Religious Life Council hosts interfaith conference

The Religious Life Council hosted Coming Together 5, an annual interfaith conference, this weekend. The summit, which aimed to promote the importance of inter-religious engagement and understanding, attracted college students from 37 campuses around the country, including students from Stanford, Yale, the University of Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The conference provided students with the opportunity to discuss programs that encourage unity and peace.

“By the end of the conference people had developed friendships and felt a sense of common purpose that transcended their own college but was part of a national effort of bridging religious divides,” Paul Raushenbush, associate dean of religious life, said in an e-mail. “Participants left more equipped with the theoretical underpinnings and practical and programmatic ideas of inter-religious engagement.”

Alana Tornello ’12, one of the coordinators of the conference, agreed.

“I accepted this role because interfaith dialogue as a means for conflict resolution is one of my main passions on campus and I had a lot of ideas regarding how to express interfaith in the art forms after stage managing RLC’s Performing the Sacred last year,” Tornello explained in an e-mail. The conference included events from different faiths, including a number of “religious open houses” from faiths like Baha’i, Orthodox Judaism and Sikhism.

“As the world becomes increasingly diverse, it is vital to promote genuine respect and create bridges of understanding among people of various religious and non-religious backgrounds,” conference participant Jahnabi Barooah ’11 said in a press release. She added that the conference “serves that purpose by bringing together passionate young leaders who are committed to inter-religious engagement.”

Tornello gave examples from the last night of the conference of the bonding that had occurred.

“You could tell that everyone had gotten close quickly by their synchronized Lady Gaga dances, personal love ballads on interfaith ‘relations’ and poems of gratitude,” Tornello said, adding that during the night, one of the participants had called the group a “make-shift family.”

“It really did feel like a strange, impromptu family, and we hope that all of the groups, including RLC, can return to their campus activities with that energy in order to move forward together in the interfaith movement,” Tornello said.

In keeping with the conference’s student-focused mission, many of the conferences included student speakers. Three breakout sessions were scheduled to allow students to speak on topics such as “Movement and Physical Presence in Religion” and “The Role of Secular Humanism in Interfaith Dialogue.”

Other events included Religion Night in the Museum, a tour of the religious artworks in the Princeton University Art Museum and a keynote speech by Eboo Patel, the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core. The organization is a Chicago-based nonprofit that Patel founded in 2002 that attempts to “build an interfaith youth movement using service as the bridge,” according to the Interfaith Youth Core’s website.

“Students ... shared that they had grown personally in their own religious tradition and spiritually as people,” Raushenbush said.

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Over 30 campus faith groups were involved in the events, which were held in various locations on campus, including Frist Campus Center, Murray-Dodge Hall, the Fields Center and the University Chapel.

Raushenbush explained that the University hosted the first Coming Together conference in 2006 and that “given the current strength of inter-religious engagement at Princeton, it seemed like a good time to bring it back to the campus.”

The last Coming Together conference was held at the University of Puget Sound in February 2010. Johns Hopkins University and the University of Southern California hosted the conference in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

The conference was financed by the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life, the Student Group Projects Board and the University Art Museum.