[/media-credit]Eboo Patel spoke in Memorial Chapel on interfaith cooperation and understanding.
Patel explained his threefold approach to interfaith understanding: voicing your values for interfaith cooperation, engage with others and acting together.
Patel began to explore interfaith respect and understanding in more depth and from many religious perspectives. He also shared his observation that much religious dialogue today is “poisoned speech,” because it is spoken by people who are venting vitriol about religion, instead of people who want to build one another up, to engage with one another. He spoke of acting together, exemplified in particular by the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. He shared an example, when, during the Selma Civil Rights March, Rabbi Joshua Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walked side-by-side.
Attendees included local Schenectady residents and people from other colleges. Shilpa Darivemula ‘13 said, “I feel a lot of commonalities in religions, and a core sameness we all share. Like Eboo said … there’s a sameness that can create this beauty.” Talking about interfaith dialogue and the pursuit of it, Darivemula continued, saying, “I feel like sometimes we write it off when it gets too difficult.”
Director of Campus Diversity and Affirmative Action Gretchel Hathaway explained on bringing Patel to campus, “It’s part of education. If we don’t educate our students to understand diverse thinking, diverse religion, diverse theology, diverse futurality, then we have missed the mark on what we really should be doing here.”
Patel commented on Union’s interfaith legacy, saying, “I think this is an inspiring place … you have two central parts of this college’s past of interfaith cooperation.” He touched upon Union’s founding by different religions, which may not have agreed in certain religious matters, “but they agreed on a social matter: educating people.” He then said, “You have that [historical] tradition, then you have people living that tradition out,” and spoke about Union’s current interfaith endeavors, including Union’s Year of Religion and the Presidential Interfaith Campus Challenge.
Patel concluded, “If you don’t write the next chapter in the history of interfaith cooperation, nobody else is going to do it. And it’s not going to write itself.”
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Everybody says there is this RACE problem. Everybody says this RACE problem will be solved when the third world pours into EVERY White country and ONLY into White countries.
The Netherlands and Belgium are just as crowded as Japan or Taiwan, but nobody says Japan or Taiwan will solve this RACE problem by bringing in millions of third worlders and quote assimilating unquote with them.
Everybody says the final solution to this RACE problem is for EVERY White country and ONLY White countries to “assimilate,” i.e., intermarry, with all those non-Whites.
What if I said there was this RACE problem and this RACE problem would be solved only if hundreds of millions of non-blacks were brought into EVERY black country and ONLY into black countries?
How long would it take anyone to realize I’m not talking about a RACE problem. I am talking about the final solution to the BLACK problem?
And how long would it take any sane black man to notice this and what kind of psycho black man wouldn’t object to this?
But if I tell that obvious truth about the ongoing program of genocide against my race, the White race, Liberals and respectable conservatives agree that I am a naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews.
They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-White.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White.
Excuse me sir, but the article is not about race, it is about interfaith cooperation. Please do not rant on this innocent journalist’s article that does not even speak of the subject.
Great piece Shayna!!