Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, packed Memorial Chapel with people eager to hear his inspiring message: that young people are the key to building religious cooperation and interfaith leadership.
The Class of 2015 had read his memoir, Acts of Faith, over the summer and discussed it in their first-year seminars. And Patel had been the special guest at a lunchtime meeting of Colgate’s Heretics Club — an apropos venue, it turned out, for him to build campus rapport.
“Heresy is the presence of choice, and the opportunity to choose is a key feature of modernity,” he said, quoting a breadth of sources from the sociologist Peter Berger, author of The Heretical Imperative, to the poet William Blake.
“Religion is inherently relational,” Patel said. “Part of being Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, is how you relate to others. So the issue isn’t the compatibility of religious systems, it’s how the people get along on earth.”