ucmadmin Better Together, Domestic Poverty and Food Insecurity, Profiles in Radical Hospitality, White House Interfaith Service Challenge

Profiles in Radical Hospitality

Hi all!  Shea here.  *Waving.*  This week’s post is a continuation of our Profiles in Radical Hospitality written by Alice Ragland, an OU student and another regular volunteer at UCM’s Free Meal’s program. 

– – – – –
The world is a circle
Continuous and connective;
The whole thing will malfunction
If one part is ineffective.
Nobody can eat
If somebody is famished;
No justice can exist
If in one place it has vanished.
No one can be warm
If somebody is cold;
Nothing can glitter
If ALL of it is not gold.
If one school is in shambles,
Another cannot be effective;
If the top is corrupt,
The whole structure is defective.
No river can be clean
If one is polluted;
These problems must be solved,
They cannot be diluted.
The world is not a series of disconnected points
But a continuous place, where each of its joints
Connects with another, no matter how far apart.
What appears at the end re-appears at the start.
For the world is a circle,
 Continuous and connective.
The whole thing will malfunction
If one part is ineffective.
–Alice Ragland
ucmadmin Better Together, Domestic Poverty and Food Insecurity, Profiles in Radical Hospitality, White House Interfaith Service Challenge

Profiles in Radical Hospitality

Hi there!  Shea here.  *Waving.*  As part of our Better Together at OU blog, we’re going to be posting pieces written by folks who spend time at UCM programming related to the White House Interfaith Challenge.  UCM runs on the idea of Radical Hospitality, which means we accept everyone who walks through our doors no questions asked.  In large part because of the vibe this creates there’s lots of interesting people at UCM involved in lots of interesting things.  I thought you might like to meet some of them and learn about their views of UCM, faith, life, and other stuff.  I’ve been asking around for blog posts, so here’s the first one I received.  Today’s post is by Kavin Shah, an OU student and regular volunteer at Thursday Supper and Saturday Lunch and participant at Interfaith Impact.

– – – – – 

Hello. My name is Kavin Shah and I am a lifetime member of the Clean Plate Club. This is my first year being involved with UCM and I’ve already had some of the best times of my 4 years here. I love the opportunities it provides for me to become a bigger part of what I now define as my community. Athens is no longer just a transient residence where my college is, it has become a home.  I am currently a senior studying psychology and women’s studies at OU and there is no better place where I can apply what I learn in school to form closer relationships with my community members than at UCM. Sometimes I like to clean and wash dishes but my favorite duties so far include: taking Wanda home, hugging Richard, Gerry’s stories, and listening to Frances say the word “honey”. I also enjoy pulling knotweed, petting dogs, and interfaith impact. I plan on spending as much time here as I can so if you haven’t been by this year come say hi Thursday 5:30 or Saturday 1:00 and we can share a meal!

Shalom. 

-Kavin.
ucmadmin Better Together, Civil Disobedience, Community Organizing, Human Rights, Interfaith, Occupy OU, Occupy Wall Street, Religion, Religious Identity

Why I Am Occupying

Hi again!  Shea here.  *Waving.*

United Campus Ministries has been incredibly supportive of the Occupy Ohio University movement.  After all, when a group of students works with administration to hold a non-violent, substance free, radically inclusive, social justice demonstration for the purpose of educating college students about civil disobedience, what’s there to say besides “Awe-some!”?

On that note, I thought it would be pertinent to share why I am occupying.  I have a lovely post written by a frequent volunteer at UCM’s Free Meals Program, but I thought perhaps talking about Occupy this week would be timely.  But keep in mind, this is personal.  I’m not speaking for anyone else, for the occupy movement here or anywhere else, or for UCM.  I’m Shea and I’m speaking for me, as someone who values humans and religion and things like mountains and love.  And it’s a bit long, for exactly the same reason it’s a bit personal.

