend who I don’t know so well to be safe. Well, why would you make such an offer except that you really thought there would be trouble for that person, or you had observed it? And we did what all universities did. We reached out to people and said we need you to tell us if you’re having trouble. But I think those moments have affected our students, and I think quietly they may well be nervous about each other’s beliefs, concerned about whether there is understanding sufficient in the world for there to be peace, awkward about asking questions they need answers to. So that’s actually at the core of what we’re trying to do.

I think students more determined to solve the problem than to exacerbate it — but they are affected by it and affected by the tension. We had a meeting with our Muslim students after a bit of a blowup over [free] expression here a year ago. They talked about what it was like to be at Brown, what it was like to be in the world, and I think many of the senior administrators who were there were deeply moved that these very young lives were having to navigate some pretty acidic commentary about Muslims generally and that many of those freedoms we talk about in America that we think everybody should take for granted were not theirs. They didn’t really feel that they could count on their safety, their freedom from harassment of a kind of garden variety.

Q: What about student interest in the environment and global warming?

A: Brown is an environmentally fired up place. We have environmentalists that come to that with a spiritual passion….When I was in college we used to frequently be confronted with the nuclear clock: How close was it to midnight? Was it three minutes? Was it five minutes? These students are likely to use those images in their papers. I was listening to someone tell me about a management book that’s just come out and it’s called “My Iceburg is Melting,” and it literally apparently uses a fictional piece about penguins having a meeting about their iceburg melting and how are they going to solve these problems, and this becomes a management tool at a Harvard Business School sort of place.

Q: Do you think involvement in issues like that increases their spirituality or their search for spirituality?

A: I think it exposes that deficit if they feel as though they aren’t grounded spiritually in something that may transcend their age or these problems. I hear students saying all the time, “My parents were — one person was this tradition and one person was that tradition, so we weren’t raised with anything. I have arrived at college, and I don’t know this world. I look at my friends who have a spiritual practice, and I really would like to have one.” But how do you go about doing that when you are 18? People my age thought that the best thing to do was to raise children without religious background and then let them choose when they were 18. In my mind that’s like raising children without table manners and then expecting that you can hand them a knife and fork and a napkin when they’re grown and they’ll know what to do with it.

I think religious literacy, some sort of way of approaching a set of issues, needs to be a part of a person’s formation. They will then decide as they move through their life, as you do, as I do, what does that mean in this moment? How do I appropriate that? Is it adequate? One of the things, of course, in the university we are endlessly trying to say is your spiritual tradition, the literatures of your tradition, have to be interrogated. Not all my clergy colleagues agree with me about that. Some people think nope, the Bible said it, I believe it, that’s all there is to it. We don’t subscribe to that theory, so we are actually taking a position with respect to religious texts and traditions that says they have to change. These students will be their leaders.

Q: What differences do you see in this group of students and those in the past, religiously and spiritually?

A: These students live historically in a different time. The context around them — as you’ve already pointed out they have seen 9/11. My son said to me on the phone the day of 9/11, “Remember how I said to you, Mom, our generation didn’t have a historically defining moment? Well, now we do.” He’s right about that. They do, and that does change everything for them. I don’t think it’s made them more religious. I think it may have made the whole world around them, as well as them, more conscious of spiritual questions and religious questions, which is probably why they are being surveyed more about it. The surveyors have noticed, too, and thought, maybe these kids are praying.

Q: Do they have a sense of vulnerability, of needing help from any source they can get?

A: I think there’s also a piece that’s contextually very different. When I was in college, and we laid out the newspaper at Wellesley, we did it with spray glue and a light table. When our Brown Daily Herald students lay out the daily newspaper, they do it on the Internet. They have a computerized system. Our students know so much more about Darfur, about what’s going on when a tsunami hits. They know more about whether there’s tolerance in China toward religious expression or there isn’t. They see the tragedy of Iraq unfolding in front of them, and I think they are asking themselves the question, what is it I am going to have to do about that, and how will I do that? We were beginning to have that knowledge in the ’60s and the ’70s, but their immersion in the world is far more nuanced than ours was because of what’s around them informationally. It doesn’t surprise me that they are worried.

Q: They are aware that we are a part of the world, and there’s no getting around that.

A: Those oceans on either side of the United States don’t separate us quite the way they used to. They’re spanned all the time electronically, and our students are wanting to propose to students around the globe that they work together on something, especially environmentally.

