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BY AMELIA POSSANZA

In print | Published February 5, 2009

Although religiosity on college campuses in general has long fallen out of fashion, this week, for the third year in a row, Religion and Spirituality Week is raising awareness of diverse expressions of spirituality, while providing students with venues for dialogue. Religious Adviser and Interfaith Coordinator Joyce Tompkins and two interfaith interns, Jane Abell ’11 and Dina Emam ’11, organized the schedule for the week and are serving as facilitators for a number of events designed to raise awareness and open up dialogue about different expressions of spirituality.

The week began on Sunday with a religious foods display in Sharples that featured such dishes as challah, hot cross buns, latkes and a traditionally South Asian dessert.

On Monday night, Abell and Emam facilitated a “speak out” session for students to share their religious experiences.

Inspired by the Quaker tradition, students were not allowed to respond to one another’s stories during the event and were encouraged to leave silences between remarks in order to allow for reflection.

These guidelines created a safe environment in which students could voice their thoughts without degenerating into argument.

During the hour-long session, 20 students drifted in and out of the circle, some just there to listen and others there to express themselves. “Often discussions get really heated really quickly, especially on issues that are sort of hot button. It’s really hard to air your own opinion sometimes,” Abell said, explaining the impetus for using such a forum.

When Abell and Emam began planning for the week back in the fall semester, they invited the student body to help brainstorm ideas for reframing religious dialogue in an engaging and informative manner.

Out of this meeting and another in early January, Abell and Emam developed a schedule of events that would each be led by a different student or group. “What I hoped to provide students with this week was a voice,” Abell said.

For that purpose, the coordinators set up a series of poster boards in Shane Lounge as a forum for students to express their thoughts, personal experiences, dilemmas and general ideas about religion. Many students have already commented. One student wrote, “I told my friend I believed in God, and he asked me if I was joking.” Another wrote, “Somtimes I’m God-fearing, sometimes God-hating, but never God-loving.” Yet another board hosts a heated conversation about orthodoxy.

Other events held throughout the week were a Buddhist meditation workshop, a women and religion panel and a Quakerism panel. Conceived by the Women’s Resource Center, the women and religion panel consisted of women sharing their own personal stories. Both the Buddhist meditation workshop and the Quakerism panel focused on teaching students about less familiar religious traditions.

“Our hope is that [this week] is not something that’s just about traditional organized religion, but also any kind of spiritual life that anybody engages in, and most people do, even if they don’t necessarily use that language to talk about it,” Tompkins said.

It is notoriously tricky to be outwardly religious at Swarthmore College, and it was from this very issue that Religion and Spirituality Week first took form. According to Tompkins, several years ago, while discussing the difficulties of being religious at Swarthmore, one student jokingly said, “It’s harder to come out as a religious student than a gay student at Swarthmore.”

From the ensuing dialogue, Tompkins created a week to provide students with the opportunity to learn about other religions and explore their own spirituality.

“There’s this idea that religion doesn’t belong here or that it’s an oppressive anti-intellectual force. I think what I’d like to point out is that religion and spirituality are much bigger than the traditional groups that many people think of. Every person has a spiritual life, has something besides just a brain and a body. That’s really what we’re trying to attend to,” Tompkins said.

Tompkins and the interfaith interns hope that Religion and Spirituality Week will have a lasting effect in the community.

In particular, they hope to see on-campus religious dialogue expand beyond the confines of the structured events of seven days. “One thing I would like to see is some of those events that we weren’t able to do this week dispersed throughout the semester so that we have a presence on campus,” Emam said.

The final events of the week include an interfaith text study on Thursday afternoon, a multi-faith panel on Thursday evening, a learner’s Shabbat hosted by Ruach on Friday and a screening of the film “Barracka” on Saturday.

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