Faith in Chicago

I returned home last night from a trip to Chicago's Ebenezer Lutheran Church, where I presented a chapter from Faith about how, as a seventeen-year-old, I wanted to be a Catholic priest. My parents talked me out of it: "It's such a lonely life," they said. That was all it took.

I was warmly received at Ebenezer, to say the least. The church itself is labyrinthine, and a different parishioner led me from place to place to place. (That I mentioned this hospitality made the pastor, Rev. Carla Thompson Powell, very pleased.) Worship was led by a jazz band. The first lesson was read in Swahili. The church, like mine, welcomes believers of all stripes: young, old, black, white, gay, straight. Etc. Etc. Many thanks to them for the invitation and for trying to claim me as one of their own. For my part, I responded to a question about my ambivalence regarding Catholicism by once again quoting Karen Armstrong, calling myself a "Freelance Monotheist." Both Peter and I look forward to returning to Ebenezer at the end of January.

Before leaving Monday I had breakfast with Eboo Patel, whose book Acts of Faith chronicles his growth as a moderate Muslim and his work as founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, which is what it seems to be by the name -- an organization that brings young people of different faiths together to organize and engage in service projects. For IFYC, as for me an Peter, belief itself seems irrelevant; what matters is practice. Eboo recently wrote about us at the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" blog. He gets to the heart of our book, and the heart of the conversation he and I had yesterday, with this: "Most of us understand faith as a conversation with God, but it is also very much a conversation with others – and in a world where people from different backgrounds are in more frequent and intense interaction than ever before, it is often a conversation between people of different faiths."

Thank you, Chicago.