The Interfaith Community at Rochester

The Interfaith Chapel is the center for religious and spiritual life on campus for students, faculty and staff. We’ve been doing Interfaith on this campus in this Chapel for forty years and when the Chapel was first built Interfaith was Christian and Jewish and in that forty plus years it’s now a much bigger tent

Thanit was in the beginning. So there’s a lot of diverse stuff going on in here. It’s kind of a hub of activity, religious and spiritual. We currently have ten different religious groups that are affiliated with the chapel. We’ve got Muslim and Jewish

And several Christian and Buddhist and Hindu and we have student groups that are affiliated with the Chapel and a very active one in Interfaith engagement, the Student Association for Interfaith cooperation and they’re the group that pretty much ties together all the other groups and gets them to do

Interfaith programming together. Tonight at the Interfaith Chapel, we are holding an interfaith Thanksgiving banquet with a guest speaker, Chris Stedman, from Yale University. University of Rochester’s Christian Fellowship has been around about twenty seven or twenty eight years at this point. We

Are usually the most diverse ministry on campus and I’d like to say that we have a little slice of heaven here on earth. So what we’re going to do for tonight is hold an informational session for Hajib for a day

Which is an event that’s part of our annual Islam Awareness Week in support of and in solidarity of women on campus who choose to wear the headscarf. Cru has a weekly meeting that meets once a

A week on Thursday night. We want to be a place where we can be real, honest and vulnerable about our lives because we believe a relationship with God is possible through Jesus Christ. We have the Roman Catholic Newman Community and the Protestant Chapel Community. Both of these

Communities have been here on this campus for fifty years. So, the Catholic Newman Community is the largest single denomination on campus. We serve about sixteen hundred Catholics on campus, thirty percent of the population in discovery, faith and reason together. Many people see faith as

Opposed to reason as if it’s an either or option and here on this campus we definitely take this stance that they’re very compatible. PCC is a multi-denominational group of kids from all different Protestant-Christian background, some of them from backgrounds that are not Protestant-Christian who have all come together to worship and

Be at church on campus here. Also like pretty much all faith groups, once you’ve captured the fact that we’re eating, you’ve captured the essential part of our group. We do a lot of food in the chapel. People can get free meals here several nights a

Week with one religious community or another. All religious cultures have special foods and so often they will do things with their something special to a particular tradition that’s being served and others get to sample that and enjoy it to. Having Diwali dinner,

This is a yearly event we usually do around the fall time. It changes every year based on the calendar. We do this usually in Douglas Dining Hall and we’ve been preparing for this ever since the start of school.

Actually, great people, great food. It’s just a good time to celebrate a good event. Happy Hanukah! Happy Hanukah everybody! Tonight, tonight is the first night of Hanukah so there lighting a candle. We brought the lights, the Menorah, which is symbol of freedom.

We are going to have hundreds of students pause in the middle of finals and see what is important to celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah together as a community. I love bringing people of different religious traditions and students of no

Tradition together to find the things that they have in common and the things they value together. It’s important that people, regardless of faith and belief come together and you know take the time to learn about what the other person believes in and I think U of R ‘s

Great for starting that initiative. A production of the University of Rochester. Please visit us online and subscribe to our channel for more videos.

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