Hashcast episode featuring Najeeba Syeed 17 min
Hosts Jason and Tuhina sit down with peacemaker, healer, and scholar, Dr. Najeeba Syeed, to talk about a whole host of topics adjacent to building the interfaith table, the difference between inter-faith and intra-faith dialogue, and what it means to recognize the pluralistic reality all around us.
Auggie Mahamed Yusuf was quoted in an Interfaith America article about his work to raise awareness and funding for basic hygiene supplies for unhoused neighbors in the Cedar-Riverside community. Many thanks to Pre-Med students, former Interfaith Scholars, and other Auggies who helped make this project a success!
In Good Faith Podcast
EP 311: Lived Religion & Peacebuilding: Najeeba Syeed 29 min
Dr. Najeeba Syeed discusses how peacebuilding and lived religion unify us and how they’re crucial to a democratic society. Najeeba Syeed is the inaugural El-Hibri endowed chair and executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg University in Minneapolis MN. She co-edited the book “Critical Approaches to Interreligious Education,” and she’s been feature in the Los Angeles Times, or NPR, PBS, and other television shows, and she lectures at major universities across the US.
Please welcome our distinguished Augsburg University 2024-25
Interfaith Institute Advancing Religious Pluralism Faculty Fellows!
Margit Berman, Department of Clinical Psychology
Kathleen Clark, Department of Nursing (Chair)
Sarah Degner Riveros, Department of Languages and Cross-Cultural Studies
Daniel Hickox-Young, Department of Physics
Brooklyn Loxtercamp, Department of Nursing
Sergio Madrid-Aranda, Department of Education
Vanessa Marr, Department of Social Work
Kao Nou Moua, Department of Social Work
We are so pleased to welcome this cohort from across academic disciplines , the cohort is led by El-Hibri Endowed Chair Najeeba Syeed and Matthew Maruggi, Chair of Religion and Philosophy Department. In addition to working on curricula in their own fields related to religious pluralism they will be supported for further training and travel of their own choice in religious pluralism. We look forward to their campus wide impact!
Written by: Najeeba Syeed, El-Hibri Endowed Chair and Executive Director, Interfaith Institute
I recently sat across a room of 500 students and faculty from around the country, gathered for the annual Interfaith America summit. My own student was in the audience. I have looked at thousands of students, across hundreds of rooms in the last 15 years of my career as a professor.
I have also had the honor of serving as a staffer to an elected official, and have mediated dozens of conflicts in many contexts. Imbued in all of these spaces, and in the most recent times, I have begun to understand how much we must think about democracy with an everyday lens. How do people express their opinions on policy, how do they organize to have their voices heard, and why is decision making often left to those who have formal power?
Where have the voices of everyday people gone? Maybe it is time to think about a model of:
Everyday democracy, coupled with the skills of care, and built on an ethic of hope.
What does it mean to be a chaplain for everyday democracy?
Listening, Humble Listening
One of the students in my interfaith scholars class last semester, Vernis Campbell, talked about learning to listen in her own words: humble listening. To set aside the ego and hear the pain of another. She captured a foundation of engagement that is often missed.
When we try to build spaces for exercising civic engagement, we should also pay attention to the barriers that people face. Some are resource driven, and some are trauma induced. Engagement in systems takes vulnerability. We open ourselves and communities to the gaze and eyes of power that may be connected not just to decisions we disagree with, but decisions that hurt us or our communities.
A chaplain for democracy listens, does not bully someone into engagement. They are curious, they walk with the person, they hear the pain and it becomes a part of the process of how one relates to everyday democracy. Humble listening, if practiced by more with access to power, does not dismiss the connection between people and policies. It opens the door to understanding how past policies injured others and also to building new ones that are inclusive, durable, effective and efficient.
I often ask people in conflict, “Who is human?”
We must open our own hearts to understand how we dehumanize others and how we are dehumanized. Policies built on dehumanization are the enemy to democracies. Let us learn to listen in a manner that humanizes everyone and builds societies predicated on common humanity. We may never reach common ground, but let us start with common humanity.
