Chicago has become the center of the interfaith movement.  It’s a not-so-micro microcosm of religious diversity.  It’s a place where Catholics, Jews, Jains, Muslims, Atheists, Evangelicals and others live alongside each other in “a city of neighborhoods,” as we like to say.  

These religious groups find common ground through organizations like the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), founded more than a decade ago by Chicagoan Eboo Patel. 

The 33-year-old Indian-American is ready to turn religious pluralism into a new norm, a societal standard. Like multiculturalism.  Like environmentalism.  Like equal rights.

The voices of hate and religious discrimination have gotten too loud in Chicago and all over the world, Patel says.  We can’t let it continue any longer.  We have speak out and make change.

The “we” Patel refers to is a pretty powerful “we.”  On Sunday, he addressed 500 teens, young adults, clergy members and interfaith advisers rallying together at the Interfaith Youth Core’s annual conference, held at Northwestern University in Evanston.  Over the course of the three-day event, more than 1,000 people from 90 schools, scattered all over the world, were said to participate.

Patel, in some ways, is like their superstar.  He’s become the guy for all things interfaith, serving as an adviser on faith issues to President Barack Obama and gaining recognition this week from the U.S. News and World Report as one of the Best Leaders in America.

The crowd at the conference applauds wildly when Patel takes the stage, snapping photos with digital cameras and iPhones.  As Patel speaks, his eyes sweep the room and never once look down at the small black notebook in front of him.  He talks about a vision for an interfaith future, and I’ll admit: I got goosebumps.

But what will the future of Chicago’s religious communities be?  How will the interfaith movement play out here?

Patel and IFYC have formed a million-dollar partnership with the Chicago Community Trust to address interfaith issues.

“The issue of the 21st century is religious diversity and pluralism,” said Terry Mazany, the president and CEO of the trust.  “This (partnership) has emerged to address that top-level need, not only preventing a horrendous action, but in fact tapping into the wellspring of goodwill and creativity” among the city’s religious groups, who are its largest recipients of philanthropic giving.

On local college campuses, the interfaith movement may seem to be well on its way:

-        Loyola University regularly sponsors conferences and academic discussions, includingGlobalization and the Common Good—An Interfaith Perspective held last spring.

-        DePaul University has two designated interfaith pastors and a group, Interfaith@DePaul, that sponsors 3-4 events each month.

-        Northwestern has an interfaith dorm, a “living and learning community,” where students can choose to intentionally interact with people of other religious traditions on a day-to-day basis.

Still, these efforts represent a small proportion of the student population, maybe 50 to 80 students each, Patel estimates.  “We want it to be the status quo on college campuses,” he says.

“And for those who don’t participate to feel guilty about it,” added Mazany.

IFYC, even with its intern program alone, has begun to shape young leaders, people who won’t accept religiously discriminatory language, close-mindedness or exaggerated stereotypes. These 20-somethings will be the civic leaders of the next generation.  At least that’s the hope.

And speaking of hope…

“The guy in the Oval Office was an interfaith leader in Chicago 30 years ago,” Patel tells the conference crowd, giving one example of the city’s long interfaith history, highlighted with revolutionary leaders like Jane Addams, the founder of the Hull House.

“Back then the common good for him was Altgeld Gardens,” he continues.  “Now the common good for him is planet earth.”

Faith communities, from non-believers to Muslims, have applauded Obama’s attention to religion and religious diversity in his inaugural address (my see previous blog entry here) as well as his speech from Cairo to Muslim countries (blogged about here).  But perhaps our president, with his roots in interfaith community-building, could be doing more and saying more to address religious plurality in America.

“I’d love for him to say more,” says Patel, who is a Muslim.  “It has to be the spirit of our time.”

No one really cares about the atheist billboard that made its debut downtown today.

On the corner of North LaSalle Drive and West Grand Avenue, Chicagoans pass by silently, smoking cigarettes, chatting on cell phones and barely glancing up at the sign, which says: “Are you good without God? Millions are.”

Like the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign ads on the CTA back in May, it seems the latest effort to publicize non-belief is a non-issue in the city of Chicago.  No protesters.  No angry glares.  No immediate public response from the religious community.

Hemant Mehta, the coordinator of Chicago Coalition of Reason, the group that sponsored the billboard, thinks no reaction might be a good reaction. 

“If Christians (or whomever) don't react, that means atheism is becoming more acceptable in society.  Which is great.  If they do react, then what exactly are they opposed to?” said Mehta, also known as the “Friendly Atheist, in an email.

