Faith in Diversity Newsletter - 6.1.25 - Remembering the UNF Interfaith Center - Part II

I decided to change the order of free newsletters - instead of next week, this week is a free newsletter, continuing the narrative from last week. The rest of June will be for paid subscribers.

The faces of the UNF’s Interfaith Center’s text study have remained in my life. Fellow facilitator Kan Ibraev became a dear friend and our families now celebrate Ramadan together each year. Kalilah Jamall, a Jacksonville native raised by Muslim parents but who identified as agnostic, was a star student who would go on to be one of my star employees when I led the Interfaith Center years later. A number of the students returned during my tenure, either still as students or as facilitators and alumni exemplars. I am grateful for how they treated me as part of the family before I was staff, but for that first generation, their real mentors were coordinator Rachael McNeal and Director Tarah Trueblood.

Tarah was not the first Director of the UNF Interfaith Center, but she came in early and her tenure defined not just that first half life of the IFC but its whole lifespan. Tarah earned law and divinity degrees and had a background in campus ministry. She brought with her a commitment to community Interfaith engagement, and so it was that we began to work together. 

After several years of helping my friend Rachael with the Interfaith Text Studies, Tarah pulled me into a project with a local board known as the Atlantic Institute of Jacksonville. A national brand connected to the Fethullah Gulen’s Hizmet movement, this local board had chosen to expand from its Turkish Muslim roots to a more Interfaith mission. For their upcoming annual dinner, featuring legendary documentarian Ken Burns, they needed someone to coordinate their college student essay contest. Tarah, who was the chair, knew me from the Center and recruited me for the job. Thus I was introduced to movers and shakers in the Jacksonville Interfaith community whom I had only known from a distance up to that point. This included Dr. Parvez Ahmed, who was a professor at UNF and frequently supported Interfaith Center events. He had a prominent and sometimes controversial profile as a Muslim spokesperson in Jacksonville. He helped me with my research on Muslim youth growing up in the South and would go on to welcome me into community Interfaith work.

Another direction of connection for the Center was on campus with ministries. It had evolved out of a campus ministry office, with supportive chaplains, and those individuals and organizations remained a backbone. One such example was the Episcopal Campus Ministry. When Rev. Amy Slater took over the Osprey Episcopalians and was looking to make a big Interfaith swing, Tarah told her: I know a guy. Together, we won a $100,000 grant proposal for what became the Pilgrim Bridge, a program for Christian students to engage in Interfaith leadership. The Interfaith Center supported this initiative, with several of the student participants coming from their ranks. They co-hosted events and gave us space to hold them, which enriched both programs. 

During this time, I had started a job in youth and young adult ministry at the Episcopal Church where Rev. Slater worked. I was two years in when the Interfaith Center lead position became open. It was now an Associate Director position within the Department of Diversity Initiatives; the title and salary demotion was not as attractive, but the intersectionality of diversity work was. In the end, I weighed everything and decided…not to apply for the job. 

And the next day my supervisor at church took me to lunch to inform me that my position was being eliminated in a little over 6 months. 

Talk about timing! I applied to the Interfaith Center that night. And eventually, after the university’s interminably long application process, I got the job.

—-

My tenure leading the Interfaith Center was marked by continuity and new partnerships. It was also under two years before I had to figure it out in light of a global pandemic.

The Center continued to be essentially a chapter of the Interfaith Youth Core, defined by student leadership, religious inclusion, formal training, storytelling and dialogue, and maintaining a service mindset, whether in the community or on campus. Like student leaders before them, we got them trained up at Interfaith Youth Core’s then Interfaith America’s leadership institute.  Tarah, Rachael, and their student established this successful pattern, and I was happy to continue the tradition.

The problem was, Tarah and Rachael had been gone for months and years by the time I started and despite some faithful staff members, the Center had lost momentum with student leadership. So I built up a new generation of students from scratch, but using the tried and true methods used before. And they worked again! Within a year, I had around 5 students showing up of their own volition to plan, lead and volunteer at Interfaith Center events. By 2021, despite the disaster of the pandemic, perhaps in part because students were looking for meaningful community and work in that time, our student leadership had ballooned to over 20. Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Agnostic, Spiritual, Pagan, and more religious, spiritual and non-religious identities were represented, because they felt welcome, as well as a range of ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, and various other forms of diversity. As before, Evangelical students engaged as well, which might defy stereotypes, due to committed campus ministries and the Center’s ethos of full inclusion. 

One new partnership I was able to develop was with the academic Religious Studies program. Sometimes Interfaith and Religious Studies can relate with some tension due to practitioners of either lacking trust for the other. Interfaith is too subjective. Religious studies objectifies religion and religious subjects. Interfaith is not critical. Religious studies is just an ethically absent, navel-gazing head-game. Interfaith encroaches where it should not, overstepping on the terrain of religious studies. This last concern, among others, was felt at UNF, where Interfaith Center and Religious Studies leadership had not trusted each other. I was able to turn this around almost immediately. One reason was my advanced degree in religious studies. Another was having a relationship with the lead professor, who had advised me when I was a student. She also knew I had an advanced degree in the field. And, finally, I had a fine tuned sense of where Interfaith and religious studies could work together respectfully, in a mutually beneficial way, and how they could remain their own fields with different methods too. After several years, due to this relationship, we were able to found the UNF Religious Literacy Conference, bringing forward the best of both fields. 

I have written extensively on this newsletter about the period when the Interfaith Center came under attack, alongside the other UNF diversity centers, from the Governor and Republican legislature of Florida. That is a period I will continue to chronicle in various ways, but with these newsletters, and this project, it is gratifying to remember the beautiful years and work and people of the UNF Interfaith Center.

Paid subscribers can visit this newsletter on the website to add comments! I am always interested to hear what you think and discuss further.

For any feedback, reach out to me by email at: faithindiversityproject@gmail.com

Thank you for subscribing and see you next time! ~ Matt