Multiply Power, not Subtract
We live in a time and space where the notion of power is a zero sum game. How can we spiritualize this discourse on power? Engage with people in ways that multiply a notion of power that is co-created?
Interdependence as the core of a chaplaincy for democracy is built on getting to our underlying interests and not just positions. We build processes and convenings not just focused on expressing the transactional, extractive modality of building power but also the collective care that people and communities seek. We build connections between communities across differences who are able to hear, see, feel and hold the other for a moment. It is often called ‘perspective-taking’, understanding a situation from the point of view of another.
I am hopeful that we can build an approach to dialogic engagement that is beyond the accumulation of power for one group, one community, and one candidate, and begin to think about chaplaincy as a model for power. An open ended conversation that seeks to empower everyone, a non judgmental open stance in the posture of the convenor and facilitator. A coaching of leaders to understand that values can be shared, but that it takes vulnerability to trust one another over time. Trusting another is not a weakness, but actually a mutual strength.
Beyond the polls
Understandably, we focus on the ballot box as the generator for democracy. It is often the case that once someone is elected the fervor for them dies down. From campaigning to governance, one loses that connection to communities and individuals slow down in their engagement with democratic processes.
One of the roles we envision for higher education is a center for exercising democratic processes and principles. How do we build institutional capacity for diverging viewpoints and long term disagreements? I’ve been very curious to see that many institutions who have an affiliation with religious communities or bodies have been spaces for conversations on ethics and values in the past year. Perhaps our chaplaincy of care and commitment to mutual flourishing means the university becomes a space to protect all students. When values related to the big questions in life are embedded in how an institution runs, in how teachers educate, in how administrators make decisions, the bottom line is a human line. Are we building curricula that ask these moral and ethical questions in ways that are inclusive of students with different religious, spiritual and non religious commitments? A concern for the humanity of our students as the guiding principle.
As we begin to think about the day after the next election, perhaps we spend less time gloating for whatever side wins, and begin to think more about how we create communities of care, resilience and everyday democracy, together.
I often ask parties in conflict, “are you in each other’s future?” When we are in conflict, it is the painful present and past we are most focused on and the future eludes us.
I am in this for the long game, a future that includes you and me. Between elections, let’s listen, build, disagree, and co-create. Many spiritual traditions draw on the notion of making decisions with the next generations at the table. Engage with your body, your community and the many who will come next, as if they are all on the line. Sometimes the way through is to open your line of vision to a future you cannot see yet; find uncommon allies and use hope as your fuel to get there.
Our futures depend on it.
Augsburg hosted its first Interfaith Spring Symposium in March 2023. The topic was “Interfaith Leadership and Healing During Times of Crisis.” El-Hibri Chair and Executive Director of the Interfaith Institute at Augsburg, Najeeba Syeed, gave the keynote lecture.
Guiding principles of trauma informed care:
“The Five Guiding Principles are; safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment. Ensuring that the physical and emotional safety of an individual is addressed is the first important step to providing Trauma-Informed Care. Next, the individual needs to know that the provider is trustworthy. Trustworthiness can be evident in the establishment and consistency of boundaries and the clarity of what is expected in regards to tasks. Additionally, the more choices an individual has and the more control they have over their service experience through a collaborative effort with service providers, the more likely the individual will participate in services and the more effective the services may be. Finally, focusing on an individual’s strengths and empowering them to build on those strengths while developing stronger coping skills provides a healthy foundation for individuals to fall back on if and when they stop receiving services.”
Grief is one of the greatest acts of love we show for our beloveds. I have spent much of my career working with communities who have experienced violence, and the stewarding of the emotional and spiritual lives of those who are left behind is a sacred act of care and witness. I’ve recently written about what it means to be a professor in times of trauma. In this essay I will reflect on doing work with students in times of trauma.
