Band 12, Heft 1 - Volume 12, Issue 1 (2011) Special Issue on Interfaith Cooperation

Religion is one of the greatest sources of division and conflict in our world today. Consequently, understanding religious differences should be an important goal of higher education, and the college campus provides a valuable learning laboratory for this purpose. In this issue of the JCC we focus on interfaith understanding and cooperation and explore ways to encourage greater student involvement in interfaith dialogue. We are very pleased to have Eboo Patel, president and founder of the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), and Cassie Meyer, director of content of IFYC, as guest editors of this special issue.

As tensions around religious diversity escalate in America, there is an increased realization that interfaith cooperation has broad civic relevance. In this realization, there is an opportunity for American colleges and universities to play a leadership role in constructively engaging religious diversity. The authors of this article explore the current challenges posed by religious diversity, a model of interfaith cooperation focused on civic engagement and social cohesion. They also explore how college students have a particular leadership role to play in building interfaith cooperation.

This essay explores the contributions of student affairs professionals to religious and secular pluralism and interfaith cooperation in higher education. The authors propose a preliminary model of competencies necessary for student affairs professionals to engage in conversations effectively with students about issues of religion, spirituality, secularism, and belief as well as to promote campus-wide transformation for religious and secular pluralism and interfaith cooperation.

Why should institutions of higher education care about interfaith work? In response to the Interfaith Youth Core’s August 2010 gathering of campus faculty, staff, and students, a convening on Interfaith Work and Higher Education, the author offers reflections from several young people on the necessity for colleges and universities to engage actively in interfaith cooperation.

Seminaries have an important role to play in the movement toward greater interfaith cooperation and understanding as training grounds for future moral and spiritual leaders. If individuals seek to create a strong civil society that honors religious difference, they need religious leaders with the knowledge, skills, and experience to facilitate constructive dialogue. They, therefore, need institutions that provide opportunities for interfaith education. The author describes the programming and priorities of the Center for Interreligious and Communal Leadership Education (CIRCLE), a joint initiative between Andover Newton Theological School and Hebrew College.

After reading Scott Seider and Howard Gardner’s essay “The Fragmented Generation” (2009) in a college freshman writing class, students responded by providing their own labels for their generation. This article includes excerpts from their essays. Following these excerpts is the instructor’s theoretical justification for this kind of classroom work. Drawing from Richard Rorty, the author argues the need for students to consider the vocabularies that students use to describe the world around them. By analyzing their vocabularies alongside other vocabularies that coexist and compete with their own, students engage the rhetorical landscape that surrounds and defines them.

Students have a deep desire to make sense of the peoples, cultures, rituals, personal behaviors, and ways of being of others whom they observe as they conduct their daily lives. In order for these desires to be fulfilled, students need educators to serve as allies in the learning process.

Community service learning at the university level is often conceived of as a mechanism for introducing privileged young adults to people with whom they have never interacted and experiences they have never had. American universities and courses involving community service learning are increasingly filling, however, with undergraduates who are members of the identity categories to which the community service learning experiences are intended to introduce them. The authors of this study consider the experiences of university students of color participating in a community service learning program.

Students at American colleges and universities do become more advanced in their global perspective taking along all three dimensions—cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal. Their degree of involvement in a number of cocurricular activities and their perceptions of the campus community are correlated with their level of perspective taking on the three dimensions. Student affairs professionals can make a difference when they provide focused and intentional activities, ones that foster specific goals in global perspective taking.

The Heart of Higher Education absorbs its readers into a series of conversations with two giants in the field of higher education, Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc. In the past decade both authors have become major voices in the growing movement to re-engage institutions in fulfilling higher education’s original mission to educate the whole person by integrating cognitive, emotional and spiritual learning into the student experience. In this volume, Palmer and Zajonc explore the range of conceptual models and practices that have become associated with the integrative education movement, defined as a shift of educational focus from imparting information to cultivating the development of students’ learning through personal insights.

The author discusses the need for defining what education is and how it can help change the world. The article specifically looks at sincere but vague answers freshmen often give in social issues courses, such as “To solve this problem, we should educate them,” and why statements such as these do not make the case for education sufficiently.