More and more Americans are falling into the “good without God” camp—16 percent of adults don’t identify with a religious tradition and 4 percent call themselves atheists or agnostics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Sam Younan, an Iranian-American Catholic who passed by the billboard on his way to church on Tuesday, said just because there are millions of people who don’t believe doesn’t mean they’re all right.

“I’m good, and I believe in God,” the 56-year-old said.

The second annual Art on Track event —where an eight-car CTA train turns into a mobile art gallery for a day—offered Chicago’s visual artists a nontraditional space to display their work and passengers a pretty unusual, and perhaps slightly spiritual, el ride. 

On Saturday, large ham bones made of pink and red felt swung from the ceiling of one car; the fluorescent lights shone through blue cellophane; and excerpts from Craigslist “missed encounters” that took place on the CTA were posted on the walls.

“I want them to feel kind of transformed,” said 27-year-old Allison Glenn, who curated the “Meet Meat Train” installation, created students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, or SAIC. 

Works of art and religious rituals both offer people the chance to be transformed, one professor told me.  In each experience, the ultimate impact comes from the return to normalcy and what lasting effect the work or the ritual has on someone once it’s over.

In the case of the Art on Track, the nearly 70 artists showcasing their work in the train looping around the Loop wanted to change the way CTA passengers think of public transit and public space.

Being involved in the event made Allison approach the el’s “awkward social setting” with a renewed awareness to notions of inclusion, irritation, reaction and acceptance.

The mobile exhibit, the largest of its kind, also can transform the way people experience art.  Tristan Hummel, one of the founders of Art on Track, designed the event to show the public art outside of a standard museum setting.

“Maybe they want to get excited in the way a sports fan does when they see a homerun,” said Tristan, a 23-year-old SAIC alumni.  “Maybe they want to scream.”

Rob Sherman, an atheist activist based in Chicago, reported yesterday that the government terminated a $1 million grant to help rebuild a historic South Side church.

Sherman had filed a lawsuit against the state officials, including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who authorized funding Pilgrim Baptist Church.  But now, there’s no plan in place for what should be done with the ruins of the 115-year-old building.

When the church was all but destroyed by fire more than three years ago, Chicagoans mourned the loss of the building where gospel was born.  It had garnered national attention in the 1930s for its music director Thomas Dorsey and later for gospel singers like Aretha Franklin.

The building, designed by Chicago architects Adler & Sullivan, was an official city landmark, so then-Governor Rod Blagojevich pledged $1 million to help rebuild the non-church part of the building, administrative offices that housed the church’s school and historic documents.

Even before Sherman, the “Godless in Chicago” blogger, filed a legal complaint two years after the fire, people were questioning the constitutionality of the grant, citing that the state’s constitution does not permit publicly funding church-run schools.  Sherman, in 2008, alleged that it was impossible to limit the funding to the church’s “secular” functions and the grant was unconstitutional.

I agree with the legal arguments in Sherman’s filing (text here); the government directly handing money to religious institutions, for both religious ends as well as historical/cultural ones, seems to violate the most general notions we have for the separation of church and state.

The statements he makes on his blog, though, go beyond anti-church-and-state, towards-anti-church-itself. 

“Pilgrim Baptist Church remains a decrepit blight on the community, with no prospect of it being rebuilt in the foreseeable future.  Indeed, it is a perfect metaphor for what heaven is:  Once you look past the phony fancy facade of pearly gates, you realize that there's nothing there.  No god, no people -- nothing.  It's completely empty, just like the above picture of Pilgrim Baptist,” Sherman writes. “They ought to tear down the remains of that building and let the community move on.”

I can see why Sherman and area atheists are celebrating the victory of constitutional law over misappropriation of taxpayers’ dollars.  In some ways, I guess that’s something every American should celebrate, first-amendment-style.

But given the history of this specific building, of the now-crummy-looking Pilgrim Baptist Church, I’m still holding out hope that the funding will come. Already a handful of Adler & Sullivan’s buildings have been demolished (the Schiller Theater, the Stock Exchange and earlier buildings such as the Troescher and Ryerson, according to the city’s Landmark Division).  For the sake of the Bronzeville neighborhood and in honor of Chicago’s architectural history, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Sherman’s ought-to doesn’t come true.

 Photo by bluebike, Flickr Creative Commons.   