The Ones Left Standing: Guilt of Survivors
This emotional state often comes up in the work I do on campus-based engagement around spirituality and faith, and the questions raised are theological: Why was I meant to survive this tragedy? How can I continue and carry on the legacy of my beloveds *and* the spiritual lineages of those who have passed?
These questions raise spiritual and ethical considerations when working with students. It becomes important to draw on the empowerment component of trauma-informed care. We can ensure that our mental health services on campus are aware of the profound existential issues some of our students face that are related to the trauma and loss of an individual, and we can also talk about what it means to carry the responsibility of a spiritual or religious community.
What are mechanisms for students to build memories that honor the histories of their communities? What are ways they can develop agency to share the joy, teachings, wisdom and rituals they were connected to? Grief here is not just individual, it is collective. It is an act that cries out to the universe, “I am here still standing on this Earth, how do I draw on all that is precious to me to keep that presence alive in my heart and continue to build threads of knowledge so that we may not just survive, but one day, flourish?”
Communities of Compassion: Living Together, Living Separately
Very often we measure the success of interfaith engagement by how much time people spend together. This is indeed a beautiful concept and measure of our work which is grounded in human contact theory and ethics of relational enterprise. We are better when we are in dialogue.
While this is often the case, there are moments in which communities are entrenched in modes of trauma, and we need to take into account two areas of trauma-informed care. First, safety is determined by the person themselves. If they are in need of a space that is unique to them at the moment and rituals that are shepherded by their own spiritual leaders and a private environment for their care, then we must respect their needs and definitions of what is effective for them.
Drawing on this concept of self-defined safety, we can think about a collaborative process within campuses that recognizes that each community may have unique needs, and within each community there may be different grief processes. Inherent in this is developing a communal approach to program design and content. The collaborative mandate of trauma informed care beckons us to work directly with, not on behalf of, students and communities.
Perhaps it is the quiet meeting of students across divides privately before a large public event is considered that is the more effective engagement. Success should not be measured by the display or performance of how activities are done.
I share all of this because we want to avoid doing work that re-traumatizes students. How do we provide processes that are collaborative, and recognize another trauma-informed care principle, trust? Are we building collaborative based engagement before a crisis? Do we only see a student population or demographic after harm? Were we taking time to know that community before harm ensued? Are we inviting everyone to the table?
Trust takes time, it takes care, and it takes intentional, sustained, committed building. Sometimes it takes placing the ego on the side, opting out of high profile events and thinking about relationships over public recognition.
Being humble in times of trauma teaches us so much. Are we listening?
The Interfaith Institute is thrilled to welcome nationally-recognized interfaith advocate, humanist community builder and researcher, and Augsburg alum Chris Stedman ‘08 to the institute as our inaugural Research Fellow. Chris will be focusing his research on the religiously unaffiliated and religious indifference. His work is a vital contribution to understanding the current state of diverse belief systems of students in higher education and younger generations across society, particularly the widely misunderstood religiously unaffiliated population. He will be sharing his research with the larger campus community and beyond at the end of his Fellowship.
Chris Stedman is a writer, professor, and activist who teaches in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Augsburg University. He is the author of IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives (2020, with a second edition released in August 2022) and Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (2012), described in a ten-year retrospective by the Center for Religion and Media at NYU as “excellent and much-discussed.” He is also the writer and host of the podcast Unread, which was named one of the best podcasts of 2021 by the Guardian, Vulture, HuffPost, Mashable, the CBC, and others. In addition, Chris has written popular essays for outlets including the Atlantic, Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, VICE, and the Washington Post, as well as for publications like The Journal for College and Character and Interfaith Voices, and contributed essays to collections such as Everyday Humanism and Humanist Voices in Unitarian Universalism.
At Augsburg, Chris teaches on the search for meaning. He was previously a fellow at Augsburg’s Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship and served as an Interfaith Fellow with the Institute. As the Institute’s Research Fellow, Chris is currently studying the religiously unaffiliated and religious indifference, an effort for which he was also awarded a Director’s Residency at the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University. As an Augsburg student, he graduated in 2008 with a degree in Religion and minors in English and Social Work.
