Guest blogger Yasmine Alotaibi is a summer intern with America.gov and a senior at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville. With a double major in political science and history, she is currently working on two honors theses – one focusing on U.S. national security policy and one focusing on pre-revolutionary Cuba. Upon graduation, she hopes to continue writing on U.S. foreign policy.

Religion is a tricky subject. In fact, I try to avoid discussing it whenever possible (funny that I’m now writing a public blog post on the topic). While I’m more than happy to argue politics, I often shy away from arguing theology. Why? Religious beliefs are so much more personal than political beliefs. It’s easier to step on someone’s toes if you question their religion than if you question who they voted for.

David Plotz and Robert Wright, however, were quite calm when they discussed Wright’s book The Evolution of God at a New America Foundation event in Washington, DC. Plotz, editor at Slate and author of Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible, provided humorous insights while questioning Wright. Wright detailed his argument and fielded questions from the audience in a professional manner. If nothing else, I was impressed with the civility of the discussion.

Wright’s argument focused on what he called “God’s changing moods.” He said that the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam all contain verses that range from belligerent to tolerant. Verses that are emphasized by various religions at any given time depend on the circumstances. As long as the followers of one religion do not feel threatened by another, they will choose to emphasize verses that preach tolerance. As Wright said, when it comes to their own interests, people are quite selective about what verses to emphasize. Most people would find that a very unsettling argument. After all, when it comes to a holy book, what’s written is written, right? And who are we to change its meaning?

I, however, found his comments reassuring. As a relatively new convert to Christianity (just shy of three years), I’m still working my way through the Bible, trying to reconcile seemingly archaic concepts with these modern times. It can be discouraging. I’m a nosy person, and I like having all the answers. I frequently encounter verses that I just don’t understand. Of course, this leads to questions: . Do I read it the verse in the literal sense? Do I look for the meaning behind the symbols? Will I ever know the “correct” way to interpret the Bible? Not having the answers and knowing I may never have them is a bit disconcerting for a person like me.

Wright’s concept of “God’s changing moods”, however, gave me hope. Here was a man that devoted years of research to discuss the concepts of God in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and it seemed like maybe he didn’t have the final answer either. He concluded that our concepts are fluid. They change as our society changes. Occasionally, these concepts clash when one religion feels threatened by the other. But, he emphasized, all religious are capable of tolerance. We just need to recognize that all ideas of God are manifestations of the same underlying unity.

So maybe we aren’t supposed to have all the answers . Maybe, like Wright says, our interpretations will keep changing, and our ideas will keep evolving. We might think we have an answer but, as we grow and change, so will our beliefs.

That evening, as I left the event and started my trek home, I felt comforted by the idea that I’m not the only one without a final answer. That doesn’t mean I’ll give up searching (where’s the fun in that?). It just means I can rest a bit easier knowing that I have company in this search.

Eboo Patel, who has contributed to this blog, today wrote about Obama’s anticipated speech in Cairo on June 4:

“Obama will be addressing the 930 million Hindus in India, and the 5 million Jews in Israel, and the 38 million Catholics in Spain, and the 500,000 Muslims in his own city of Chicago. Tomorrow, Obama does more than discuss how the United States will relate to the Muslim world. He sets the precedent for how diverse peoples and nations should interact in the 21st century.”

See the full article here.

What do you hope to hear Obama say about faith and religion in his speech tomorrow?

Eboo Patel on a Righteous American Muslim. Pew Forum explores religion and the U.S. Courts with a study on the debate over government funding for religious groups. Civil rights groups say religious garb like the niqab and hijab should be exempt from proposed Michigan rules governing what witnesses wear when testifying in court.

Check out a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life that found 50 percent of American adults have changed religious affiliation at least once during their lives.

America.gov talked to a few people who have changed from one religion to another, and their responses are varied and interesting. One woman raised as Protestant Christian adopted Sufism as an adult.

Do people often change religions in your country? Why or why not?

During his weekly address yesterday, Obama said about Easter and Passover: “These are two very different holidays with their own very different traditions. But it seems fitting that we mark them both during the same week. For in a larger sense, they are both moments of reflection and renewal. They are both occasions to think more deeply about the obligations we have to ourselves and the obligations we have to one another, no matter who we are, where we come from, or what faith we practice.”

Watch Obama’s address or read the transcript here.

More on Obama at First 100 Days blog.

Here at Talking Faith we continue our exploration of religious traditions with guest blogger Joshua Stanton’s reflections on Passover, the Jewish holy day that began in the U.S. at sundown on April 8 and ends at nightfall on April 16.