So, I am occupying because basic human rights are being violated.  Even here, even now, even though we’ve seen human rights violated before and been sickened by what we’ve seen.  And these human rights are beyond basic, or at least the way I think about them is.  They include the right to be safe.  The right to have a place to live that is conducive to healthy human life.  These human rights, in my view, include the right to be not hungry.  The right to love and be loved.  The right to be educated.  To live without fear of oppression based on power binaries and differences.  The right to religious diversity and freedom of expression.  And because the UN says it’s so, and because I respect the UN, the right to internet access.
I don’t think these rights comprise an especially large request.  I am not occupying, after all, in demand of diamonds or high-quality cowboy boots (the prices on these things are outrageous, for the non-Appalachians in my midst).  I am not occupying in demand that everybody love everybody or because I demand personal beliefs be sacrificed in order to create a more human-friendly world.  I am occupying because now, in this place, people don’t always have access to very basic human needs.  When we’re discussing Psychology, and maybe it’s a good idea to visit Psychology-World right about now, people need their basic needs met in order to advance to higher levels of being.  When folks don’t feel safe, when they don’t have a place to live that is conducive to healthy human life or enough food to eat, they most generally lack the ability to advance into higher, more actualized states of being.  And because everyone secretly wants to be actualized, I occupy.
I occupy because I am an Appalachian woman and these hills, this loam under your muddy rain boots, have been disrespected more ways than an 18th century sailor knew how to semantically disvalue a woman.  Coal mining is dangerous work, for people and for mountains.  Now entire mountain tops are being removed and, frankly, every time one of these mountains loses its top my heart breaks.  It’s not ok to take a mountain’s top.  Mountains are bigger than we are, they’re important, and I think we’re being just a bit greedy by taking the tops of very old mountains with no intention of returning them.  Didn’t our mother’s teach us manners?  Or, for those folks not lucky enough to have good mothers, don’t you know they were supposed to?  And living around these mountains are PEOPLE.  Bad stuff cycles unless we choose to actively break cycles of bad stuff.  Because Appalachian children, and everyone else who lives in this region, have faced what I would view to be basic human rights violations, I occupy.
I occupy because I think people deserve to have rule over their lives.   To love and be loved.  This includes the right to marry whomever one loves, so long as the relationship is healthy (I’m not occupying in the name of non-healthiness, after all).  This also includes the right to raise children in a functional household, the right to be a child who feels safe at home, and the right to speak whatever language in that home one feels comfortable speaking without fear of being devalued for speaking that language.  I think both women and men should have the right to decide when they want children and access to birth control and I strongly feel that women should have access to medically safe abortions.  I think people deserve healthcare—mental and physical—that is accessible and which comes without stigma.  To copy and paste this paragraph’s thesis sentence, because I think it works well here as well, I occupy because I think people deserve to have rule over their lives.  
I’m occupying because these things are not happening.  Because there’s been a power binary created that’s a bit like a see-saw: a few folks are up in the air while the rest of us, and we’re a very worthwhile rest of us, are in the economic mud.  I like mud as much as the next gal but this version of living—whether we blame corporations, taxes, or whatever political party we are not—isn’t ok with me.  I think people deserve these basic rights, and I don’t think we live in a society that provides individuals with the ability to access these rights.  And no matter whose fault that is, it’s not acceptable. 
I’m not naive.  I don’t think the world is a perfect place and I don’t think that any turn of events or handful of decades could dramatically re-fashion human life in America to be hunky-dory for every single person in this nation.  I don’t believe in utopia.  Like Ursula K. Le Guin, I believe we all have our dark sides, and since society was fashioned by humans with dark sides it has a dark side as well.  But I believe that the way we treat the least among us—the poor, the disempowered and those with unequal rights—is a gauge of our society, and I think that perhaps our society isn’t acing reality right now.  I think our society is capable of doing better.

This is why I occupy.

Peace,

–Shea

ucmadmin Better Together, Community Organizing, Interfaith, International Water Security, Religion, Religious Identity, White House Interfaith Service Challenge

No Label Required

Today’s post is from Rachel Hyden, Campus Organizer for Ohio University’s Better Together Campaign. 

For the majority of my life I have had no religious identity. As a child my parents never took me to church, and through high school I never much spoke of religion. It wasn’t until college that I really started questioning my beliefs­– not only the basic questions like where I came from, what my purpose is, and if there is a God, but questioning where I fit in. I knew I was a moral person- I believed in equity, I believed in peace, and I believed in doing what was best for this planet and the people on it. But I didn’t know where I fit in. Was there a religious community out there for somebody like me?  Someone who doesn’t identify with a religion, but instead lives a life based on the common morals and ethics you would find in most religious codes? What do you call somebody like me?
What I’ve come to realize through my interfaith organizing is this­– I don’t need a label to fit in. My morals and my values are my religion, and I am finally comfortable with the lack of title. It wasn’t easy getting to this point­– for so long I craved to believe in a recognized religion. But I don’t need the label to fit into this community, this interfaith community. And here at Ohio University, this interfaith community is really starting to grow.
On September 11, over 350 OU and Athens community members gathered for an Interfaith Peace Walk. With so many faith traditions represented, it was utterly breathtaking to see the diversity intertwining through the crowd. Labels and no labels, we were a community walking as one. And despite our differences, we stood side by side for our shared belief in peace. There are few words that can truly describe the moment when I felt the sense of belonging that I had been yearning for. It was incredible.
While the Peace Walk was a moment that will stay with me for a lifetime, I know there are many more to come. Better Together at Ohio University will be working this year to raise $5,000 to build a well in a developing nation. If that goal is reached and we can successfully give a community access to clean and safe drinking water, I know that moment will change me forever. With just one year of interfaith organizing, we have the potential to save someone’s life. Imagine what we could do with ten?
ucmadmin Better Together, Domestic Poverty and Food Insecurity, Interfaith, International Water Security, White House Interfaith Service Challenge