Previously the founding director of the Yale Humanist Community and a fellow at Yale University, he also served as a humanist chaplain at Harvard University, a content developer and trainer for Interfaith America (formerly Interfaith Youth Core), and as the founding director of State of Formation at the Journal for Inter-Religious Dialogue. In 2018, Augsburg selected Stedman for their annual First Decade Award, which recognizes alumni “who have made significant progress in their professional achievements and contributions to the community” ten years after graduating.
Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Friday, September 15 and lasts through sundown Sunday, September 17. Yom Kippur begins at sundown on Sunday, September 24 and lasts until Monday night, September 25. Lesser known holidays Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah are also part of this holiday season. Sukkot begins at sundown on Friday, September 29 and the non-work holiday lasts until sundown on Sunday, October 1. Sukkot continues (as a working holiday) until sundown on Friday, October 6. Shmini Atzeret begins that same night, Friday, October 6, and the following night begins Simchat Torah, which lasts until sundown on Sunday, October 8, both as non-work holidays. During these days, please be thoughtful of those who observe them by not scheduling meetings, conference calls, or deadlines. For teachers, please do not schedule tests, presentations, or other mandatory activities. And remember that many Jewish households host family and/or other guests for these holidays. For those who celebrate Christmas, imagine if everyone wanted something from you between the mornings of December 24th and December 26th while you had multiple things cooking, preparations to be in services, and family and friends coming over. Be thoughtful, kind, and inclusive. And greetings: “Happy New Year” is appropriate to say on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. “Have an easy/meaningful fast” is appropriate to say on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when Jews traditionally fast for 25 hours. Or to avoid mentioning fasting (which not everyone can do) you can say “Have a meaningful holiday” instead. “Happy holiday” is appropriate for Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah, and really most Jewish holidays. Thank you!!” (Credit: Ronald Weber)
Augsburg Religious Holiday Policy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bsiyBZp2sQHfuA2jUGM2cnagAlz_tb0W-TIPnlocSus/edit?usp=sharing
This was such a busy #Interfaith summer Augsburg University, at the Interfaith Institute. A peek at some of our work!
In July, we co-hosted Interfaith Institute Augsburg University, a statewide summit on hate crimes prevention with our state wide partner Minnesota Multifaith Network and our national partner Shoulder to Shoulder. We were delighted that over 50 faith, community, philanthropy, academic, and government leaders joined us. The First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Waltz opened the summit (you can see from the pics she stayed and listened to the discussion), followed by Dr. Anantanand Rambachan who set the tone, we heard from Rev Jim Bear Jacobs who invoked storytelling and reminded us interfaith spaces need a deep understanding of Native communities and histories. We were blessed to have Rev Cassandra Lawrence of Shoulder to Shoulder lead us through a mapping exercise and asset analysis of hate prevention resources.
Our director Najeeba Syeed led the group through a discussion of action steps and we were blessed to hear from Dr. Jen Kilps of Minnesota Multi-Faith Network who shared the history of recent hate crimes activities.
Out of this convening on our campus grew a renewal of ties for Augsburg to Islamic Resource Group. Imam Tamim Saidi, who gave a closing blessing, is now joining us in Augsburg classes to help increase our students’ literacy on Islam. Rabbi Adam Spilker will be enriching our students’ understanding of Judaism in our classes.
We are so thankful for all who joined us and for the new friends and allies that were made.
Our director wrote about the rural implications for rural Minnesota here based on her own research as well: https://www.augsburg.edu/interfaith/2023/07/24/reflections-on-statewide-summit-on-hate-prevention/
Our director Professor Syeed will be presenting on the issue of rural interfaith work with Dr. Jen Kilps next week for a statewide network of rural Minnesota communities. There is a hunger for this type of research across the nation.
We are excited to be enriching our classrooms with the resources we’ve discovered and will continue to build these partnerships!