Guest blogger Joshua Stanton is a founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue™ and a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College. He is also a founding co-Director of Lessons of a Lifetime™, a nursing home-based project designed to improve intergenerational relations and convey leadership skills to youth.

During Passover, Jews around the world commemorate the Exodus from Egypt, the day we escaped from slavery and came into our own as a nation. On the first two nights of the eight-day holiday, we gather together for a special meal with family and friends called a Seder, in which we reenact portions of the Passover story. We also refrain from eating leavened bread for the entire eight days of observance. This practice emulates that of our ancestors, who did not have time to let their bread rise before escaping to freedom.

This year, I have gained new insight into what freedom represents. As part of my rabbinical school training, I began working with a family of Jewish refugees from Ethiopia. Though still adjusting to life in a new country, they express a deeper affection for Passover than any other family I have met. While in Ethiopia, they experienced the travails of civil war. Fearing for their lives, they fled, leaving everything they had behind them. They did so with just the hope of freedom – something that they do not take for granted. Their impassioned discussions of Passover has given the holiday new meaning for me. People still make unimaginable sacrifices to experience freedom firsthand.

Even when the eight days of formal Passover observance come to a close, Jewish practice remains intimately tied to the Passover story. We as Jews are commanded to learn from our history and understand the gift of freedom that we enjoy in our everyday lives. Our servitude in Egypt represents an enduring reminder of the plight that foreigners and minorities can endure. As Jews, we are commanded to care for them, having learned these hardships firsthand. This guiding lesson continues to define our outlook as a people. We are compelled to use our freedom to help others who do not yet share in its blessing.

Interfaith work affords Jews an ideal way to fulfill the holiday of Passover. This year, I will have the joy of spending Passover in Jerusalem. For the first time in nearly two millennia, the Jewish people have a state of their own. But it is now more than ever that we should remember what it was like to be strangers in a strange land. As such, I will be observing enjoying Passover alongside a number of non-Jews at a Seder hosted by Rabbi Dr. Ron Kronish, Director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel. His vision is to welcome Jews and non-Jews alike to the gathering in order to foment dialogue while commemorating our people’s escape from slavery. In doing so, he will fulfill the fundamental obligation of Passover and show that, irrespective of religious differences, while in his home, none are to be thought of as strangers.

The message of Passover, therefore, is for Jews not only to respect people of other religious traditions but actively protect, aid, and welcome them. Even in the moment that God set us apart as a chosen people, He compelled us to look beyond our people and help the stranger of another nation. This call for inter-religious engagement is one that Jews should observe through concrete action and dialogue with other religious communities – particularly those most isolated within our society. For Passover commands us not merely to remember our ancestors as slaves in the land of Egypt but to feel the plight of others as though it were our own.

The views expressed in Blogs at America.gov do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of State or any other office in the federal government.

This is the third blog entry in a series on interfaith perspectives during Lent.

Guest blogger Cassie Meyer completed her Master’s Degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School where her work focused on social justice movements in American Christianity. She has co-taught multiple courses with Dr. Eboo Patel on interfaith leadership and interfaith action at Chicago Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary, where she is adjunct faculty. (See full bio)

“Five times a day. Five times a day?” The question came out as a gasp. “How?”

Ahmed shrugged and conceded: “I’m not great at it. It’s harder to do in America. I think I’ll probably try harder when I’m older. Still, it’s a part of what we’re supposed to do as Muslims.”

I’d been a Christian for about two years when I met Ahmed, a true, flesh and blood Muslim, mysteriously transported from Bangladesh to my small Midwestern liberal arts college. Much of my new life of faith had been spent learning as much as I possibly could about the tradition I had not grown up with – reading the texts, learning the histories, discovering the patterns of community. There are some things you can learn by reading books: Who was the Apostle Paul? What exactly was going on with the Church in Corinth? What could we make of the messiness of the psalms? And then there are the other parts of a life of faith that you can read book after book about, and still, really, have no idea what you’re doing.

A practice of daily prayer had been this for me. Prayer seemed like something everyone else had figured out, something that when I tried to figure out, I spent a lot of time staring blankly into space, or with my thoughts meandering toward what I might eat for lunch that day, or…asleep.

So the thought of praying five times a day – and that that could be a central part of how you understood and enacted your faith – absolutely terrified me. Terrified me because it inspired me. And what on earth did it mean for a conservative evangelical American Christian to be inspired by a (somewhat) devout Bangladeshi Muslim?