The White House Interfaith Challenge

Hi!  *Waving.*  My name is Shea Daniels.  Welcome to the Better Together at Ohio University Blog!  This week I’d like to tell you about the White House Interfaith Challenge, mostly because I’m really really excited about it.  Hopefully by the end of this post you’ll be excited about it, too!

The White House Interfaith Challenge is a super-cool initiative that Ohio University is part of.  It’s a service based challenge focused on interfaith cooperation.  Let’s break those sentences down a little bit further, because it seems to me that there’s two really important ideas being communicated, and I want to make sure you end up just as excited about them as I am.

Idea 1: The White House Interfaith Challenge is service based.  Colleges who are part of the challenge, like Ohio University in Athens, choose two issues to focus that service around, one domestic and one international.  Here at Ohio University we’ve chosen Domestic Poverty and Food Insecurity (this is what I’m working on) as well as International Water Security (initiative run by Rachel Hyden).  Students and community members are banning together to serve hot, yummy, healthy free meals twice a week (domestic poverty / food insecurity) while raising money to build at least one well in Africa (international water security).  And we’re having a blast!

Idea 2: This is an Interfaith challenge.  What does Interfaith mean?  Semantically, let’s visit our good friend Webster.  According to Webster, Interfaith means “involving persons of different religious faiths.”  This is a really good definition but I would like to challenge Mr. Webster on one point…Interfaith work is for folks of all and no faith traditions, so folks who are atheists, agnostic, or don’t know what they are, are as welcome as folks who are Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, or Wiccan.  Lots of people involved in our Interfaith challenge don’t claim any religious tradition.  Lots of people involved in our Interfaith challenge are devout followers of a religion.  And we’re all working together, because that’s the point.  Even if we don’t agree on everything we agree it is more productive to build a well in Africa than to argue about religious differences.

So, that’s the White House Interfaith Service Challenge in a nutshell.  Interested in getting involved?  Yay!  Email  Rachel at rh148407@ohio.edu for more informational about the International Water Security initiative, or if you want to join our Steering Committee.  If you’re interested in Domestic Poverty and Food Insecurity you can email me, Shea, at ss298506@ohio.edu, or just show up at UCM’s Free Meals Program (Thursday 5:30, Saturday 1PM). 

So, once again, I’m Shea.  *Waving.*  Welcome to Better Together at Ohio University’s blog.  Stay tuned in coming weeks for all kinds of interesting posts from all kinds of people.  We’ll be talking about Interfaith work, about the service we’re doing, and about what it means to us.  Because we’re pretty sure that we’re better together than we are divided, and we’re pretty sure we can positively impact the world through the service we’re doing.

ucmadmin UCM Athens

Better Together

So, we’re planning this Interfaith Peace Walk for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. And we send out a press release, and a reporter contacts me and says he’s doing a story about the declining level of compassion and unity in the years since 9/11 brought us all together, and can he ask me a couple of questions? Here’s how the exchange went:

Him: Why does it take a tragedy to bring us all together?

Me: We humans are creatures of compassion. We see another’s suffering, we recognize it as in some sense our own, and we respond with kindness, concern, respect, and generosity. This is built into us, it’s how we are able to do community. But most of the time we’re distracted from our common humanity—we feel separate, we think our suffering is special, we don’t consider the suffering of others legitimate. Until a tragedy strikes that we all in some way experience—through news coverage, through personally feeling the tragedy’s impact or knowing someone who feels it, whatever. In the days following 9/11 we recognized each other as suffering the same pain, fear, and loss, and our compassion took over. In time we went back to feeling separate and not well understood, and we returned to feeling alienated from each other. We forgot that common thread that unites us.

Him: What happened to all that unity [we felt in the days following the attacks?

