A Challenge to Your Comfort Zone

by Project Interfaith Executive Director Beth Katz

Recently, I received an email from one of the pastors at a local megachurch. The two of us struck up a friendship after meeting at a conference on social media last spring. Shortly after the conference, we got coffee together to share more about our work in the community and realized that we were working toward many of the same goals for our community. We both tweeted about this initial meeting and that’s when things got sticky. Some people at his church saw our tweets and took the fact that he had met with me, a Jewish woman who runs an interfaith organization, as a sign that he was having doubts about his faith and identity as a Christian.

Since our initial meeting, we have been getting together periodically for coffee. The conversations we have had have been some of the most thoughtful and illuminating ones I’ve had and have given me a better insight into the faith community of which he is a part. In his most recent email, he told me that he continued to receive strong pushback from some members at his church about our friendship and about his support for interfaith work.

But despite the intense pressure he is receiving from some of his peers, he continues to attend our programs, meet with me and be engaged. And I thought “Wow- that takes some serious guts.” To risk your standing and credibility in your faith community and workplace to challenge the status quo, now that’s courageous.

And then I had to ask myself “What am I doing to really challenge the status quo even at Project Interfaith?” It’s pretty easy to get into your comfort bubble no matter who you are or what you do and interfaith work is no exception. I realize that if I am asking community members to step out of or at least stick a toe out of their comfort zones, I better be willing to do the same.

So I am setting a challenge for myself- just in time for the upcoming secular New Year. I am challenging myself beginning in January and through the rest of 2011 to each month meet with one person that I normally may have just assumed I would have little to nothing in common with or would be totally disinterested in interfaith work. This would include those I would conveniently label as “fundamentalists.” (Gasp! Yes, I’ll fess up- I, too, am guilty of labeling. Hi, my name is Beth and I am a human.) My goal is not to meet with these individuals to “convert” them to interfaith work. My goal is to meet with them to get to know them and to stretch my horizons- to really hear what makes them tick and to better understand their perspectives.

Naturally, to satisfy my dorkiness, I had to give this challenge a name. So I am calling it the “Go with Your Guts” Challenge because, let’s face it, it is going to take guts for me to meet with people outside my comfort zone. I’ll be sharing what I take away from these experiences each month on the Project Interfaith blog so be sure to check in.

I invite you to join me in the “Go with Your Guts” Challenge. Push yourself to meet with one person each month of 2011 who you might normally write off as having little or nothing in common with. And let me know how it goes by sharing your story on our blog. Who knows- if enough of us go with our guts, maybe we’ll find that the space beyond our comfort zones is actually a place worth spending some time in.

Beth Katz is the founder and Executive Director of Project Interfaith. Beth got bitten by the interfaith bug in college, where she first got involved in interfaith work as the co-founder of a student interfaith group. Her passion for creating a world where people of all faiths beliefs and cultures are valued and included led her to come back to her hometown of Omaha after graduate school to start Project Interfaith.

Beth frequently speaks and writes on interfaith issues and work, including writing a monthly column "The Accidental Theist" on the blog Omaha.net. She presents on Project Interfaith’s mission and work at local, national, and international events including at the Istanbul Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, and at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Beth is an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she has taught courses on international conflict resolution for the Political Science department and religious diversity issues in the schools for the College of Education. She is on the board of the newly-formed Center for Catholic Thought at Creighton University and is a member of the Nebraska Medical Center's Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Consultation Committee. She also has served on the Mayor’s Clergy Advisory Board in Omaha since being appointed in 2008.

Beth holds a Master of Public Policy and a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan as well as a Bachelor of Science in Education from Creighton University.

Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom

by Project Interfaith Community Mosaic Video Project Coordinator, Sierra Pirigyi

‘Tis the season for giving. For many people, this means giving to the charities, causes and non-profit organizations that one supports. This holiday season, you can make a difference in the world by helping to grow understanding, respect, and relationships among people of all faiths, beliefs, and cultures by making a contribution to Project Interfaith.

Why give to Project Interfaith? Why not instead give to your local food bank, or to an organization that helps refugees in a war-torn nation? While these are no doubt worthy causes, they are all symptoms of something larger. Hunger, war, poverty and human suffering are all effects of a world without understanding, mutual respect, and real relationships.

Any health care practitioner would agree that the most important steps one can take to improve his or her health are preventative, not curative. Curative health care treats symptoms—the effects that have already resulted from poor health and poor health habits. Health care should instead focus on prevention, by changing the causes that are contributing to poor health and thus resulting in disease, and integrating the steps that will grow a happy, healthy, fully-functioning human being.

Changing the world works much in the same way. We must take a step back, focusing not on the symptoms of this broken world, but instead on the causes—the things that have lead us to a world full of poverty, strife, and inequality. The true way to improve the world is to change the way the world works in the first place, not just to deal with symptoms. You can take medication for your high cholesterol, or you can change your diet. You can endure radiation therapy for your lung cancer, or you can quit smoking. You can create a plan for a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, or you can look at the root causes for this, among many, religious conflicts throughout the world—a lack of understanding, respect, and relationships among the various faiths, beliefs, and cultures.

