Getting up at 6am, after a night out painted as a blue Avatar is never easy. The excitement of meeting other students from around the country, with the same obsession I have made it a lot easier. After a somewhat eventful journey down south and then through the enlarged rabbit warren Londoners call the tube, I arrived at St Ethelburga’s where the first NUS Interfaith Forum was due to take place.
The forum started off with a welcome from Ben Whittaker, NUS Vice President for Welfare. This was followed by an introduction by Kat Luckock, NUS Student Inter-Faith Coordinator. She went though why the forum has been set up and forum guidelines.
We then got into small groups and discussed what Interfaith is, what we have been involved with personally and issues and challenges that we have faced. My group had four faiths represented, with varying experience in interfaith work from a strong interest to someone that set up a coexist society at Warwick and someone that organises interfaith football at Bath. Each group presented their discussions to the rest of the room. One thing that became startlingly apparent was the Leeds Atheist Society has arranged and been involved in more and a wider variety of Interfaith events than any other group present, including interfaith/coexist societies!
After a lovely lunch Campusalaam trained us in the FlashPOD method. This is a way to record a deep discussion of a specific event or issue and then share it online.
The day lived up to my high expectations. After almost two years of arranging Interfaith events mostly through Leeds Atheist Society, meeting other people with the same goal was invaluable. We shared stories of problems we had encountered and how we had over come them.
It was great to see that it is not just Atheists who believe in the importance of Interfaith. The forum was made up of mostly Jews and Muslims and I met one Sikh and one Baha’I too.
The forum is going to meet with the Minister for Universities, David Lammy on 4th March. How this is going to be ran was discussed by the forum.
Amongst the project aims the six Interfaith Forums will help the members to develop a strong inter-faith collaboration and enhance campus cohesion by creating space for interfaith dialogue and activities.
I believe it is already doing this. By using the FlashPOD method my group discussed why certain faith societies are less than enthusiastic about supporting interfaith events run by Leeds Atheist Society. I found this extremely insightful. Apparently people of faith feel they have nothing in common with Atheists and the idea that we want to spend time with them is greeted with suspicion as they think that we think they are stupid. I at least managed to dispel the popular myths about atheism.
Many of us that attended the forum have added each other to facebook so we can keep in contact until the next forum meeting. It was defiantly worth travelling 400 miles on Valentines day to attend.
I hope that the future forums will include more networking and small group discussions. These will facilitate the sharing of ideas for how to arrange successful interfaith events and discussion of problems that arose when staging these events. There is also need for training and a sharing of know-how on how to word things, as these are contentious issues and insensitivity benefits no-one. It would be terrible to unintentionally offend two faith societies on campus within minutes, wait that might have already happened!
I have suggested Leeds SU as a venue for the next forum and have sent in an article similar to this to the NUS, which will hopefully be appearing on their website shortly.
Oh and I think Leeds Atheist Society are officially entitled to the title “King of UK Interfaith.” 