Me: Well, see above. But there’s more. Because the stories we hear and see most often are about difference, division, and conflict—how Republicans disagree with Democrats, how Muslims hate Christians or Jews, how the poor resent the rich, how the rich think the poor want a free ride, and on and on. Stories of unity, of bridge-building across persistent divisions, don’t get the same kind of attention—even though they’re happening every day, in communities all over the country. Take our Interfaith Peace Walk—and Better Together, the year-long interfaith community building campaign of which the walk is a part. The walk and the campaign tell a story of all kinds of people working together to make the campus and the community better–and judging by the numbers and enthusiasm of the people who want to participate, it’s a compelling story. But I’d be very surprised if we make the cover of Newsweek.
 
I liked my answers, so I thought I’d share them with you. If you like them, you should think about getting involved with our Better Together campaign at Ohio University. This is our year.


-Rev Evan Young

ucmadmin UCM Athens

Reflections of a UCM Intern

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Rachel Hyden, I’m a senior at Ohio University studying public relations and I’m the PR intern for United Campus Ministry. If you follow UCM on Facebook or Twitter, you probably see my updates, and if you walk through campus and see flyers for events, well, those are mine too. My duty is to make UCM visible to the public so all of the Athens and Ohio University community will know just how hard UCM works for spiritual growth, social justice and community service.
Recently UCM has partnered with Ohio University to take on President Obama’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, a nation-wide call of action to advance interfaith cooperation and community service in higher education. The campaign will focus on organizing around the issues of water security and poverty, and I am fortunate enough to be involved as a student leader in charge of water security.
Because I am in a leadership position, I, along with UCM’s Campus Minister Evan Young, will be attending the Interfaith Leadership Institute (ILI) in Washington D.C. from July 25 to July 28. The Institute is sponsored by Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit organization supporting religious pluralism on campuses across the country. The purpose of the ILI is to equip students, staff and faculty to lead an interfaith movement on their universities campus. Since Ohio University is committing a year to interfaith service, this Leadership Institute will prepare me to help lead this movement.
            As I said before, my position in the campus challenge is as a student leader for water security. I am very enthusiastic when it comes to clean water advocacy, and am genuinely excited that I was chosen for this role in the campaign. I’ll be putting my passion into action by organizing stream cleanups in Southeast Ohio as well as educational events focused on the importance of clean water. A good portion of my agenda for the challenge will be focused on horizontal hydraulic fracturing, a method of oil and gas drilling that can contaminate ground water, essentially ruining our right to clean drinking water.
            My interest in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, stems from my work as a Clean Water Fellow with the Ohio Sierra Club. I was awarded the fellowship in mid May and have been working on the issue ever since. I do quite a lot of research and even more educational advocacy. I find it highly important that this community be properly informed of the dangers this method of drilling poses, and have made it my utmost priority as a Clean Water Fellow to do my very best at securing clean water for my community.
I am so thankful that UCM has been open to my work with the Sierra Club and that I’ve been given this opportunity to lead a movement according to my passion for water security. Sometimes I can’t believe how things have turned out, just a year ago I had no idea what I was doing with my life, but now, having had experience working for social justice and water security, I know I have found where I truly belong. 

ucmadmin UCM Athens

UCM Social Justice Awards!

The Board of Directors of United Campus Ministry is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2011 UCM Social Justice Awards! Join us in a ceremony and celebration of their activism and efforts to promote peace and justice in our community and beyond.

Special music by Divine Covering OU gospel choir. Refreshments will be provided and the event is free and open to all!

Congratulations to our 2011 recipients:

Appalachian Peace and Justice Network for conflict resolution and alternatives to military service education in public schools.

Future Women of Appalachia, an OU student group, for empowering girls and young women in Appalachia.

Good Earth Farm for sustainable agriculture and food security.

Elisa Young for anti-coal and environmental justice activism.

And Bill Sams (posthumous) for his commitment to workers’ rights.

The Kuhre Griesinger Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to an individual or organization that has received at least one UCM Social Justice Award and demonstrates a high level of sustained social justice activism. This years award goes to Dr. Francine Childs for a lifetime of advocacy and activism in civil rights, nonviolent social change, women and children, and education.

ucmadmin UCM Athens

To Celebrate or to Weep?

Osama bin Laden is dead. Shot in the head by Americans during a raid on the house where he was staying in Pakistan. And I’m challenged by my faith.

My own Unitarian Universalist tradition embraces the inherent worth and dignity of every person. And teaches justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. 


