Lent 2011 Speaker Series
Life Without Borders: Reflections on  Compassion, Forgiveness, Justice, and Communion

Final Session!

Wednesday, April 13

7 – 8:30 P.M.

Free Will Donation

Wednesday, April 13
Eboo Patel

Founder and President of the InterFaith Youth Core, Eboo Patel works to advance the vision that religion is a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. He is inspired to build this bridge by his faith as a Muslim, his Indian heritage, and his American citizenship.

Eboo Patel was appointed by President Obama to the Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and serves on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Author of the award-winning book Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, Eboo is also a regular contributor to the Washington Post, National Public Radio and CNN.

He is a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship.

The big idea for IFYC came to Eboo Patel in 1998 when he was at an interfaith conference at Stanford University. He and a small group of his peers realized they were the only young people at the conference, and they started asking each other two questions. Why do so many stories about religion these days feature young people fighting in the name of God? Why isn’t there a huge movement of young people from different faiths working together to apply the core value of all faiths – service to others? The answer came to them in a moment of inspiration: build an interfaith youth movement using service as the bridge.

As a graduate student at Oxford University, Eboo helped organize interfaith youth service projects in South Africa, India, and Sri Lanka. He returned to Chicago in 2001 and worked to launch the idea in the US with a focus on student leaders and college campuses. IFYC was incorporated in 2002 with a $35,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and one staff person.

Today, IFYC has an annual operating budget upwards of $4 million and enough staff to field several kickball teams. They’ve worked on five continents and over 200 college and university campuses, trained thousands in interfaith leadership, and reached millions through the media.

We are delighted to have Eboo Patel join us and look forward to his reflections on what it could mean to live our lives honoring all our religious differences and yet celebrating our global kinship in a community without borders.