I asked the priest at the Episcopal church that I’d been going to if he knew of anything similar to this practice in the Christian tradition. He laughed gently and pulled a battered red book from the pew pocket in front of us. “You should explore this, Cassie,” he said, flipping through the pages and cracking the spine open to “Morning Prayer.” He pointed out the other prayers to me: the noon prayer, a simple midday breath, and the compline prayer, which contains some of the words that have become dearest to my faith (“Guide us waking, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace”). Father Patrick explained that these scripture-punctuated daily prayers in the Episcopal prayer book, The Book of Common Prayer, were based on the practices of prayer that medieval monks had practiced in their monasteries, and before that, taken from the ancient language and rituals of the early church.

It was a completely different way of praying than anything I’d learned so far; I’d been taught that prayer should be spontaneous, Spirit-driven, unhindered by pages and text. It should be that, certainly, sometimes. Yet there was something comforting about letting the written rhythms lead me, and that though praying alone I was also somehow praying within the resonance of many other Christian voices before and behind me. I thought of Ahmed, the longing I felt when he described his daily prayers, that Muslims around the world said the same words in the same ways across time zones and country lines. Maybe he had helped me find my way home.

This Lent, my practice has been to return to The Book of Common Prayer, return to a daily practice of liturgy and guided prayer in words that Christians have been praying, in varying incarnations, for centuries. Instead of rolling out of bed five minutes before I need to rush to work, I wake up early enough to sip a cup of coffee, and whisper into the stillness of my kitchen the words of the morning prayer rite. It’s fitting that I’ve returned to this practice while observing Lent with a group of Muslim, Christian and Jewish colleagues from the Interfaith Youth Core, where as I did with Ahmed, I learn to delve deeper within my own tradition as I watch them explore theirs.

I want to be clear: I believe that something fundamentally different is being done when Ahmed and I pray; that something fundamentally different is enacted when I fast and when my Jewish colleague Sam fasts. We do a disservice to the richness of our traditions and the depths of our convictions if we pretend otherwise, and we falsify the truths on which our faiths rest if we pretend that real differences and disagreements don’t exist. And yet my prayer practice is that – a practice, a discipline – because I watched the ways a Muslim practiced his faith, and began to ask new questions about what it means to follow the One who’s path of death and resurrection I seek in the Lenten season.

I’m not the first Christian to make this discovery: it’s rumored that the practice of daily prayer in Saint Francis of Assisi’s Rule was drawn from the friar’s own peaceful interaction with Muslims during the Crusades. Francis didn’t become any less Christian when he saw someone else’s devotion and sought to translate it into what he knew as truth.

So there are the truths that we know and the truths that we act; at the end of the day, Jesus was still my savior, and he was still Ahmed’s prophet. At the end of the day, my prayers still sound very different from Ahmed’s. But if I have any sort of prayerful discipline, if I have any sort of prayerful practice, it’s at least in part due to the strange discovery that I could desire to know my own faith more deeply from watching someone else practice his. And thereby begin to find my way home.

This is the second blog entry in a series on interfaith perspectives during Lent.

Gest blogger Hafsa Kanjwal is the Leadership Associate at the Interfaith Youth Core. She recently graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where she studied Regional Studies of the Muslim World and International Development. Hafsa was born in Kashmir and moved to the United States when she was six years old. She is deeply interested in political Islam, especially as it relates to democratic reform.

I always used to think that there was a great dichotomy between spirituality and activism. The image of the spiritual seeker in my mind was not one of an individual who works towards social justice. I felt, for whatever reason, that I could be one or the other. And for a long time, I choose the latter.

My identity as an American Muslim was for the longest time built upon the foundation of working towards that justice, whether abroad in my native Kashmir, or on my campus community. It was an exploration of the more public expressions of religious identity and solidarity. The most important thing to me was to create a more just public space, and I did not realize that this required greater inner coherence, built upon a strong personal relationship with our Creator.
Two years ago, I remember asking a Muslim activist, whom I deeply respect, what provided her with the most fulfillment in her work. I was shocked when she answered, “Prayer.”

She shared a quote with me by Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s (peace and blessings be upon him) nephew that I am incredibly grateful for — “Work for this life as if you would life forever, and work for the hereafter as if you would die tomorrow.” I have come to realize that balancing my actions and intentions towards the fulfillment of my responsibilities to both this world and the hereafter is the only way I can achieve success in both.

Of course, intentionally seeking that spiritual balance is challenging. It is during the month of Ramadan that the space for reflection for Muslims is vast, and it is during that month where I work hard to set aside the time for more prayer, more reflection, and more recitation of the Holy Qur’an. During the rest of the year, creating that space becomes more difficult, which is why I am grateful for Lent.

