Peace, love and difficult conversations
The Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life has demonstrated a commitment to multifaith engagement that has been solidified with the construction of the Numen Lumen Pavilion in 2013. The building itself is a representation of our mission to provide a “safe place for spiritual growth, worldview exploration (religious and secular), and interfaith engagement.” However, our work has been met with criticism on many levels. Instead of using my breath (or in this case, my keyboard) to try and shout why our work is great and why people should listen, I would like to use this piece constructively to express how we can improve our words and actions. One of the main themes emerging in criticisms of interfaith work is that the crowd that we engage gets lumped together in a giant conglomerate of peace, love and neoliberalism.