Visit us at: 30 Good Minutes.org

         

Conversation with Paul Raushenbush and Eboo Patel

Daniel Pawlus: Now let’s talk with Eboo Patel and Paul Raushenbush. Eboo and Paul, so great to have you both here, two movers and shakers in the religion world in America. So let’s have a great conversation together. Eboo, I think you had something that you wanted to start off asking us here.

Eboo Patel: Paul and I have been friends for about a decade and one of the things that has always struck me about Paul is the number of lives you’ve led. You’ve been a music journalist; you’ve been a chaplain at Princeton; you founded the Huffington Post Religion Blog; and now you’re the full-time editor of that. And that’s only half of the number of lives you’ve led! You’re also a pastor. I’m wondering, what have you brought in essence to each of those vocations that you’ve done?

Paul Raushenbush: Well, my road to becoming a pastor was really through beginning to understand my own vulnerability. I came out of college and started a record company in Spain and was a music producer. I had an amazing time, but then began to actually find myself more and more addicted to drugs, getting into a very rock and roll lifestyle. So what happened was for the first time in my life I began to actually feel vulnerable. I was raised in the church and I had actually studied religion in college, but it had been about religion, not for me exactly. Then all of a sudden I…there’s a great story. I had to go into a halfway house. I mean, it was very serious. This lady used to put my shoes under my bed and I was like, “Marilyn, why are you putting my shoes under my bed?” She was like, “Because I want you on your knees.” I began to pray and that was the journey. So for me, being a pastor in any work is all about understanding people’s brokenness, people’s need. And because I have been there, I come from a position of really understanding that to judge is really a mistake because, scratch the surface, and everybody is hurting.  So whether I’m working at Huffington Post, working at Princeton where everybody is supposed to be perfect but underneath everybody is struggling, out on the Internet where people are seeking for truth, where there’s a lot of anger and there’s a lot of frustration and curiosity, I try to be compassionate and generous to people. That’s really where the pastoral effort comes from.

Daniel Pawlus: Sounds like the head to heart conversion for you that really happened at that moment and you’ve threaded through everything that you are doing now, Paul. Eboo and I both know that you have a little bit of inspiration in your background. There’s a certain gentleman, a great-grandfather of yours, that’s pretty inspiring to the religion world of America. Let’s talk about Walter Raushenbush just a little bit and how he impacted your life and some of your academic work.

Paul Raushenbush: Walter Raushenbush was a figure who lived one hundred years ago. He was an evangelical. He came from seven generations of pastors. Basically the way his conversion happened is that he left seminary. He could have worked anywhere. He took a small church in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, back when “Hell’s Kitchen” meant something! He got converted by the experience of the poverty of his congregation. He said, “It just broke my heart how many children’s funerals I had to do. The boxes with the babies in them.” And that was his moment where he realized the Gospel has to say something to these babies if it is to say something at all. So he went back to the Bible and realized that it was both about personal spiritual redemption, but also about social redemption. Throughout my life I’ve been kind of also going back and forth between these two very important elements of what it means to be spiritual, what it means to be a religious person. It has to say something to your individual heart, but it also has to do something for the world around us. So that’s been a big part of my journey, Walter Raushenbush’s inspiration. I don’t claim to live up to his standard but certainly bringing that message of wholeness.

Daniel Pawlus: Eboo, you and Paul both have experiences on college campuses. We should spend a little time talking about that, your work at Princeton and how that connects with the work of IFYC. So do you want to kick us off in a direction there?

Eboo Patel: Actually, Paul and I had a great conversation about ten years ago when you were just applying for the job at Princeton. It was one of the first formal positions at a university that focused on interfaith cooperation. We’ve had an ongoing conversation over the past ten years about the possibility of a big movement of interfaith cooperation on the college campuses: how that could change higher education, how that could change a generation, how that could change America. That’s the work that Dan and I do full-time. It’s the work you did full-time for a good long time. I’m wondering, what are your thoughts about that big dream, given the last decade of your life?

Paul Raushenbush: What was interesting to me at Princeton was you have this idea of interfaith cooperation but we’re basically a lot of people who don’t really have any convictions talking about their faith.

Daniel Pawlus: What do you mean? Just intellectually approaching things?

Paul Raushenbush: Or they kind of have this, “Oh well, we’ll all just walk around and sing “Kumbaya” and we’ll have some cookies!” What was interesting at Princeton, the people who showed up for interfaith dialogue and engagement were people who took religion seriously. So you had Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians and very, very intense religions conversations. Everybody realized—and we also had Buddhists and more liberal Christians—and everyone took religion really seriously and realized that religion mattered. I would say this to all the incoming freshmen: To be an educated person in the 21st century, you have to know what you believe, but you also have to know what your roommate believes. You have to be able to speak about it intelligently, otherwise don’t pretend you’re going to be a leader of the 21st century because you won’t be able to be. So it was putting it in those terms, basically connecting it with the wider educational mission of the university.

Daniel Pawlus: So, what about the action piece? Eboo talks about this all the time. Dialogue is great, fantastic. You get those passionate people together in a room to talk about these things, but what are they doing together to make a difference on college campuses?

Eboo Patel: Paul is a leading expert in that because I think he ran the Days of Interfaith Service as much or more than any other college professional in America!

Paul Raushenbush: Eboo would tell me to have an Interfaith Day of Service! It was one of those things that was really great and it leveled the playing field because we would have sixty, seventy kids and you could have seven Hindus there along with twenty whatevers. So all of a sudden everybody was meeting each other and they would be working on a project together. I remember the very first one I did. I was walking around looking at whom I was working with. We were helping with a Head Start like program and organizing them. In the corner was this Muslim woman, veiled, and this Orthodox Jew and they were working on something and I knew they had never run into each other before. They were together for two hours, talking and organizing a bookshelf. At the end of it you could just see they were really…something had changed and not the opportunity. I actually think this is not just pragmatic solely. It’s also a transcendent reality that, when you are in and doing something that is for other people, it changes somehow the way you are willing to interact who you are with.

Daniel Pawlus: Let’s talk about the current day, perhaps the blog work that Paul is doing at Huffington Post and so forth.

Eboo Patel: Paul, one of the things that strikes me is that we have this image of the pastor as somebody who is [there] in person. When you were at Princeton and probably when you were at Riverside Church, people would make appointments with you. They would come and they would tell you about their journey, they would ask you questions, they would share with you, in your words, their “brokenness.” You spend ninety percent of your time now in front of a computer screen. As you were saying in the earlier part of our conversation, you still imagine how spirituality and religion can address people’s vulnerability or brokenness. How is that different being the editor of an online blog than it was being an “in person” pastor?

Paul Raushenbush: It’s completely different and yet the goal is the same. I can’t follow-up with people. I can’t hold someone’s hand. But what we can do is we can provide resources for people who are looking for information for someone who might have gone through what they went through. I lost a nephew last year and I wrote a piece about it. I basically published the eulogy I gave about Sam and the responses I got about “I lost this person in my life” or “I lost that person”. . . Even in these small ways we’re able to be together. To sense that we’re not alone is very important. So on the very personal level you can find resources of people who have gone through what you might have gone through. On a bigger level, what I always try to do on Huffington Post Religion, if you go to the site you will see a Hindu article next to a Jewish article next to a Muslim article next to a Catholic article. And you will see a snapshot of what the world is and what America is, what Chicago is. The idea there is to say this is who we are. We can be next to each other and we can have authentic, individual experiences. And, maybe I’m going to be learning something even if I click on someone who is not of my own faith. So these are extensions. I say what I’m doing is a ministry at Huffington Post Religion. I’m the only employee at Huffington Post who probably says that! Actually, Arianna is so supportive of what I’m doing and she’s the one who wants it to be authentically religious. She wants that. So she is a big supporter of what we’re doing and appreciates that this is it’s own thing.

Daniel Pawlus: I want to follow up on that. It sounds like you are a big advocate for the social connectivity, obviously, and social media plays a role in all the pieces that are put up on the Huffington Post. Tell us a little bit more: what are you really trying to accomplish with this blog that differentiates it from other religion blogs out there?

Paul Raushenbush: I think many other places where you read about religion is exactly that. You’re going to read about religion. What I do is I look for the most important and profound religious voices and I let them speak for themselves. We also have a full-time religion writer who will report about religion, but I’m elevating wonderful, productive voices from across the country and even across the world and giving them a platform. A lot of places, again, report about religion and I really want this location to be religion. I want it to be a place where authentic religion comes through the page.

Eboo Patel: Paul, you used the word productive, right? And so much of the conversation about religion in the United States, and around the world, is not only non-productive, it’s actively destructive. There is the discourse of “religion poisons everything.” There’s the discourse of “religious communities are fated to fight.” There’s the discourse of “the Muslims are coming to get you.” Tell us what you mean by productive.

Paul Raushenbush: Well, I have a few ground rules that I have. Basically, you can’t tear down another person’s religion on Huffington Post. You can talk about your own religion and you can talk about what you wish for, but I can’t have a Muslim saying, oh, all of the Hindus are this and blah blah blah. I don’t want that. I really want people to talk about their own tradition and talk about the best of it. That the reason I even write back to say I understand where you’re coming from, why don’t you write about what’s wonderful about Hinduism, what’s wonderful about Islam, what’s wonderful about Judaism. Be positive about your own tradition and don’t always focus it against someone else.

And on the question of this idea that religion is always an evil kind of thing, there is a place for a critique of religion, but in the religion section I actually don’t have the kind of crazy, anti-religion atheists. Just like the Green section doesn’t have anti-environmental or the Women’s section doesn’t have misogynists.

Daniel Pawlus: On the Huffington Post specifically, you’re saying?

Paul Raushenbush: We have all of these different sections. I’m saying that on the religion section I have secular humanists, I have people who are willing to have a conversation about what’s good about their own tradition. But I do steer away from the “burning the whole field” kind of attitude where all of this is wrong. Okay, so that means Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr…just throwing out everybody. I don’t think that’s the kind of conversation I want. People can do whatever they want by commenting and things like that. There is a lot of interactivity on the web and we support that.

Daniel Pawlus: So we have a couple of minutes left, I want to bend both of your guys’ ear on what should we be looking for right now. You’re both on the front lines reading the headlines everyday. What’s going on? What is the most important issue of the day in religion? Eboo first. What do you think?

Eboo Patel: I say this with some frequency, but I believe with my whole heart that part of the 21st century is going to be about whether religion becomes a bomb of destruction, a barrier of division or a bridge of cooperation. And I think that if religion is going to be a bridge of cooperation we’re going to need to have a generation of bridge builders. A huge part of building bridges between different religions is how we talk about our own religions, other people’s religions and the relationships between them. One of the reasons that I read the Huffington Post Religion literally every day is because, as Paul says, it articulates an aspiration about how a religious diverse world ought to engage with each other, which is authentically, respectfully and with love.

Daniel Pawlus: We have forty-five seconds left, Paul. What would you add to that?

Eboo Patel: I would echo all of that. That’s a big concern of mine. I think the other interesting thing that’s happening is I think young people are trying to find out what is authentic about faith. How do we live in this world and have this faith that guides us in a way that empowers our imagination and creativity to live in a different way. So for me, I look around and I see all these pockets of very interesting young, often young, thinkers and religious people and they are really taking their faith and making into something. They are reigniting it. And that’s what I look for. The next generation who is really going to say, okay, we’re going to make Christianity new and beautiful and fresh just like generations have before us.

Daniel Pawlus: A great place to end. A pleasure to work with both of you guys.

Home | Schedule |This Week |PG Archives| Interfaith Resources | Short Video | About| Links|Donation