College Ministries and the Luther Diversity Center Launch Interfaith Initiative
The visit of Eboo Patel, founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, served as the beginning of Luther’s “2009-10 Interfaith Initiative”, a joint effort of College Ministries and the Luther Diversity Center. The Interfaith Initiative seeks to help Luther College live out its mission of striving to be a “community where students, faculty, and staff are enlivened and transformed by encounters with one another, by the exchange of ideas, and by the life of faith and learning”.
The Interfaith Initiative has two main components; the first is ongoing work with Patel’s Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC). IFYC’s vision is to help create a world “in which people from different religious backgrounds come together to create understanding and respect by serving their communities.” Two IFYC staff members accompanied Patel in his visit to Luther; they are now providing ongoing support as we seek to nurture an environment where the diversity of faith perspectives are respected and engaged for the sake of the common good. Pr. Amy Zalk Larson and eight Luther students will travel to the IFYC Conference “Leadership on a Religious Diverse World”, Oct, 25-27 in Chicago. Three of the students: Winda Rompass, Manu Ramkumar and Matt Lind, are recipients of highly competitive IFYC conference scholarships. The other students received scholarships funded by the student congregation, Student Senate and College Ministries.
College Ministries and the Luther Diversity Center also selected a group of twelve students to be involved in an interfaith 
dialogue experience called JourneyConversations. The JourneyConversations group is facilitated by Luther’s new Interfaith Coordinator, Sandhya Caton. Participants of diverse faith traditions have the opportunity to share about their own faith journeys and to listen deeply as others share about their experiences. A new group will be formed in the spring.
The JourneyConversations group meets in the newly refurbished Melanchthon Interfaith Room, upstairs in the Center for Faith and Life. The Melanchthon room has been transformed from a classroom into a welcoming, comfortable space for interfaith dialogue and for College Ministries’ groups to hold meetings. It is also being used for Zen Buddhist Meditation every Tuesday evening and for Muslim prayer on Friday afternoons.
