Closing the divide

Editor's Note: This story is the first in a multi-part series examining interfaith issues at Boston College. Part one deals with the administration's new Interfaith Initiative and other student efforts on campus. Next week will look at residence hall life and the struggle to practice one's faith in such settings.

With the most sacred day of the Christian calendar just around the corner, Boston College is preparing for a week of elaborate holy services. The administration's new Interfaith Initiative, however, is remaining a priority. The new effort, which began last summer, is getting off the ground this semester as the school continues to work on improving its relations with and services for those of non-Catholic faiths on campus.

The initiative developed from a conversation between Provost and Dean of Faculties Bert Garza, Bede Bidlack, GA&S '13, members of campus ministry and other BC faculty about the changing religious identities of BC students. The University is becoming more religiously diverse than ever, and for a historically Jesuit institution, this means spending more time engaging in interfaith discourse and increasing awareness on campus.

"For a long time, the assumption has been that all students at BC are Roman Catholic, but now it's much more diverse, and we're just trying to bring that awareness to the entire BC community," Bidlack said,

After these discussions, a group of BC faculty wrote the official proposal that eventually took form fall semester as the BC Interfaith Initiative, a committee comprised of an array of people from the BC community, including faculty from the theology department, a representative from ResLife, members of BC administration, graduate students, and Father Joseph Appleyard, S.J., the vice president for University Mission and Ministry. Last semester they laid the groundwork for the new group, and this semester, the initiative is in the process of unveiling their collective efforts to improve interfaith awareness on campus.

In the coming weeks, in conjunction with the Interfaith Coalition, a separate group composed only of Campus Ministry staff, the Interfaith Initiative is sponsoring a series of open religious events that will act as "open houses" to the many different faith groups on campus. The Muslim Student Association (MSA) will be holding the first open house and prayer service on Friday, March 28, followed by the BC Hillel's Jewish Shabot on April 4 and an Episcopalian prayer service on April 9. These events will include open prayer services friendly to those who do not follow the particular faith, and many are serving traditional food of the respective religious practice.

The initiative also attempts to create events that will attract more students in order to project its message to a larger audience. On March 25, the BC Interfaith Initiative will host an on-campus screening of the popular comedic film Groundhog Day, which, Bidlack said, has actually been discussed frequently among various religious communities in regard to the underlying messages and meanings the movie possesses.

The Interfaith Initiative also recently created another group on campus, the Religious Quest Council, to act as the representative undergraduate student voice in these efforts. Religious Quest, Bidlack said, is a non-confessional group composed of mostly Roman Catholic students but open to all, whose purpose is to create forums for dialogue on campus about interfaith living. The committee is composed of students who are either currently enrolled in or have previously taken the Religious Quest core course. Their first project will sponsor a round-table discussion titled "What's Good about Fundamentalism" on April 8 and will address the importance of religious differences.

Despite so many events created to raise awareness of such efforts, it is hard for such groups to be heard on a campus dominated largely by students, faculty, and administrators of the Roman Catholic faith. "It's quite a bit [the group's events and efforts on campus], but not enough people know about it," Bidlack said.

"All of these different things started happening this year," said Tokufumi Noda, current voice of the student-run Interfaith Dialogue Club and A&S '09. "And it's all been this amazing collision of efforts. We're trying to coordinate these efforts too, so we're not reinventing the wheel every time we want to do something."

These groups are not only interested in letting different voices be heard on campus, but also looking at reevaluating BC's practices to find a way for the Jesuit school to be more inclusive of other faiths.

"This conversation does include Roman Catholics, but we want to take this [interfaith] community outward to the entire BC community to change the entire way the school runs," Bidlack said.

One issue consistently pointed out by members of these interfaith groups is evidenced by a problem that arose last semester, when BC scheduled freshman convocation on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, an extremely important religious holiday for BC's Jewish students. These groups aim to ensure such oversights don't happen again and that BC can be progressive in its future endeavors to be more inclusive of other faiths in this modern, diverse world to which the old school is still adapting.

"It's exciting," Noda said. "There's a lot of potential for BC to play a major role in interfaith dialogue, not just for the sake of our campus, but for other college campuses as well."