I grew up rural. That’s the important part of this story. I lived in a farming community about two hours west of Chicago. I was a Catholic; Catholicism was my received faith. Some of my friends were Catholics. The rest were from various Christian denominations. We didn’t talk about religion.

When I went to college in the suburbs, I fell away from the faith (I imagine that this happens to LOTS of college students) and continued on my way. Since I was finally in a place with a diversity of religious expression, I quickly realized that my views of other religions (especially Islam) were informed largely by my friends’ parents and their favored false information outlet: FOX News. The realization of my own ignorance pushed me to do some learning on my own…

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• List of religious events and conferences around the country.
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Hello friends,

Mung beans are about $1.19 in the bulk food aisle at Whole Foods. You can take these beans and sprout them in a Mason jar. A pound of beans will make BOATLOADS of fresh, tasty, nutritious sprouts. Good eatin’! And yes, I realize that the acronym for the Dispatch is now B.A.D.D. – it’s cuz I’m such a tough guy. :)

Well well well, it’s been a while since I’ve attempted to connect with y’all. When I last checked in, we were days away from launching the One Voice of Faith conference. It went well, and the Interfaith Youth Leadership Summit that Hafsa Arain and I put together was a success. After that, it was a mad dash through World Malaria Day, movie screenings, wrap-up meetings, training to become a ONE Campaign and Malaria No More Malaria Griot, and budget reconciliation. The budget work was difficult; I had to match up how much I actually embezzled with how much the Interfaith Youth Core thought I embezzled. JUST JOKING!

The Faiths Act Fellows reunited in Chicago at the end of May. It was great meeting up with all of my lovely friends to talk through the last year and to help design future iterations of the program. The Fellowship was an amazing experience. It’s going to be a few more months before we can “take the temperature” of the coalitions that we built in cities across the US, UK, and Canada, but the preliminary statistics show that we raised about $150,000 USD, which will be personally matched by Mr. Tony Blair. 10,000 people came to Faiths Act events, and we reached out to over 40,000 folks in three countries. Not bad for a first outing, if I do say so myself. Hafsa and I worked hard to connect interfaith activists to each other across the Bay Area. For only having eight months in which to work, I think that we affected the interfaith ecosystem quite positively.

I have delayed this Dispatch largely because I didn’t want to report to you all without being able to list my new employer (probably some hang-up of being a prideful rural lad), and I will do so now. On June 21st I joined the Ashoka Changemakers as a Community Mobilizer (I’m actually a non-benefited full-time consultant/contractor). I’m helping out with some current competitions to identify and empower social entrepreneurs, and I will soon take on competitions of my own. I’m going to work on developing an outreach plan for faith-based organizations, too. It’s all very exciting!

My girlfriend and I are keeping our eyes out for interesting humanitarian jobs both here and abroad. She’s back in central Colorado (pictures of the paradise of Crested Butte) and I’m still here in San Jose. I’m helping out around the office at Islamic Networks Group ; they’ve been kind enough to let me keep my desk space for the time being. There is also more interfaith organizing to be done in the Bay Area, and I’m doing what I can in my spare time. So we’ll see – the future looks bright!

So I’ll leave you all to your endeavors, which I would spell “endeavours” like my English friends if I wasn’t afraid of the jagged red line that Gmail puts underneath it. Get plenty of sleep, try drinking a few cups of green tea each day, and…shamelessly link out to a post that I wrote about my raw food experience.

I miss you all, I hope to speak with you soon, and always, keep up the good work.

P.S. Today’s poetry break is brought to you by Thomas Merton, who is awesome. His poem “A Dirge” follows my signature.

Tim Brauhn

A Dirge

BY THOMAS JAMES MERTON

Some one who hears the bugle neigh will know

How cold it is when sentries die by starlight.

But none who love to hear the hammering drum

Will look, when the betrayer

Laughs in the desert like a broken monument,

Ringing his tongue in the red bell of his head,

Gesturing like a flag.

The air that quivered after the earthquake

(When God died like a thief)

Still plays the ancient forums like pianos;

The treacherous wind, lover of the demented,

Will harp forever in the haunted temples.

What speeches do the birds make

With their beaks, to the desolate dead?

And yet we love those carsick amphitheaters,

Nor hear our Messenger come home from hell

With hands shot full of blood.

No one who loves the fleering fife will feel

The light of morning stab his flesh,

But some who hear the trumpet’s raving, in the ruined sky,

Will dread the burnished helmet of the sun,

Whose anger goes before the King.

*** This post is part of the “Blog Every Day Challenge“, which I have undertaken in homage to John Haydon, a captain of social media and inbound marketing for non-profits. A few months back he did the same thing. Granted, all of his posts imparted some kind of value to his readers (and he has many). I’m blogging about the same old stuff. Don’t call it “general interest”, because I think that it goes without saying that humans should generally be interested in what I’m doing. :) ***

We spent three jam-packed days at the offices of the Interfaith Youth Core, talking over the last eight months. Each pair of Fellows gave a short presentation – basically a highlight reel – of their work, and we talked very candidly about successes and failures. As a whole, the Fellowship raised around USD $140,000, which former Prime Minister Tony Blair will personally match. The money is going to Project Muso, Spread the Net, and Malaria No More US and UK. We had around 10,000 people come to our events and reached out to around 40,000 in total. We had 350 media pieces and trained dozens of new interfaith leaders.