Q: Have scandals in religious institutions made them more skeptical and cynical?

A: I would say in the same way they look to Washington and see a thoroughly inadequate government system for responding to contemporary challenges, in many religious structures, especially Protestant Christian ones that have become very much a part of the popular and political culture, they see inadequacy. Then it means as a 20-year-old I’m not only confronted with sorting out my own beliefs, but I’ve actually got to think about what would the communitarian structure look like through which those beliefs could come integrity, because it’s clearly not that. But I don’t know if they’re faced with any different problem with respect to the governing structure that they live with in this country or many others. I think there’s a real sense of “we have much rebuilding to do and we need it while we are in college.” And we also say the word “leader” here a lot. Brown students are endlessly told — identified for their leadership, entrepreneurial qualities. I sometimes want to wrap my arms around them and say “You know what? Today you are off-duty. You don’t have to lead today,” because there is so much pressure on their shoulders. When the news comes on in the morning, and one of our homeless shelters is about to be closed, and the three people standing in the way of that are Brown students, I am very proud of them for being there, because I know that they wouldn’t even know to be there if they weren’t spending endless hours enmeshed in issues of homelessness and care for the homeless. But how many issues are there like that? They do need to say their prayers in the middle of the night to keep going with that kind of energy.

Q: Do you get the sense that their pastors and religious leaders are up to date or in tune with what’s really concerning them?

A: No, I don’t think their preachers and rabbis and priests are up to speed, and I’m actually on a tear to hope that we can find in this generation many new such folks among Brown students, around the university culture across the country, because one of the reasons our religious institutions have failed in this country is that they have not been able over the last 25, 30 years to draw into their leadership positions people of the very first rank. That sounds, I’m sure, elitist, but in my own denomination [United Church of Christ] we have commented about it, and I think that we are really reaping the whirlwind of that, when you look at the evolution discussion like we’ve seen in this country recently. These students have all studied science. Most of them have not, in secondary school or in college, had the kind of rich opportunity to study religion, philosophy, ethics and really think about those issues, and we need to bring those strands together or we are going to be faced with everything from stem cell decisions to genetic engineering to evolutionary questions to moral questions in this society, about whether there should or shouldn’t be torture. Can we really be facing that question — in America?

Q: You think religious institutions ought to be dealing more with issues like that?

A: I think they must deal with them. When they don’t, students then say that religion is inadequate, spirituality is where I belong, and they are right if religion is not about those issues that are framing the human life. That’s always been the province of what is a worthy life, and how would I live it and articulate it? So our students are actually taking themselves quite seriously and, I think, calling on the institutions that they will be a part of to be somewhat reflective of the kind of integrity and coherence that they are being taught in a university to acquire. It’s a tough standard.

Q: Do you find students questioning their own beliefs?

A: That question is our question. It’s not theirs. They are questioning their beliefs the way you did, the way I did, of course. But their purpose in questioning them is not to throw them out. Their purpose is to understand them better, to probe the foundations of those questions. My friend Scotty McLennan, who is my [chaplain] counterpart at Stanford, wrote a book a few years ago called “Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning.” It’s a great title, but as I said to him, writing my review in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin — we both went to school there — I said has the science of your childhood held up? Has the math of your childhood held up? Why would the religion of your childhood work in your adult life? It doesn’t. It doesn’t have to be discontinuous, but it seems to me that what you are taught as a kid — where there’s thunder in the sky that’s God bowling — is not going to fly when you are 22. You are going to have probed the physics, you are going to know a little meteorology, and you are going to have moved along. I don’t think it’s about giving up something you were taught when you were a child. It’s about doing what grownups have always had to do, which is to reappropriate traditions now that they are past innocence. They know more. Sept. 11 is not just something your parents shield you from. It’s something where you think, my God, the guy I used to play football with was on the 86th floor of that building. That could have been me. What does this mean? Could my life end that quickly? What would it have been about? Is it worthy? That’s not a question most children are asking. And I don’t think it’s questioning in the sense of giving up. I think it’s about probing deeper and making sure that what it is you are laying claim to and articulating is something you can really stand by, live by, speak for.

Q: These students want religion to become more active in current affairs, in issues that affect the least among them, like the poor.