I feel these convictions in my heart, and yet I don’t know where in my heart to find compassion for this man; I don’t know what justice would look like given what he did; I struggle to see the worth in a life spent sowing hatred and plotting destruction.

The Christian tradition in which my own is rooted counsels the believer to “love your enemy, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5). 

It’s no great reach for me to pray for the souls and the families of those who died in the attacks this man planned, and in the compassionate and heroic response to those attacks. I suspect that hating him and the others who executed his plans is beyond me—but I’m not sure it should be, and I’m a little embarrassed not to find that hatred in my heart. On the other hand, I’m not sure I can find my way all the way to loving him.

The Jewish tradition from which Christianity springs says, “Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble” (Proverbs 24). And at the core of that tradition, in the Ten Commandments, we are told, “You shall not kill.”

I have never believed that I would be able, in a life-or-death situation, to kill another person. But I have never been in such a situation. And I can love and extend compassion toward those who, face to face with him, found it in them to kill Osama bin Laden.

How then to respond to this event? I can imagine weeping–in sadness, and in relief. Sadness because any death we deal out to any one of us, no matter who, diminishes us all; relief because the specter of fear and harm and mayhem bin Laden personified has been lifted from us all. I can imagine prayer—because a soul in the kind of turmoil this event has produced must give voice to its anguish, must seek solace, must frame in words its yearning for understanding and guidance and order. And I can imagine asking forgiveness–for bin Laden and for all who prayed for his death; for President Obama who bears the burden of having ordered him killed; for our soldiers who faithfully carried out those orders; for the families of his victims who yearned for revenge; and for all of us who, time after time, lash out in fear and anger when we are hurt, though we know the better course is compassion. I can’t imagine cheering, or celebrating, or pumping my fist or waving a flag.

I understand that as flawed and fallen humans we sometimes feel inevitably compelled to take the life of another. And I understand that the turmoil produced by that compulsion might move us to justify our actions, to proclaim our right to vengeance, to take it upon ourselves to decide what is justice and to mete that out with a lordly hand. But I believe that at such times the best in us is that piece that humbly asks forgiveness for transgressing a divine law we revere but cannot fully embrace. Can we accept that we felt we had to do this, that it goes against what we believe, and that our lot is to live with the consequences? That would be a hopeful sign indeed.

-Rev. Evan Young
ucmadmin UCM Athens

Interfaith Cooperation is a Must at Ohio University

Letter to The Post and The Athens News

The White House launched an Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge on March 17. President Obama’s address challenged college students and administrators to promote religious pluralism through interfaith service projects on their campuses.

The president cited Ohio University’s interfaith campaign to combat water pollution as an example of work already happening at universities that he hopes to replicate next year at other universities across the country.

OU’s Interfaith Steering Committee, in partnership with the local nonprofit United Campus Ministry, chose to combat the issue of water pollution at the beginning of this year because we believe that access to clean water is a fundamental human right.

In March, we raised a total of $250 for LifeStraws personal water filters to be sent to Haiti, providing about 50 Haitians with clean water for one year.
As part of my yearlong fellowship with the Interfaith Youth Core, I have worked with students who identify with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Unitarian Universalism.

I have been inspired and deeply moved by their determination to help those impacted by the earthquake in Haiti and to clean up our local streams. Through conversations with each of these students, I have seen that they, like me, draw their inspiration to serve others from their various faith traditions.
It is more important than ever for students to demand religious pluralism and participate in interfaith service projects at OU and at other campuses throughout the nation.

We have heard the voices of intolerance rise in recent months in cases such as the Ground Zero mosque controversy and the shooting of two elderly Sikh men in California in early March.

It is time for us to raise our voices and show the world that those from diverse faith backgrounds can and must work together to promote the common good.
I, along with the rest of the Interfaith Steering Committee, would like to invite you to join us in this effort.

On April 16, we will be completing a stream cleanup with the local nonprofit Rural Action to remediate acid mine drainage practices that have damaged Monday Creek, located in the northwestern part of Athens County.

On April 27, we will be hosting a Better Together Reception to celebrate our work and present opportunities to get involved in the campaign next year. These events are free and open to students of all or no faith traditions. Contact gk184406@ohiou.edu for more information.

This can be our moment. Our work has inspired the president of the United States to show his support for interfaith action. Help us prove we’re better together.

Guru Amrit Khalsa is a senior at Ohio University majoring in journalism. She is completing an intensive yearlong fellowship with the Interfaith Youth Core, an international nonprofit organization that builds mutual respect and pluralism among young people from different religious traditions by empowering them to work together to serve others.