So yes, the Little Things took a temporary hiatus this summer while I worked on a journalism project called News21 here in Chicago.

Although I wasn’t blogging here at the Windy Citizen much, I was still reporting on religion locally and posting links to the stories on the site.  In case you missed ‘em, here are some highlights:

-       I grabbed a copy of the Book of Mormon and stopped in at local missions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where I found lots of Hispanic converts to Mormonism. The church’s young missionaries shared their experiences testifying to Spanish-speakers in areas like Logan Square and Pilsen.

-       I rocked out with Al-Thawra, a local band that plays experimental punk with a Middle Eastern twist, and discovered the Muslim punk movement among young, second-generation Americans.

-       In Chicago’s Southwest Side, I met Ahlam Said, a DePaul grad working for a social justice nonprofit called IMAN, or the Inner-City Muslim Action Network.  In a series of videos, she discusses how faith informs her approach to race and economic disparity in Chicago.  At an event held by IMAN, musical and spoken artists tell stories of their Muslim experiences.

-       I learned about the Salvation Army’s missions beyond thrift stores by visiting the Evangeline Booth Lodge, a homeless shelter the organization runs in Uptown, and attending church at the Norridge Citadel Corps, where I sung along to big-band tunes with Kirsten Aho, a 23-year-old artist called to serve as an “officer” in the Salvation Army.

Spending every day looking into religion stories made me realize how important I think these issues are in a changing America.  The balances of belief and non-belief, secular and spiritual, and tradition and progression matter for us each day, both as individuals and as institutions. 

Sadly, though, specialty beats like religion are increasingly being cut by newspapers. Boston Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson lamented the lower attendance at last week’s Religion Newswriters Association convention and discussed the potential future for religion news on his blog, Articles of Faith.

In light of such disheartening news, I’m pledging to make a better effort to seek out the religious and spiritual (and not-so-religious and not-so-spiritual … that’s you, atheists/agnostics/humanist-types!) and bring their stories to light.

So if you’ve got an event you think I should attend, a leader or friend I should talk to, or an issue you want to read about, please let me know. 

Check back soon and thanks for reading!

On Friday, I tagged along as my roommate Sarah Kate started her search for a nearby reform congregation.  Her plan: to spend the summer Sabbaths at a few synagogues nearby and find one to join by the time High Holidays come around in September.

Inside a Near North Side synagogue with pretty blue and gold stained glass windows, we prayed and sung amongst a largely white-haired crowd.  After the Kiddush (post-service blessing over wine and challah), we chatted with rabbis and members of the congregation, who told us about the young adult group they were starting and how as young, pretty (why thank you!), single girls we should get involved.

We left every friendly interaction with the same feeling: we weren’t just shopping for synagogues, they were shopping for us.  We fall into the coveted demographic.  Just what they’re looking for: unaffiliated, unmarried 20-somethings.

Rabbi Laura Baum writes about the effects of changing culture and technology on the next generation of Jews: only half of Jews in the U.S. are affiliated with a congregation and a majority of the Jewish population identifies as secular or somewhat secular, she says on the site OurJewishCommunity.org, which means organizations have to reach young Jews in a different way.

While Sarah Kate may want to become a member of a synagogue so she has a Jewish home, a place to go for her religion’s most holy holidays – Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the day of repentance—there are also opportunities for her to find Jewish community outside of a traditional house of prayer.

Here in Chicagoland, home to nearly a quarter-million Jews, there are local sites like Oy Chicago! and JChicago, plus the ever-helpful and thorough Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago offers events and info for young adults (like this list of synagogues who welcome non-members to High Holiday services).

Still, our synagogue shopping continues… likely through September, when most young things like us depart from their summer schedules to attend services and events more regularly.  We’re looking forward to sharing Shabbat with more of Chicago’s synagogues – let us know if you’ve got a recommendation!

 On Friday afternoon, when Muslims pray as a congregation, the top floor of a mosque in the South Loop fills with rows and rows of men, falling to their knees in submission to their God and facing east, the direction of Mecca.

The Muslims at the Chicago Islamic Center on State Street are Arabic, South Asian, black and white.  Some are young professionals, recently moved from their homes in the suburbs to their first jobs in the city.  Some are older; a few come with children who follow along with the group prostrations.

The diversity within the Muslim community in between marble-tiled walls of the downtown mosque is a reminder of the diversity of Islam worldwide.  When President Obama spoke in Cairo, Egypt last week, he did not use the term “the Muslim world,” which seems to reference a uniform group, and instead said “Muslim communities” and “Muslim-majority countries.” 