A: They absolutely do, and they are measuring religious institutions against the very articulated beliefs of those organizations. If a Christian organization is saying the measure of who we are is whether we fed the hungry, responded to the homeless, showed up when there was a war to do anything peace-making about that — and students said, “Look, you said all these things, you said Jesus said those things. You are not doing anything about that. In fact, none of those issues can come up.” In one segment of Protestant Christianity there’s been a real effort to bring about a certain social agenda through the church, and those congregations and those pastors and those traditions have become very mired in that. There’s actually an internal critique that’s been developing in that very movement. Randall Balmer at [Barnard] is probably the person I would look to there, because he is a card-carrying evangelical, and he really feels the evangelical church has thrown the baby out with the bath water by becoming so enmeshed in politics. I think the tension between how spirituality is sufficiently political and concerned with the amelioration of human wrong on behalf of the great spiritual traditions and yet not so enmeshed in lobbying specific political action, that in fact the pulpit becomes confused with the soap box — that’s a really tough tension, and it takes very wise leaders, smart leaders, careful leaders, thoughtful leaders, and they need to come from places like Brown. We need our rabbis to begin to come out of our best institutions. We need our pastors, our preachers, our monks, our nuns — they need to come from places where we’ve been really able to — I don’t mean just elite institutions can do that. I mean that we really need to be speaking to each generation about the need for it to produce exactly what those who founded Harvard College said: Pretty soon our leaders we brought from Europe are going to be moldering in the ground. We need a new generation of those leaders, so we founded a great university here. We need, in our great universities across the country, to keep calling forward the leaders of our traditions. In Islam, for instance, in the United States there isn’t a single institution yet where one can study to be an imam. The American Muslim experience is percolating. There are people coming from many different countries. They are settling in the U.S. for all of the promise that this offers. We need to create the educational institutions, and these students will be in the generation that will do that, as their Jewish forebears of the ’30s created the great Jewish educational institutions of this country. I think it’s a very exciting time, but it’s a serious time. We need our very, very brightest and most engaged or rooted students to do that, and we need to say that’s honorable. We’ve spoken to them about being politicians and doctors and lawyers and all those things. We haven’t talked to them so much about being religious leaders, and we need to do that. I think we are doing better at it. I think they are becoming each other’s teachers in important ways

I often feel like we open the door in the morning and get out of the way. [The students] are our teachers. I think one of the things we care most to model for them is a kind of collegiality not based on how erudite you are or how new you are to the question, because frequently the newest scholars have the most innovative, imaginative questions to ask, and we need to hear them. They are proposing syntheses among traditions that were not dreamed before. They come together around an issue like Burma overnight. My advisee from two years ago walked in the door and was the person organizing the entire campus on Darfur, led the university faculty in divesting our portfolio from Darfur. He’s a sophomore in the college. There’s a certain humility we all need about who’s smart around here. But I also think there is an extremely lovely blessing we’re receiving by looking over the shoulders of these students, seeing where their eyes are taking them for the things that need to be worked on and then trying to offer our tools, our history, our background in ways they can make better use of. I sometimes think we are surgical nurses or midwives in an operating theatre where the surgeons are very young, very skilled, but surprising for their precociousness in terms of where we need to go, and they’re not listening sometimes to all the old arguments about why you can’t go there. They’re there.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: While religious conflict is dominating the headlines, there are some who are trying to find understanding and respect across religious lines. A group of women in Cambridge, Massachusetts is doing just that. They have founded a book club to learn from each other’s Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. Betty Rollin has their story.

BETTY ROLLIN: They call themselves the Daughters of Abraham — Jews, Christians and Muslims who gather once a month in Cambridge, Massachusetts to talk about books. Not just any books. Whether fiction or nonfiction, the books they read are about their three religions. The Daughters of Abraham book club was the brainchild of Edie Howe, a lawyer turned divinity student. The idea came to her the night of 9/11, when she attended an interfaith service.

EDIE HOWE: I was deeply moved by the events of the day and by the service, and I asked myself, what can I do to make a difference in the light of the horror of this day? And I thought of Abraham and the fact that Jews, Christians and Muslims are essentially children of Abraham. And I thought, well, I’ve been running a book group for 10 years. I could run a women’s book group that would be composed of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Maybe that would make a difference.

Reverend MARY MARTHA THIEL (in book club discussion): I loved this book. It has the quality of just deep respect and listening that we try to embody, and I found it a profoundly moving book.

