Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action

Violence committed by religious young people has become a regular feature of our daily news reports. What we hear less about are the growing numbers of religious young people from all faith backgrounds who are committed to interfaith understanding and cooperation.

Eboo Patel is the Founder and Executive Director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international organization that brings young people from different faith communities together to build understanding and cooperation. He earned his doctorate in the Sociology of Religion from the University of Oxford, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. Patel is a regular guest on Chicago Public Radio and a frequent contributor to the Op-Ed pages of The Chicago Tribune. Additionally, he has written for The Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, Utne Magazine, The Journal of Muslim Law and Culture and National Public Radio. He serves on the Boards of the International Interfaith Center, CrossCurrents Magazine and Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center. Patel has been featured in a range of media, including The New Republic, NPR, the BBC, and CNN. He is a sought-after speaker, and his addresses include the keynote speech at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum with President Jimmy Carter and the Baccalaureate Service Address at the University of Pennsylvania. Patel is an Ashoka Fellow, part of an elite network of social entrepreneurs with ideas that have the potential to change the world. Patrice Brodeur has recently been appointed Canada Research Chair on Islam, Pluralism, and Globalization at the University of Montreal in the Faculty of Theology and the Science of Religions. Born in Canada and educated in Israel and Jordan, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. He has published on a variety of mostly contemporary subjects in Islamic and Religious Studies, from theory to applied religion. He has been active internationally in the field of interreligious dialogue and has begun articulating theoretical implications for the interdisciplinary academic study of religion. He was a fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (1997-1998) and received a summer National