The time is now, and it’s not too late. We can change the course of this planet. We can live in a world of peace and harmony, where each individual is free to live, believe, and practice those beliefs however he or she chooses. We can put an end to the religious conflict and intolerance throughout the world. We can do so by treating the root causes that have resulted in the unhealthy world we live in today. The lack of understanding that results in misconceptions. The lack of respect that results in the dehumanization of people throughout the world. The lack of relationships that helps perpetuate myths and stereotypes. In this ever-increasingly connected world, where we are ever-increasingly coming into contact with those who are different from ourselves, the work of Project Interfaith has never been more important. We can grow a happy, healthy, fully-functioning world. We simply need to start integrating the steps that will result in one.


Sierra is currently a Liberal Arts major at Metropolitan Community College. She plans to transfer to the University of Nebraska Omaha next fall, to complete her Bachelor's degree in International Studies with a Specialization in International Non-Profit.

Sierra began interning with Project Interfaith in February 2010, assisting in various fields until discovering her passion for programming. Although currently undecided about her exact career plans, Sierra intends to continue working in the non-profit field, hoping someday to do humanitarian work with children and youth. Her regional interests lie primarily within Latin America and the Middle East.

Hating the Haters and Other Profound Wisdom

by guest blogger, Joe Gerstandt

Ack.

Yet another brush with my own hypocrisy.

I am having an unpleasant moment. I just caught myself being something other than what I claim to be.

You see...I seem to be bumping into a lot of close-minded people lately. You know exactly the people I am talking about. Ignorant people. A-holes. I bump into them in real life, I bump into them on-line and when I turn on the television. I am swimming in people that are clearly everything that is wrong with the world. And after a certain amount of this I just want to start kicking people in the shins. I thought that rather than kicking people I should just write a post about the close-minded people that are making me insane by ruining everything and then I wrote the title down on a scrap of paper.

And then I thought “what an arrogant and judgmental thing to say?”

So here I am having an unpleasant moment with myself. It is unpleasant because I claim to be a different kind of fellow.

I have come to believe that when I am having a lot of scratchy, challenging interactions with other people it is likely to be more an indication of my own mental, emotional, spiritual and social fitness than it is an accurate evaluation of these other people or their actions. I believe that. I believe that strongly.

But.

The unpleasant truth is this.

I still want to kick people that don’t "get it.” It only takes a few minutes of watching the “news” or hanging out on Facebook to come across some perspective that is woven through with sentiments that are racist or sexist in nature or that questions the validity of Muslims or gays or atheists or fill in the blank. And more often than not, when I come across these perspectives, I want to do battle. I want to punish these people for the ignorance, bias, arrogance and privilege that I believe I see.

…and that is only fair because they started it.

Peace through superior firepower, right?

And this is why the stuff that matters so much is so hard.

This is why inclusion is hard. This is why honesty is hard. This is why peace is hard. This is why collaboration and community and family and democracy and love are all hard things to actually live. They are really easy to have as aspirations...but they are really hard to actually deliver on.

They are really hard to deliver on because there is always some really good reason for us to make an exception. We can always find some interpretation of some ideology, be it political, religious, economic or philosophical, justifying our sitting in judgment of someone else. And if we are not incredibly careful we can find ourselves becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

The world does not need any more problems.

And.

You and I cannot afford to waste our gifts, they are simply too precious. We must be solution people.

There is a book called As Bill Sees It that has been an important book for me. One of my favorite passages in this book is found on page 44.

"Too much of my life has been spent in dwelling upon the faults of others. This is a most subtle and perverse form of self-satisfaction, which permits us to remain comfortably unaware of our defects, too often we are heard to say, 'If it weren’t for him (or her), how happy I’d be!'

Our very first problem is to accept our present circumstances as they are, ourselves as we are, and the people about us as they are. This is to adopt a realistic humility without which no genuine advance can even begin. Again and again, we shall need to return to that unflattering point of departure. This is an exercise in acceptance that we can profitably practice every day of our lives.

Provided we strenuously avoid turning these realistic surveys of the facts of life into unrealistic alibis for defeatism, they can be the sure foundation upon which increased emotional health and therefore spiritual progress can be built."

Be good to each other.

Joe grew up on a family farm in northwest Iowa, served four years in the United States Marine Corps. Over the past decade, he has worked both internally and externally with corporate and non-profit organizations on issues related to diversity, inclusion and culture. Joe's work consists of helping people and groups of people truly understand diversity, inclusion, and culture so they can deliver better on their promises. His work is not about tolerance, sensitivity, or compliance it's about letting the dog off the leash. Joe lives in Omaha, NE with his wife, two daughters, and baby boy.