ROLLIN: Mary Martha Thiel is a United Church of Christ minister. The other women are physicians, social workers, teachers. One is a rabbi, one is a real estate broker — all of them eager to learn about each other’s faiths. Rona Fischman is Jewish.

RONA FISCHMAN: It’s far more than just the reading. It’s meeting outlooks that I never met before, hearing points of view that I would never meet in the normal course in my life, and over the years we’ve really become a caring community.

Reverend ANNE MINTON: It has been one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.

ROLLIN: Anne Minton, a former Catholic nun, became an Episcopal priest and is now retired.

Rev. MINTON: Getting to know them, hearing about their faith and the practice of their faith has been so strengthening of my own faith. Being with Muslim women, for example, who pray regularly five times a day helps me remember a rhythm of prayer in my own life.

ROLLIN: Sepi Gilani, a physician, is a Muslim from Iran. A book that especially resonated with her is LYING AWAKE by Mark Salzman, about Catholic nuns.

Dr. SEPI GILANI: As I was reading I thought, oh, these nuns are kind of like my grandmother. After my grandfather died, she would spend a lot of time in prayer, and so you can kind of see those similarities even though one is a story about a nunnery and my grandmother is a Muslim, a devout Muslim widow. You can see the similarities. So that’s an eye opener.

Ms. FISCHMAN: I’ve gotten some of prejudices eroded. I grew up skeptical about Christians, because I was sort of taught that they all were covert missionaries in some way and that they’d love to have me convert, and that really has eroded.

Ms. HOWE: What surprised me was how quickly relationships formed among the women. There were personal difficulties — that women of one faith tradition would go over to the home of a woman of another faith tradition, leave food, sit down and talk.

Ms. FISCHMAN: In 2003 I just had a bad year. I had a very dear friend and family members all terminally ill and dying one after another. So we didn’t have people in the house unless we were in mourning. And a number of people in the group were here for the mourning. But more importantly they were here for advice, you know, when my life was changing. And having people who are centered in God, who have a big perspective on the world, to tell you, you know, we go through it and you’re okay was even more valuable than people showing up with food.

ROLLIN: The women have learned to see Abraham through the eyes of each other’s faiths.

Ms. HOWE: It’s wonderful to see, for instance, the story of Abraham and Isaac and the different ways that’s told. For the Muslims, it’s all about Ishmael, and for the Jews and Christians, it’s about Isaac.

ROLLIN: One surprise for the women has been the commonalities among the three religions even though the rituals are different — the way sin and forgiveness are dealt with, for example.

Rev. MINTON: As a Catholic, when I would go to confession I believed that the grace of God came through priest.

ROLLIN: Muslims don’t go to confession as Catholics do but try to be better people in their own way.

Dr. GILANI: Because there is no concept of original sin, you can always — if you’ve had a horrible past, you’ve done a lot of ill deeds in the past you can always make up for it by doing more good than bad.

ROLLIN: Jews, especially during the High Holidays, are also bent on self-improvement.

Ms. FISCHMAN: We are preparing for the New Year cycle, which is very much about getting back on the path. The language is almost the same. It’s turning around.

Ms. HOWE: One very strange thing that has happened to me is that I now think in a sort of 3-D paradigm. I cannot think about Christianity without thinking about Judaism and Islam. It is — they are inextricably linked in my mind forever, I guess.

ROLLIN: There is in this group an agreement to avoid conflict. Still, there are differences among the Daughters of Abraham, and there is occasional friction.

Ms. FISCHMAN: The frictions that I would have imagined were between Christians and Muslims or between Jews and Muslims or between Muslims and Christians. And actually the friction that we’ve had were in the same religious cohort — that we’ve had liberal Protestant Christians saying dismissive things about Catholics. We’ve had Conservative Jews saying dismissive things about Reform Jews.

ROLLIN: The word is out, and the Daughters of Abraham are growing. There are now five groups in the Boston area. Trips have been taken both to Jerusalem and to Spain, where the women visited holy sites of all three faiths, and other trips are planned.

Ms. HOWE: I believe it is very important for Jews, Christians and Muslims to learn about each other. If you look in the world today, there is profound misunderstanding. There’s an enormous amount of prejudice, and this book group is my undertaking to try to reduce that to the extent that I am able.

ROLLIN: For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Betty Rollin in Cambridge, Massachusetts.