According to the Christian Science Monitor’s global news blog, by adopting this nuanced word choice, Obama avoided promoting the idea that all Muslims are alike and that by fighting terrorism America is fighting a war against all of Islam.

“There is no monolithic ‘Muslim community,’ nor is there a singular homogeneous entity known as ‘the Muslim world,’ rather there are diverse and distinctive Muslim communities that need to be reflected in our discourse. Using the term ‘the Muslim world’ only serves to bolster the Islamist and Al Qaeda narrative of ‘the West’ against ‘Islam’ – of a battle of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ or ‘good’ versus ‘evil,’” said the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank in London that opposes Islamic extremism, in a press release.

Obama also spoke about Islam in the U.S., mentioning the country’s 1,200 mosques and “non-stereotypical” Muslims.

“He really recognized the American Muslim community.  He recognized the size of our community and the challenges we face,” said Junaid Afeef, executive director of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, pleased with President Obama’s ambitious promises of change, but waiting for the action to follow.  “It’s the responsibility of the president to fight stereotyping wherever it is.”

(Photo from Mus, Flickr Creative Commons) 

Sisters Maria Cristiana and Maria de la Ascension shuffle though large, laminated photos—pictures of nuns holding children, playing volleyball, eating pizza, singing and worshipping.

They’ve come to Chicago to ask for donations for their missionary work in the Ukraine and Argentina as members of the Institute Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, a religious order with about 700 women serving in 30 countries worldwide.  Despite the recent decline in enrollment into Catholic vocations, their sisterhood has enjoyed significant growth in its 20-year history, and now finds itself needing more space to house and educate the young women joining the order.

In Chicago, the two—Sister Cristiana dressed in a black habit, customary in Eastern Europe where she serves, and Sister Ascension dressed the order’s religious habit, grey and blue to symbolize Christ’s earthly and divine nature—are visiting local parishes, including St. Stanislaus Kostka and St. Fracis of Assisi, for support. 

It’s not easy, though.  Not only does the down economy make parishioner purse-strings tight, but for some Catholics living in today’s contemporary world, it’s difficult to relate to the kinds of work the nuns do.

Many can see the value in Catholic mission work and charity, but that’s just one part of it.  The Institute also includes “contemplative sisters,” who live in cloisters and dedicate their lives to prayer.  Sister Cristiana, who’s starting a monastery for these sisters in the Ukraine, said this is a harder project for them to fund.  A picture of a group of children or an event can show off missionary work, but the role of contemplative sisters is less visual, less colorful and more spiritual.

“Not everybody understands the power of prayer,” she said. "Everybody understands helping the poor, the orphans, the disabled."

Sister Cristiana is not alone; contemplative orders in today’s world often struggle to justify their significance as the spiritual side of a sisterhood or brotherhood.

“For Catholics to support it, it seems like ‘oh such a waste,’ so it’s a challenge,” said Michael Wick, the executive director of the Institute on Religious Life in Libertyville. “The present generation appreciates doing rather than being, and in cloistered life, they appreciate just being of the Lord and the institution of prayer.”

In a world of to-do lists, busy schedules and achievement-based measures of success, it’s hard to see a silent, away-from-everything lifestyle as worthwhile.  But these nuns come to know and love God deeply, and they pray for the benefit of the rest of the world.

“They are basically the professional pray-ers of the Church,” Wick said.

For Servants of the Lord and the Virgin of Matará, the work of contemplative sisters is a necessary complement to their apostolic mission.

"By their prayers, works of penance, and sufferings, contemplative communities have a very great importance in the conversion of souls," according to a compilation from the order's constitution, on its Web site.  "The nuns bear in their hearts the sufferings and anxieties of all those who seek their help."

While missionary sisters draw people to the Church with their programming in the community, like mercy houses for orphans, young mothers and the disabled, “contemplative sisters are to pray for the people there,” Sister Cristiana said.

As more young people join religious orders like Sister Cristiana—she, now 32, and Sister Ascension, now 21, joined as teens—the Institute for Religious Life anticipates a rebound for the Catholic Church, after years of decline.

People in the most recent generation have not been exposed to Church vocations and have grown more curious, Wick said.  After noticing the popularity “cloistered life” section of his organization’s Web site, they launched a separate site just on contemplative living three years ago, cloisteredlife.com.