Interfaith conversation: sounds warm & fuzzy, right?
In reality, though, beyond the Brother/Sisterhood week banquets, it can be pretty tough.
For instance, how would YOU handle these real situations that came up in one such interfaith program?
Rebecca Mays, at the American Academy of Religion, 2015.
–a Muslim young man from a rural island whose hadith lineage would not allow him to enter the sanctuary of a Christian church if a cross stood in the sanctuary (but they were scheduled to visit such a church);
— a young Buddhist scholar from Myanmar (Burma) who argued that the Rohingyah young woman in the group should not call herself by that name as that ethnic group as such has never existed in his country (the Myanmar government has been accused of genocide involving Rohingyah); or
— a Muslim young woman who could not room with our one transgendered participant.

All these and many more such challenges have been faced by Rebecca Mays, a Philadelphia area Friend who has been Director of the Dialogue Institute at Temple University since 2012.
And in the new issue of “Quaker Theology,” she describes how she faced these complex encounters.

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