My Town Is a Living Laboratory of Pluralism

Rabbi Joseph Meszler

In my small town of Sharon, Mass., there is a great deal of love, a good dose of hatred, and a lot of ambivalence. It is emotionally exhausting keeping up.

In the past year, our town's different synagogues, churches and prominent mosque have come together to collect food for a food pantry on Thanksgiving, stuff backpacks for poor children on MLK Day, share music in an interfaith concert and pray for victims of gun violence. We have also had a brick thrown through a church window with anti-Semitc graffiti because of the church's pro-Zionist stance, and Rev. Pat Robertson came to town to slander the Quran as "a book of hate." And then there are people who just want to be left alone and don't want to get involved.

Eboo Patel explores religious pluralism

Manya A. Brachear

Honor religious freedom by respecting the red, white and blue, says Patel

Eboo Patel (Photo: Armando
L. Sanchez, Chicago Tribune)

Eboo Patel is an idealist. A hopeless romantic. A dreamer. The Chicago-based founder of the Interfaith Youth Core and one of President Barack Obama's faith advisers doesn't believe people of different faiths should just all get along. They should work together. But there's another attribute that has grounded Patel's optimism and led him to develop one of the nation's leading non-profits devoted to interfaith cooperation. Eboo Patel is a patriot. If pairing a so-called “foreign” name with the concept of American loyalty makes some bigots cringe, Patel's latest book will make them cringe cover to cover. In “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice and the Promise of America,” Patel confronts the challenges of living up to America's high ideals, takes on the bigots and explains how he briefly lost hope for his cause, only to find it once again.