Conference Lets Youths Learn About Other Faiths

In his three weeks at the E Pluribus Unum Conference, Michael Barone has learned the Hebrew alphabet, participated in Torah study, shared a Jewish Sabbath dinner and picked up some handy Yiddish phrases.

That’s no small accomplishment for Barone, a 17-year-old Roman Catholic who will enter the pre-theology program at Canisius College in his native Buffalo, N.Y., this fall.

But at the conference, a unique interfaith gathering of 59 recent high school graduates at Washington’s American University, Barone and his Protestant and Jewish peers had daily opportunities to reach beyond the texts and traditions of their own faiths.

In the process, they learned about the importance of working out religious differences and even something about their own beliefs.

Toward the end of the conference, each student was asked to present a cigar box decorated with symbols of their choice to describe their three-week experience.

Barone chose to embody the spirit of the conference by combining civic images, such as the U.S. Capitol, and spiritual symbols, including a cross. He also placed 59 pebbles in the box to represent the students who attended, coming from 27 states. And in another compartment within the box, Barone displayed three pebbles, representing the Trinity, next to the words of the prayerful Jewish song, “Eli, Eli,” which describes a personal relationship with God.

“It spoke to me even in my Catholic tradition,” Barone said.

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The conference was a joint venture of the Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, whose founder and president Rabbi Sidney Schwartz served as conference director, the National Council of Churches and the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry.

Schwartz hopes to repeat the program annually, depending upon future funding.

There was a considered balance among the three religious traditions represented at the conference. Twenty Jewish, 20 Catholic and 19 Protestant students participated (one Protestant participant withdrew just before the conference).

“We can ask questions without being offensive,” said Marilyn Tebbe, a Catholic from Tipp City, Ohio, who said her multiethnicbackground has led her to be curious about other religions and races.

However, after one interfaith service during which Schwartz asked the students to call out names for God and no one mentioned Jesus, one Jewish student remarked that concern for offending others had gone too far.

“The Christians are tiptoeing around,” said Sarah Yerkes, a Reform Jew from Columbus, Ohio.

Schwartz, a rabbi in the liberal Reconstructionist denomination, called the students “religious high achievers,” who are learning to recognize the relationship between faith and civic engagement.

“Religion without social justice is like a family without love,” said Schwartz, emphasizing that faith drives social action.

The conference had four parts: spiritual arts and worship, community service, academics and communal life.

The community service component matched students with 17 primarily liberal advocacy and activist groups in Washington, including the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Forest Foundation and the National Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

Schwartz said teaching young people to commit to community service is the “final frontier. . . . Americans hate to be told what to do.”

With this in mind, Aaron Slavik, a Catholic from Sacramento, adorned his cigar box construction with a shiny penny bearing the inscription “E Pluribus Unum,” which is Latin for “Out of the Many, One,” and the nation’s motto.

“It’s not so much the differences, it’s the similarities, it’s the roots, where we come from,” Slavik said, adding that the conference had helped him better understand an inter-religious relationship within his own family.

In a sacred dance workshop, part of the spiritual arts and worship component, students stood in a circle, performing African dance moves to “Shir haShalom,” the “Song of Peace” that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sang just before he was assassinated in November 1995.

Clergy or academic representatives led the daily “faith-alike” study groups, in which students explored issues of human rights, poverty and the environment within their own faiths.

“There can be no cooperation between faith communities unless you are grounded in your own tradition,” Schwartz said.

Colleen McCoy, a student from Marietta, Ga., came away from the conference strengthened in her commitment to her United Methodist denomination.

McCoy, who wants to become a minister, said she was lucky that her denomination ordains women, unlike some of the Catholic students at the conference who said they were upset by their church’s ban on female priests.

In his cigar box, Barone--who said he hopes to start a study group in Buffalo similar to the conference program--placed a half-melted candle. He explained that it was left over from an exercise in which students held individual candles and combined their flames.

Sitting next to Barone, Lori Eisenberg, a Reform Jew from Jacksonville, Fla., noted the symbolism of the flames coming together.

“It was a big flame,” said Eisenberg, smiling.