Here at Cornell, we regularly invoke the phrase “any person, any study.” It is a noble aspiration, central to our purpose and values as a university. But fully realizing that motto requires work. We fall short when we fail to leave our comfort zone and never meaningfully engage identities, cultures, ideas and values different from our own. This includes engaging students with deeply-held religious, spiritual and secular commitments and worldviews.
In any given week, more than a thousand students come to Anabel Taylor Hall at 548 College Avenue to worship, pray and meditate while wrestling with meaning, identity, values, justice and tradition. They come to explore the big questions not addressed in a résumé or problem set. Students come to our campus interfaith center for Muslim prayer, Hindu Bhajans, Christian worship and Mass, Jewish Shabbat, Buddhist meditation, earth-based ritual, food justice work and generally to be in spaces and communities where religion, spirituality and the deeper questions around life and being human are taken seriously by their peers. They come to this space to explore the complexity of the world around them and their place in it.
In my role, I get to see how Cornell’s global multifaith diversity provides an excellent opportunity for students to engage beliefs, values and commitments different from their own. This interreligious and crosscultural engagement is needed now more than ever. Our society is more divided than in decades — too many of us live in echo chambers, consuming media that reinforces our own values and perspectives and rarely engage with depth, curiosity or even friendship with those who are different from us.
Pluralism is essential to successful interfaith engagement. Pluralism is not just a buzzword, and it is more than diversity. Pluralism is an active commitment to engage difference with respect and intentionality. Doing pluralism well requires practice and training.
Interfaith, like pluralism, is not pretending we’re all the same. Authentic interfaith engagement demands we show up to situations and conversations we could easily avoid — especially when we disagree. Interfaith engagement is not just for the religiously inclined, it requires training, for anyone, on how to live in a society where people genuinely see the world differently.
Interfaith engagement isn’t about pretending we all agree. It’s about acknowledging that we don’t — and still choosing to build relationships, share meals, collaborate and dialogue with respect. Productive discomfort is essential to interfaith engagement. Interfaith requires us to stretch ourselves — intellectually, culturally, emotionally and spiritually — in ways not possible when we only hang out with people who think and believe like us.
Here’s an often unrecognized impact of interfaith engagement: it helps us clarify and deepen our own beliefs, values, and perspectives. Interfaith does not diminish our existing beliefs and commitments.
The Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making, the student Interfaith Council and the affiliated chaplains and religious leaders with Cornell United Religious Work work together to create frequent opportunities for this kind of engagement, including conversations, roundtables, discussion cafés and shared experiences.
Given that: we are excited to announce a new opportunity for undergraduate students to join an “Interfaith Adventure to Philadelphia” over February break. There is no substitute for placing a group of students with different beliefs, practices, and worldviews in the same van, sending them into synagogues, mosques, and temples, and asking them to discuss (even argue) and to have fun exploring Philadelphia together.
If that sounds challenging, it is. But it is also full of opportunities to create meaningful bonds over shared experiences, visits to religious communities, team-building activities and fun excursions. Applications are open on the OSMM CampusGroups page.
If you’re willing to be challenged, join us on this adventure or show up for any of our interfaith programs on campus. Interfaith engagement is always an adventure — a journey of self-discovery and an opportunity to rethink what “diversity” actually demands of you. Your Cornell experience will be deeper, more honest, and more human for it.
Joel Harter is Associate Dean of Students and Director of the Office of Spirituality and Meaning-Making and Cornell United Religious Work. He can be reached at jharter@cornell.edu.