Tony Blair himself interrupted a series of toasts we were giving each other to say how proud and excited he felt about us. We are his Fellows, really, and he’s always very eager to talk us up. He told us that what we did was new and trend-setting and most of all important.

It was a bittersweet three days in Chicago, though. The US Fellows are spread all over this huge country of ours, to say nothing of the distance to the UK. The Canadians are also widely dispersed.  I might not see some of these people for a very long time, or ever again.

One of the unexpected byproducts of the last ten months of training and action has been the “gelling” of the Fellowship into more than a group of people brought together for a common purpose. We’ve shared trials, tribulations, and laughter, collaborated on national and international initiatives, and changed the map of interfaith work in just a few short months. These activists are my dear friends and allies.

Someday years from now, I will be asked to assemble a Dream Team of world-savers. The alumni of the Faiths Act Fellowship will be first on my phone tree. Thank you all for everything.

Hafsa wasn’t so easily tricked. “Did you just make the sign of the cross?” she asked. I was caught! I’m not sure when the habit arose, but for years I’ve crossed myself when passing traffic accidents or seeing an ambulance with its lights flashing. It’s easy as a Catholic; I cross myself about one thousand times during a regular Mass. I sheepishly replied, “Yeah. I guess you saw that, huh?” I expected her to ask me all sorts of questions about why I would do such a thing, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, she said, “Right as I noticed you crossing yourself, I was saying ‘Bismillah ar rahman ar rahim (in the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful)’ under my breath!”

Well how about that? Even though she and I come from different religions, we still share some traditions. Saying a quick prayer for the health and well-being of others is one of them.

How’s that for a headline? Let’s go with our gut reaction – it was a Muslim, wasn’t it?

Wrong.

Those lines are lifted from the news story. What kind of a person wraps straps around his head to pray? Jews, that’s who. Observe:

Yeah. A plane was diverted because the flight crew was concerned that a passenger was praying. As it turns out, Orthodox Jews wrap their arm with a black strap and tie a small box to their heads. The accoutrement is called tefillin, and it’s actually pretty cool. The box contains scripture verses, and the arrangement of the straps on the fingers actually looks like Hebrew letters.

Two important take-aways:

1. I’m sure that the young Jewish man’s response to the flight attendant was “I’m praying.” The tone was probably the same as it would be if I was asked why I was breathing air: “I need oxygen to live.” Such responses should be the end of conversations. Why on earth anybody would be worried about a 17-year-old boy wrapping a leather strap around his head is beyond me. Are we really that scared of the unknown?

2. The more important issue here is something that we refer to in the interfaith education sphere as religious literacy. Stephen Prothero addresses our shortcomings in his book by the same name (Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t). Americans are woefully ignorant of traditions not their own. An incident like the aforementioned “prayer alert” is evidence of this. Also germane to our social, theological, ecological, and political processes, we are woefully ignorant of our own traditions.

Religious literacy looks like a hot-button issue from the air. We are concerned about schooling people, especially young people, about religion in general because it rubs against our wall of separation between church and state. Maybe some of that friction is good – we’d stop having silly incidents like these.

Prayers have power, but they’re not a security issue. We should learn this.

NB: If you really want to read the news coverage of this non-event-event, the BBC and NYTimes both have it.

]]> http://timbrauhn.com/2010/01/23/religious-literacy/feed/ 5 http://timbrauhn.com/2009/12/18/malaria-in-the-bay-area-secret-strategy-document/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=malaria-in-the-bay-area-secret-strategy-document http://timbrauhn.com/2009/12/18/malaria-in-the-bay-area-secret-strategy-document/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 22:25:14 +0000 timbrauhn http://timbrauhn.com/?p=700

The following message is a highly-confidential, eyes-only communique from our secret plans to do good.

Some of you know that I am a Faiths Act Fellow with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation. The Fellowship is 30 religiously-diverse young people, based in cities across the US, UK, and Canada, who are building multifaith hubs of action towards the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and malaria eradication. My site-partner Hafsa Arain and I are placed in the Bay Area.

For starters, the phrase “Bay area” is really a catch-all for anything within 50 miles of the San Francisco Bay. From our home office in San Jose, at the south end, we regularly trek all the way up the Peninsula for meetings in San Francisco, or shoot up the East Bay to discuss upcoming events with partners in Berkeley and Moraga. It’s not that the South Bay doesn’t have everything that we need – we’ve simply decided to cast the net wide, as it were. :)

Here’s the basic idea: “To create a sustainable intercollegiate network of interfaith councils in the Bay Area that can share information, events, and resources to collaborate on UN Millennium Development Goals/malaria work in order to establish or expand each individual campus’s interfaith work.”

Right now, we’re two and a half months in and we meet regularly with Stanford University, Saint Mary’s College of California, University of California – Berkeley, and Santa Clara University. All the schools are at various stages of organization regarding student-led interfaith initiatives, but wherever we are with them, they are wonderful people.

For the spring, we’ve got some outrageous events coming up: A Bloodsuckers Ball (featuring vampires and mosquitoes), a leadership retreat for our student partners, a few service events around the Bay, and many more. Plus, we’re working with the Interfaith Millennium Development Goals Coalition – Point 7 Now (http://www.imdgc.org) to organize the youth side of the “One Voice of Faith” conference. And of course there’s World Malaria Day on the 25th of April. As we ramp up our work in 2010, we’ll eventually begin large-scale outreach to loads of different faith communities to help spread the message of malaria eradication.Questions? Comments?