Holly Ulmer, a chaplain with the United Campus Ministry, leads a discussion at the interfaith community workshop hosted by the Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy and the Memorial Chapel in Stamp Student Union on Tuesday, Oct. 27.
Zhe “Judy” Xu, a first-year finance graduate student at the University of Maryland, grew up in China and said she was discouraged from practicing a religion.
But now, Xu said she is thinking of becoming a Christian, despite her upbringing, after one Christian group offered to give her a ride to her apartment after she came to this university, and also invited her to a service.
“I used to research several religions in China, and I think it’s good to have a faith in our life,” Xu said. “Now I want to learn something from other faiths to see if they are better.”
Xu was one of about 20 students who gathered for an interfaith community workshop Tuesday night hosted by the Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy and the Memorial Chapel. Gathering in Stamp Student Union, the students and representatives from religious organizations came together to discuss building a stronger sense of community across faiths.
“[The event] came out of just a lot of different conversations about trying to build more of a community between people of different faiths or no faith or just people who are interested in finding out their spirituality and what that means,” said event organizer Jennifer Olson, an international education policy graduate student and coordinator for interfaith programs and spiritual diversity with MICA and the chapel.
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Three workshop facilitators moderated a large group discussion about interfaith topics and later split the group into smaller sections to give everyone a chance to speak.
Holly Ulmer, a chaplain with the United Campus Ministry, served as one facilitator for the event and guided attendees in discussions about how they identify themselves, what they know about where different religions worship and what they would change about how religion is handled on the campus.
“My hopes are that students will find some new friends across different religious, spiritual and secular identity groups,” Ulmer said. “It’s wonderful for students to come together on campus and to collaborate and to have dialogues about interfaith interests and concerns.”
Some students said they had never been exposed to religions other than their own, and came to learn about what other people practice.
Lames Alkebsi, a freshman architecture major and international student who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, said she has never been around several faiths and wanted a chance to be introduced to them.
“Coming from a very strict country like Saudi Arabia, I’ve never been exposed to other religions, other faiths,” Alkebsi said.
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Jeremy Felder, a junior computer engineering major, came to learn about “different faiths on campus and religion in general and spirituality on campus.”
In addition to having small group discussions, students were asked to draw a map that showed how they viewed the placement of different sites of worship around the campus. Facilitators also asked them to include places they felt were safe or unsafe for religious groups.
Felder said he was surprised by the number of religious opportunities present on the campus.
“There are just a lot of cool opportunities on campus that I don’t think people know about, and that’s unfortunate because for somebody looking for their religion on campus, it’s kind of hard to find all of them,” Felder said.
But the goal of the event and its activities was to demonstrate this presence on the campus, and allow others to understand it, Olson said.
“I feel very happy that this is a campus that encourages so many faiths, that all the faiths are equal; they are friendly between each other,” Xu said.