My colleague at the Interfaith Youth Core suggested that a group of us, Christians, Muslims and Jews, partake in Lent this year and give up or add something to our daily routine once a week. At the end of the day, we reflect on our thoughts and experiences. I was inspired by my Christian colleague who mentioned that she wanted to explore the tradition of Christian mysticism during this month. I have always been personally interested in Sufism, a strong spiritual tradition in Islam. As part of my Lenten promise, I wanted to set aside more time during the day to do dhikr, the Arabic word for “remembrance of God.” This can consist of reciting the 99 names of God in Arabic, reciting verses from the Qur’an, or invoking special dua’s, or supplications. I had the chance to attend a group dhikr last week that I left enchanted. It is said that any gathering of people that invokes the remembrance of God is blessed, and I truly felt that in the presence of such a community.

The purpose of the dhikr ranges for each participant. For me, it is a reminder of the greatness of our Creator. As my fingers slide through the tasbih, or prayer beads, I am also reminded of the beauty of His creation.

More information at Diversity: At Worship

See also: Coveting my neighbor’s religious practices

Guest blogger Becca Hartman received her B.A. from Northwestern University where she studied Philosophy and Religion. Before joining IFYC, she interned with the African Religious Health Assets Program at the University of Cape Town to map the impact of Faith-Based Organizations on the public health needs of Sub-Saharan Africa.

I’m one of those freedom-loving American Baptists. You know, freedom of conscience, freedom to encounter the divine directly, freedom to read scripture and interpret for myself with the appropriate tools, freedom to worship what, when, and as I choose. My sense of this radical freedom is rooted in the boundless love and grace of God and of the Jesus who came to loose us from the many shackles we (willfully or forcefully) sport.

I am also free to envy. I work at the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), a Chicago-based international nonprofit organization that is building a global movement of young leaders committed to the ideal of religious pluralism. That means that I have the good fortune of working with people from different religious and philosophic traditions. It was first in school at Northwestern University, then abroad in South Africa that I really got involved with interfaith work. The beauty of religions’ practices, the depth of their stories, the history of their rituals, the vibrancy of their communities, and the truth in their teachings - they have always captivated me. They are a testament to the abundance of the divine that I seek to follow.

But I admit that since I first encountered religious diversity I have been covetous of my neighbor’s religious practices.

When I studied in Durban, South Africa, I lived with a wonderful, proudly Christian Zulu family. I have rarely felt the spirit in the way that I did in their house church just a couple of doors down, surrounded by singing voices that raised my consciousness to another plane altogether. And next door to ‘our’ home was an older Muslim couple. I had the blessing of living with my host family during Ramadan, which in South Africa is boiling hot with many daylight hours. Every day this family would go to work and return, all the time refraining from food and water. And every evening after sunset, when I caught them at just the right time, hanging clothes in the back of the house, they would offer me fresh veggie samosas to share in the breaking of their fast. As the sun was setting over a massive hillside of RDP government houses, the wind would pick up, and we would flip through pictures of our families together.

The next time I encountered Ramadan so fully was my first year at IFYC. I observed my Muslim colleagues (friends, really) refraining from water and food and ill-thoughts from sun-up to sun-down. Inspired by their devotion and the shared practice among Muslims around the world, I decided that I would focus on this practice and revitalize the tradition of fasting within mystical and some of mainstream Christianity. I decided to fast for Lent last year.

Growing up my family always ‘took on’ something for Lent, a practice that I find meaningful, which is a way of living from a place of abundance. It is with a heart of gratitude that we would take on extra volunteering, vow to acknowledge and thank someone new every day, write a letter to loved ones, etc. This Lent, I wanted a different practice to jolt me from my comfortable ways and to live into a new insight. Yet in my emulation of my Muslim colleagues, I was missing a vital part of the devotional experience. During Ramadan, Muslims break the fast at sundown and celebrate with prayer and a shared meal. In my attempts to ‘go-it-alone’, I was depriving myself of the joy that comes in relationships and communal celebration. Lent didn’t go so well last year.

This year, I am grateful for the participation of many friends at IFYC. Eight of us – varieties of Christians, Muslims and Jews - are taking a day of the week and fasting that day, according to each one’s chosen practice. Together we are fasting throughout Lent, journaling our thoughts and experiences in a collective book, and occasionally breaking the fast together. In the coming weeks, they will share their thoughts with you as well as we each reflect on what this interfaith Lent means to us. Thus far I am simply grateful for this community.

In the Christian tradition, Lent is the period of time when many Christians fast and pray to prepare for Easter. Here at Talking Faith we continue our exploration of religious traditions with a series of guest bloggers from the non-profit Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC).