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Virginia Theological Seminary
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Alexandria, Virginia 22304
(703) 370-6600
"Acts of Faith: Interfaith Leadership in a Time of Global Religious Crisis"
Keynote Speaker: DR. EBOO PATEL
Transcript prepraed by
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DR. PATEL: Well, I can't tell you how proud and honored I am to be with you this afternoon, largely because I owe such a debt to the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. I did my doctoral work in England and found the richness of Anglican theology and community so warm and welcoming. I spent so much of my time in conversation with people who are part of that communion in that country.
So many of the people who were first and early supporters of the Interfaith
Youth Core were part of the Episcopal Church: Bishop Swing, out in California, the founder of the United Religions Initiative; Dean Morton in New York, the founder of the Interfaith Center of New York; and your very own David Gortner, a professor here, here at this seminary, the Virginia Theological Seminary, who was one of the first religious leaders in Chicago, where he was at the time nine years ago, who saw the Interfaith Youth Core as an enterprise of importance.
And he and I co-taught a class called "Acts of Faith: Interfaith Leadership in a
World of Global Religious Crisis" at Seabury-Western Seminary, an Episcopal seminary, and it's a course that continues to be taught to this day, even though I've had to let go of David, first, to the GTU complex in the Bay Area and now to
Virginia Theological Seminary. But that course is being taught in seminaries across
Chicago. It's being taught this year at the University of Chicago and also at the

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Northwestern University.
And so I think, like so many things when it comes to the Episcopal Church, this Church is a laboratory for those new ideas that connect faith and world at a place where those ideas get incubated and then spread. It's my debt to this Church, but I think that the country and the world owes a similar debt.
I want to tell you --
[Applause.]
I'm going to join in that, because we're applauding the communion in the
Church, so I'm a participant in the applause.
[Laughter.]
I want to start with a somewhat different story, a more sobering one, if you will, a story of my friend April. April grew up a very active member of a church community -- not the Episcopal Church but of a church community -- as a young person in Minnesota, went to bible camp, sang church songs, went on mission trips around the world, viewed the Christian faith as her identity, her home, her commitment. She was the leader of the Christian Group at Carleton College, which is an exceptional liberal arts college near the Twin Cities in Minnesota.
And in the mid 1990s, when she was an undergraduate, she got an e-mail message from a religious leader in the Twin Cities. His house of worship had been burned down in an arson attack. He happened to be an imam, and that house of worship happened to be a mosque. And he was calling on his fellow religious leaders across the State of Minnesota to join him in a witness against that kind of ugly arson, that kind of discrimination.
April instinctively replied, "We will be there," and went to her group at the next meeting and said, "Something really terrible has happened in the neighborhood right next door to ours, and we have to be witnesses against that arson." And somebody stood up and said, "Why are you publicly supporting a devil worship?"
Now, there's a triple tragedy here. The first tragedy is an obvious tragedy. It's the tragedy of discrimination. A minority community, one that is just trying to find its footing in a new place, being met with violent ugliness, that's a relatively obvious

3 tragedy in this situation. That was the headlines all over the newspapers in the area.
There's a second tragedy, somewhat more hidden, and that's the tragedy of a diverse civil society that too often tends towards conflict if cooperation isn't proactively built. I'm going to get back to this a little bit later in the course of this lecture, but I want to just emphasize this for now. That in a diverse civil society, the strength of our civic fabric has everything to do with the relationships between people from different backgrounds, between different communities. This is where social philosophers and public theologians like John Rawls, Mark Marty, they talk of
America as a community of communities.
Well, if the way we relate to each other across lines of diversity is by fire bombing each other's houses of worship, we're not a community of communities; we're on the brink of a civil war. That's the second tragedy.
Here's the third tragedy. It's a tragedy of religious identity. The most highly articulated response, Christian response, to the fire bombing of a mosque in the Twin
Cities in the mid 1990s was applause. The people who went from Carleton College to be a witness in opposition to that arson were labeled "nice." The people who said that they were in favor of devil worship were labeled "Christian."
And April thought that she had a choice. Either she was going to go with her instinct and she was going to be a good neighbor, or she was going to go with her
Christian group, and she was going to be a good Christian.
Let's spend a moment on this third part of the triple tragedy. I think it's the one that you all, who are committed to the Episcopal Church, who are committed to the continuity of the Anglican Communion, to your faith identity, and that I am, as a
Muslim, as a father, as somebody who is involved in faith formation in my religious community, equally committed to that.
What happens when our particular faith identity meets the diversity of the world? That's a central question for any religious community in the 21st century, and it's going to be a central theme of this talk. What happens to particular religious identity when it meets the diversity of the world?
Let's think about 19- or 20-year-old April Kunze at Carleton College. Where did her church community go wrong? As I have delved into this, my sense is this wasn't a failure of theology. We're talking about 1995. We're not talking about 1895

4 or 1795. Christian theology, by this time, has grappled deeply with other religions, and there have been many welcoming, loving, open, affirming responses in theological text to other religions.
Why didn't April, who grew up going to bible camp and Sunday school and singing church songs and going on mission trips, not have that at the tip of her tongue, not have that in her pocket to bring out? Again, why did the people who were most comfortable responding as Christians to this arson cheer? That's, I think, the depth of the third part of that triple tragedy.
April strayed from the church for five years. Somewhere in the back of her mind, somewhere deep in her heart, she thought to herself, "If I have to choose between being a good neighbor and being a Christian, if I have to choose between the deepest parts of my conscience and what this group is saying in college, I have to choose my conscience."
Now, of course, you and I know that that conscience and the church teaching are actually deeply aligned. In Muslin belief, and I imagine in Christian belief, conscience comes from God. What you are feeling deep inside is what Muslims would call part of your "dawah," your inner torch, your God consciousness. But I do want to explore why that bridge was not built for April during her time in faith formation.
Before I do that, I want to take a step back. I want to describe what I think is the major force in our world in the 21st century, and that is the forces of diversity.
And I am going to unburden myself, if you will, of some of the baggage of graduate school, and I'm going to offer a hodgepodge, if you will, of what I think are some of the most important theories of diversity, why this is such a central element of our world right now.
And then, in the next part of the talk, I'm going to go into what are the various ways that religious communities can connect with diversity. There are a number of ways of responding to diversity. That's going to be the second part of the talk. And the final part is articulating how I think we build what I feel is the most hopeful of those responses.
On into the baggage of graduate school. I want to begin, actually, with a theological wanderer, if you will, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, perhaps my favorite scholar of comparative religions of the 20th century. In the middle of the century, in the late

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1940s, Cantwell Smith finds himself teaching at a Christian college in the city of
Lahore, which is in present-day Pakistan.
And he writes in this reflection on that, which is the introduction to a wonderful little book called "The Faith of Other Men," he says, you know, all around us, we're Sikhs and Hindus and Muslims and Jains and Buddhists, and it occurred to me, yes, our college is Christian, but what I am trying to do in 1947 in Lahore is live out my faith life amidst all of these other people living out their faith lives. And he says I am from Toronto and Harvard, which is where his university bases are. He says it's actually those cities, where most Christians encounter only other Christians that are going to be the exception 50 years hence. What I am seeing in Lahore in
1947, this is actually going to be the rule. And he has this beautiful line in that introduction, that the faith lives of people, if they are to be lived at all in the future, will be lived out in a context of religious diversity. That is the only choice.
Peter Berger actually says that diversity is a deeply unmooring fact because, in previous eras, we used to grow up in communities that sent the same messages all the time. Berger's line on this is if you grow up only with soldiers, there's only one option of who you're going to be: a soldier. If you grow up only with farmers, there's only one option of what you're going to be: a farmer. If you grow up only with nurses -- if you grow up only with Christians, you know only one way of being, believing, and belonging. There simply is no other way. Your life is fate. Simply, you get on the escalator, and you move into it. You accept the identities that come with the various stages of your life. But, as Berger says, modernity pluralizes. It means you are now aware of all of these others out there.
Anthony Giddens, who is one of the most prominent social philosophers of the United Kingdom, says that that pluralization, that fact of diversity which is brought into being by two dominant things -- one is air travel, and the second is communications technology -- that's what brings diversity into our midst. That fact is the central feature of the 21st century, and the first thing that diversity does is cause you to ask the question: Who am I?
Because if your whole life you have only known that Sunday mornings are for church and all of a sudden you meet somebody for whom Friday afternoons are for mosque or Saturday mornings are for synagogue, the first thing you say is, "Why do I go to church on Sunday mornings? If the whole world doesn't go to church on
Sunday, if this isn't just the way it is, why am I doing this?" It is a deep, profound, and sometimes unmooring, self-reflective question. This is why Giddens calls his

6 theory "reflects of modernity," because he says that the first thing modernity does to you is cause you to ask the "who am I" question.
The second thing it does is causes you to ask the "how do I relate to you" question. Do I dominate you? Do I ignore you? Do I demonize you? Do I seek to relate to you? Am I in violent conflict with you? Am I in cooperation with you?
These are the variety of things that happen, simply with the presence of diversity -- the "who am I" question, the "how do I relate to you" question.
I want to lift up a particular study of diversity that articulates and kind of delves in to the second part of the triple tragedy, the tragedy of a civil society, that is diverse, that's not engaging its diversity directly.
I am of the camp where I think diversity is a good thing. When I go to the park, I look around, and I think to myself, wow, it's wonderful to live in this neighborhood of Chicago with so many different colors and kinds of people. Well, a guy at Harvard named Robert Putnam is in the same camp. You might have passed
Robert Putnam's previous work, "Bowling Alone." He's the professor who put the term "social capital" on our radar screen about a dozen years ago. "Social capital" is a catch-all term for things like voting, levels of trust, levels of volunteerism, the strength of the civic fabric, if you will. Putnam calls it "social capital."
Well, Putnam thinks both of these things are good things: high levels of social capital are good, high levels of diversity are good. He did a study connecting those two things in the past couple years, and he found something, I think, that should give us some misgivings. The higher the diversity of an area, the lower the levels of social capital. Diversity and social capital are inversely correlated.
Now, time for some reflection, right? I like voting. I like volunteering. I like trust. I like diversity. Why is it that when Robert Putnam went and did empirical studies of dozens and dozens of communities across the United States, he found that apartment complexes, college campuses, neighborhoods, cities with higher levels of diversity have lower levels of all of these things.
I think it's because, if we don't engage diversity directly towards cooperation, we forfeit the fact of diversity to forces who might not be interested in cooperation at all, who might, on the violent end, be interested in fire-bombing the local mosque, who might, on the less violent but no less tragic end, applaud that fire bombing.
Diversity, as Harvard Scholar, Diana Eck, says, is simply a fact. Diversity is simply

7 the existence of people from different religious, ethnic, racial, age, class, geographic backgrounds, living in close quarters. Diversity can become civil war.
Diversity is not, in and of itself, a good. Pluralism is a good. Pluralism is when that diversity is engaged so that people from different backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. Pluralism is when people live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty, and it is an achievement, and it takes work. And I think, as the Putnam study found, if you leave diversity alone, what that effectively means is we forfeit that powerful set of diverse actors to forces who are more interested in conflict than cooperation.
So what might that mean for those of us in religious communities? What might that mean for the church, the Episcopal Church, for Virginia Theological
Seminary? I think that there are a set seven or eight possible responses that religious communities can have to diversity. And because I work a lot with young people and
I need to try as many devices as possible, I have found a way to make all of these responses begin with the letter B. I have to say, for some of them, it was a bit trying, but hang with me. Let's see how we do.
The first response that a religious community can have to diversity is to build a bubble. The Amish have tried, and largely succeeded, to build a bubble. I want to say off the bat, I have a lot of respect for religious communities who build a bubble, who believe that a set of laws handed down by God are so precious and need to be followed so closely and in such a particular way, often a way that comes from a particular era in human history, a past era, that they need to effectively enclose themselves off. They mean no harm to other people. They don't, for the most part, spend their time demonizing other folks. They certainly don't lob bombs at them.
They just try to be a bubble.
Here's the thing. It's actually really, really hard to build a bubble, really, really, really hard to build a bubble. And I have some personal experience with this because
I'm a second-generation South Asian, and a lot of our parents, Indians and Pakistanis who came in the 1960s and 1970s, they tried to build a bubble. Worse, they pretended that their bubble was working.
But, actually, they were living in la-la land, because what effectively happened was those of us who grew up in the so-called bubble of our parents were living fully
American lives -- watching MTV, hitting hip-hop cyphers, going to the YMCA to play basketball, sneaking off to school dances. We were living fully American lives

8 outside of our parents' house and pretending we lived in the bubble inside our parents' house.
That causes a severe identity crisis. There is a rich literature of South Asians and Iranians who have written on their identity crisis. My book is only one part of that literature. It's wonderful for writing. It's less good for trying to live a consistent life, when you're 18 or 19 years old.
So what I want to say is for a religious community that says the bubble is the way to go and we have the resources and the commitment to build it, by all means, go ahead. If that's not you -- and my sense is it's not the Episcopal Church -- you have to choose one of the other options.
What are the other options? I think a second option of how a religious community can engage in the diversity of the world is the barrier. You can articulate an oppositional identity vis-a-vis this diversity. Now, folks who erect barriers, I don't think that they're -- they're not dangerous. They're not destructive. They're not calling on folks to kill others. But they're saying, "My religion is in opposition to your religion. I'm going to accentuate the ways that my religion is not only different than yours but how my religion is not only superior theologically but should have some kind of domination, should have some kind of control. You should feel marginalized in my territory." That's the second thing a religious community can do, is to erect a barrier.
You know, we hear the barrier all the time. You turn on TV, and you listen to some folks on TV talking about religion, and they're erecting a barrier. They're articulating their religion in opposition to other religions.
The third thing a religion can do is to bomb. That's al-Qaeda. The folks who have the bomb, they're really dangerous. They're saying the only way you can be in this world is to follow our narrow path, at our pace, in our vehicle. That's it. If you're not going to be that way, we're going to kill you. The Christian identity movement is like this. There are some movements in the West Bank that are like this. There are some movements of the Hindu right wing that are like this. There is a sharply articulated religious approach to diversity that can be characterized as the bomb.
Number four. There is bigotry. This is a close cousin, I think, to the barrier, but it goes a step further. It's not just articulating opposition. It's actively denigrating

9 the other community. "Barack Obama is a Muslim. His dad was a Muslim. His grandfather prayed five times a day. That disqualifies him from being president," that's bigotry. That's more than a barrier. That's bigotry, not as dangerous as a bomb but poison in a diverse society, poison to the people who receive it and, frankly, poison to the people who give it. That's the fourth option.
Here's the fifth option. Bifurcation, where you live two different lives, you live a faith life in church, you live a worldly life in the world. The language that you learn in your mosque is relevant only to your mosque. You are a good Muslim in mosque.
And what that means is, you know how to pray, you know what to do during juma, you know how to act during a wedding, you can read from the Quran in its original
Arabic, you can greet the others who come to your mosque community -- substitute synagogue or church or temple for this -- you know how that works.
And when you go to high school or college or your company or your neighborhood, because that language is such a private language, it has no cross-over opportunity or appeal or ability, you leave it behind, and you do your worldly thing in the world. There is a phrase of Judaism in Europe: You are Jew in synagogue and a citizen in the public square.
There's a problem with this, right, which is what happens if you only go to church two hours a week, and that's, actually, pretty good, right? I mean, darn it, if my kid just goes to church two hours a week, I'd be happy. Well, if the relevance of
Christian language is only good two hours a week, and your kid or your grandkid lives
200 hours a week, between high school and football practice and MTV and music class, at some point, that muscle of Christian language, it just starts to atrophy.
If we only teach a language of church that is good for the church and not good for the world, you start to think to yourself, "Why do I need to continue practicing this language? It's only good two hours a week." That's bifurcation.
By the way, the bubble often leads to bifurcation, because you pretend you're building a bubble, but, really, it's a temporary bubble. It only lasts an hour or two hours a week.
The next possibility is blasé, which is to say I am too darned confused about the "who am I" thing, the "who are you" thing, the "how we relate to each other" thing, I'm just not going to even thing about it anymore. I'm just not going to call myself a Christian. I'm just going to be blasé' about this. I don't have a language

10 which allows me to be a Christian in the world. I don't see where the relevance is.
It's just too confusing.
Let me give you an interesting literary example of this. It's a scene from Chaim
Potok's book, "The Book of Lights." Two rabbinical students are in Japan, and they're watching a Shinto priest go through his rites, and they're fascinated because they've grown up in the bubble of Orthodox Judaism. It's all they've ever known.
The only people they knew were other Orthodox Jews. The only faith they thought they had was Orthodox Judaism. Of course, they were going to be rabbis. There was no other choice. There is no other path.
And so they're watching this Japanese Shinto priest go through what sure looks like religious rituals. And one rabbinical student turns to the other and says, "Is God listening to him, and, if not, why not? And, if so, what are we about?" I mean just think about that.
And it could well have been that many people in this room -- I've certainly gone through that experience, right, where I grew up in the practices of my faith. I thought this was effectively the only way, and not because I thought it was the better way, because I thought this was the only way that existed. And then, all of a sudden,
I encountered somebody from a different religious background doing things that looked religious, doing things profoundly, piously, beautifully, saying, "Wait a second.
Is God listening to them?"
A big part of me wants to say yes, because I love that person, and because they take so much care in what they're doing. They're so devoted to it. But if God is listening to that person, why do I do things the way that I do them? If he prays in
Hebrew, why do I pray in Arabic?
And what I'm suggesting is the response to that, by a lot of well-meaning human beings, is simply it's too darned confusing. I'm just not going to think about it anymore. I'm going to enter a large category of human life called blasé. And if people ask if I'm a Christian, I will say yes, depending on who's asking, not depending on who I think I am but depending on who's asking.
And I actually think, if you want to go back to making some connections, that the bubble blends into bifurcation, blends into blasé, because, again, if bifurcation is us thinking that our religious language is only relevant to two hours a week, we're not exercising that muscle enough, we are not learning a religious language that we can

11 put in our backpack -- man, the B's in the alphabet, they are a rich letter. I'm glad I picked B.
[Laughter.]
If you don't have a faith that you can put in your backpack, that you can carry out into the modern world, the chances of it becoming blasé, pretty high.
What's the final possibility? I think it's the bridge. I think it's the bridge between church and world, between Christian and Muslim, even between believer and secularist. It's the opportunity to say my faith is relevant to diversity. It enriches diversity. To go back to the triple tragedy, it is opposed to discrimination. It builds a civil society where people from different backgrounds live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty. And I do this because I am Christian.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what I'm talking about. Nazi
Germany, 1930s, first forays of the Nazis into Jewish territories, breaking of glass, the intimidation of shop keepers, pushing around of school children, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer gets on German radio, speaks these lines, "Those who did not speak up for the Jews do not deserve to sing Gregorian chants." Wasn't talking as a German only, he was talking as a Christian.
There is a justice requirement in Bonhoeffer theology that precedes the privilege of worship, the cost of discipleship. Let it not be said that there wasn't a
Christian response to the Nazi murder of Jews. Bonhoeffer lit a path of what it meant to be a Christian in that era.
One of my favorite stories is about an American minister in Europe during the
Holocaust, and his congregation sends him money to come back home over
Christmas, and he uses the money to help get Jews to safety in Africa. And one of the members of his congregation writes and says, "So I understand you're not coming home for Christmas because you used the money to help people get to safety in
Africa, and they weren't even Christian," and he wrote back, "But I am." A Christian response to diversity.
I think the theology of the bridge, the practice of the bridge, the faith formation of bridge is going to be key, not only to civil life in the 21st century but to maintaining faith identity. Again, I'm going to go back to this. If we are happy with the pretense of the bubble, if we are happy with bifurcation, it will lead to blasé.

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We're going to go back to my friend April. When she was confronted with the highly articulated response to diversity of the barrier, combined with bigotry, she had no tools to counter that. She became blasé. Christian or nice? Her conscience said nice. Nobody throughout her entire faith formation as a Christian had said here is how you engage the world as it is, here is how you engage the diversity of the 21st century as a Christian.
I want to articulate a three-part paradigm of what I think this looks like. The first part has to do with framework. It has to do with how we view the world. And I think the framework that is most prominently out there is the clash of civilizations' framework. It is a Christian versus Muslim framework. That's what you see on TV every night. We live in a Christian versus Muslim world. The people who believe that are not shy. They are willing to say it over and over and over again. They are willing to say that in murder to the soundtrack of God. Christian versus Muslim world. Secular versus believer world.
I think the first thing that a bridge builder does in the 21st century is change the framework. Ronnie Heifetz, scholar at Harvard, says, what a leader does, first and foremost, is define reality. We can't let the clash of civilizations people win the definition game. We have to redefine reality.
Pluralism versus extremism. We live in a world not of Christians versus
Muslims, not of Hindus versus Buddhists. We live in a world of Jews, Muslims,
Christians, Hindus, Secularists, Buddhists, Baha'is, who want to live in equal dignity and mutual loyalty with the other in a world in which extremists want to dominate all of us. And we do not honor extremists by giving them the title, Muslim, Jewish,
Christian, Secularist, Hindu. We call them what they are. The extremists of all traditions belong to one tradition, the tradition of extremism. The first thing we get right.
[Applause.]
The second thing is a knowledge base. Gosh, you know, April, who is now the vice president of Programs of the Interfaith Youth Core, my key co-conspirator in building this organization and movement, when we talk now, she says, "Ah, I wish I had known about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I wish that I had had Paul Knitter's theology in my back pocket. Gosh, I wish that I had read some of Cantwell Smith. I just wish that I had a knowledge base of Christian interpretation of the engagement of

13 diversity. It was out there. I just didn't get it."
I want to give you a piece of the knowledge base of how I, as a Muslim, feel that my faith requires me to engage diversity positively. earlier.
Do I see my friend Ibraham Rami in here? I thought I might have seen him
Okay. He would be familiar with -- there might be a couple of others in here familiar with this scripture. Surah 49 of the Holy Quran. God made us different nations and tribes that we may come to know one another. I'll tell you something.
That's going to be amongst the first things I teach my son as he learns to listen, and talk and deepen into his faith formation.
One of the first things I teach him is God made the world diverse, and your job is to learn about it. I want my son to have at the tip of his tongue, right in his pocket, the Muslim knowledge base of diversity and how we have to be a positive enrichment of that. That's the second thing.
The third part is a skill set. The truth is one can have a library's worth of a knowledge base of comparative religions but not have the skills to do the really hard and important stuff. As Cantwell Smith says, the problem isn't with Islam and
Judaism; the problem is with Muslims and Jews. And getting Islam and Judaism to harmonize intellectually, there's a library's worth of that stuff.
The ability to build bridges between Muslims and Jews takes the framework and the knowledge base and adds to it a skill set that allows you to tell the stories, to inch folks along, to articulate common ground, to, for the Interfaith Youth Core, build leaders who can start their own interfaith service projects. That's where the skill set comes in.
Let's go back to the April example for a second. As I talked to April about this, she didn't only want to have an alternative knowledge base to those other
Christians at Carleton. She wanted to have the skills to convince them. And that's not just saying my knowledge of Christianity is superior. That's the personal ability, that's the charisma, that's the dedication, that's the storytelling ability, that's the project creation ability to put together situations where those Christians can encounter Muslims and their own scripture differently.

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Now what if April had started an interfaith service organization at Carleton and brought together that Christian group with the fledgling Muslim group at
Carleton to build houses, and then say, "It's not a random mosque that was burned down in the Twin Cities. It's where your friends go every Friday afternoon." That's the skill set I'm talking about.
I want to end with a vignette from Italo Calvino's beautiful book, "Invisible
Cities." The conceit of the book is Marco Polo is traveling through Kublai Khan's empire, and he comes back to the emperor, and he tells him stories of these various cities that he sees, such lovely two, three-page vignettes. And part of the fun part of the book is that all the cities are Venice. It's just different takes on Venice. And, at one point, Marco Polo is describing a bridge, and Kublai Khan says to Marco Polo,
"Tell me about the stone that holds the bridge together," and Marco Polo says, "The bridge isn't held together by a stone; it's held together by an arch." And Kublai Khan says, "Well, then tell me about the arch," and Marco Polo says, "Well, without stones, there is no arch."
It's the way we put these stones together that create a bridge that people can walk over. My highest dream for America is that this country, this community of communities, this patchwork heritage of Muslims and Christians, of Hindus and Jews and non-believers, as President Obama says, who has gone through this dark chapter of segregation and civil war but has emerged stronger than before and believes that the lines of tribe will one day dissolve, that the blood feuds can, indeed, end and will play its role in being a force for peace in the world; that we can be a bridge from a time of religious crisis to a time of interfaith cooperation.
And my highest hope is that Muslims in America can situate themselves as a stone in this bridge, just one stone, and that we are next to a Jewish stone and a
Hindu stone and a Christian stone, each of us together forming an arch for humanity to cross this bridge from a time of crisis to a time of cooperation.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
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