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date: 21 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter explores “interfaith leadership,” a framework for religious peacebuilding across lines of religious diversity. Drawing on the example of Martin Luther King Jr., it articulates a constructive theory of interfaith leadership and reflects on its application, particularly in the current climate of religious diversity within the United States. The chapter considers the possibility of a movement or critical mass of individuals committed to building “religious pluralism,” and focuses on young people as potential agents of such social change. The authors write from their location as interfaith practitioners, working for the Chicago-based nonprofit Interfaith Youth Core, which focuses on building religious pluralism on American college and university campuses; here they seek to put this work in conversation with relevant peacebuilding literature.

Keywords: interfaith leadership, religious peacebuilding, Martin Luther King Jr., religious diversity, Interfaith Youth Core, religious pluralism

Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based organization building the interfaith movement on college campuses. Author of the books Acts of Faith (2007), which won the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, Sacred Ground (2012), and Interfaith Leadership: A Primer (2006), Patel is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN. He served on President Obama’s inaugural Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He has taught courses on interfaith cooperation at many institutions, including the University of Chicago, Princeton Theological Seminary, Northwestern University, and Dominican University in Illinois, where he was the Lund-Gill Chair. Patel delivered the Greeley Lecture at Harvard University Divinity School and a series of lectures at Union Theological Seminary, where he served as a visiting distinguished guest lecturer during the 2012–2013 academic year.

Cassie Meyer

Interfaith Youth Core

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