c. 2003 Religion News Service

ST. PAUL, Minn. _ Midway through the spring semester at Macalester College, more than two dozen students squeezed into the Hebrew House lounge for an “open Shabbat” service featuring a visiting rabbi.

As they were ending their biweekly service of songs and prayers, across campus the Macalester Christian Fellowship helped host a catered “Dining for De-mining” event to draw attention to the dangers of land mines in Afghanistan.

Within hours of both of those Friday events, a couple of Catholic students traveled a mile away for a Taize prayer service and a Muslim student stopped by the room designated in the chapel as a mosque for prayer.

The religious diversity at this and many campuses across the country is often evident outside the traditional morning worship service. Chapels, no longer the spot for mandatory religious observance of a particular denomination, have become multifaith meeting places and locations of interfaith inquiry.

“This chapel is really seen as an interfaith gathering point,” said the Rev. Lucy Forster-Smith, Macalester chaplain.

“There’s absolutely no religious symbolism at all in the chapel per se and that was a deliberate decision.”

Opportunities for worship and religious learning happen in corners of campuses, not just in chapel buildings. They can range from one-on-one counseling with chaplains to informal dialogues to organized interfaith sessions.

“It’s just so awesome,” said Rick Wojahn, a first-year Macalester student who grew up in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and now takes part in an interfaith Torah study.

“It’s this completely different view of the Bible that I never saw before.”

At Wellesley College in Massachusetts, worship happens seven days a week rather than just one.

“You have Buddhist meditation each morning on campus,” said the Rev. Victor Kazanjian, Wellesley’s dean of religious and spiritual life. “You have the Hindu community gathering for prayers on Wednesday evening. You have Muslim students praying five times a day in the prayer room and then gathering for Friday prayers.” And various groups of Christian students gather for worship celebrations each night in addition to Protestant morning services and Catholic afternoon services on Sunday.

But Kazanjian differentiates between congregational worship and other aspects of on-campus spirituality.

“You have many students whose religious life consists of one-on-one seeking out of spiritual counseling,” he said. “They may never attend a worship service, but they’re regularly involved in growing their own spiritual life through either one-on-one or through a variety of programs that we run on spirituality and education.”

Some of the counseling occurs online rather than face-to-face, chaplains say.

“An e-mail will pop up on my computer fairly regularly and they’ll say, `Hey can you help me find a Unitarian church?”’ said the Rev. Jeff Millican, chair of the religious life staff at Tulane University in New Orleans.

As they refer students to Western and non-Western religious observances, chaplains have worked to make worship spaces adaptable to the range of faith interests on campus.

A movable cross is used for Christian worship at Macalester, but Forster-Smith hopes the cross above the chapel will remain despite the interfaith emphasis.

“I understand the discomfort, but I also understand that in some ways we need to continue to represent where we’ve come from historically,” she said. “The college really was a gift of the Presbyterian church to the learning community and we need to remember that.”

She sees her job as making sure each student makes the faith connections he or she desires and, to that end, has recently encouraged Hindu students to begin meeting together.

Forster-Smith’s colleagues across the country report similar efforts to maintain diversity.

The Rev. Charlie Wallace, chaplain at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., spoke in a recent interview about preparations in the chapel _ where a big cross hangs _ for a bar mitzvah for the son of a professor.

“There’ll be some kind of draping of the cross with some other kind of symbolic things so it won’t be hanging in the middle of the ceremony as a reminder that this is not a synagogue,” he said.

Wallace, president of the National Association of College and University Chaplains, said traditional weekend worship usually happens off campus rather than on.

“A lot of places, ours included, don’t have a tradition of weekly Protestant worship that the church connection originally sort of mandated and haven’t … for years and years,” he said of the school with a historic connection to the United Methodist Church. “So people who are doing the sort of standard Protestant or, indeed, Catholic and Jewish thing go off campus for that.”

Kazanjian said Wellesley, through its involvement in the Education As Transformation Project, has worked with 200 other educational institutions to enhance religious and spiritual life. That includes consultation on construction of new worship spaces or renovating old ones.

“It is where the monoreligious history and the multireligious and contemporary reality are clashing,” he said. “Ten years ago, many colleges were abandoning support of their religious life program. I think we’ve turned that tide in the last 10 years and colleges are looking at where the religious life and spirituality fit in their educational program.”

At Wellesley, he encourages multifaith approaches, where faculty schedule exams around religious holidays and food service staff know when they may have to keep extra food out after hours for those fasting until sundown.

Johns Hopkins University opened its Interfaith and Community Services Center in 1999. Chaplain Sharon Kugler estimates that about 1,500 of the school’s 4,000 undergraduates visit that site during the week for options such as Shabbat services, Buddhist meditation and Muslim prayers.

“It’s a hopping place,” she said of the center in Baltimore where Catholics worship upstairs in the formal sanctuary while Hindus are simultaneously holding a service in a multipurpose room downstairs.

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Interfaith interactions are reflected not only in the variety of worship but in the range of workers. A Catholic student, for instance, may set up instruction books before the Sabbath begins at sundown while a non-Christian may work on Sunday to prepare the center for Christian services.

“If it’s your Sabbath, you’re not working,” said Kugler, a Catholic layperson, of what becomes a cross-faith experience for the students. “That’s been really a wonderful thing. … They’re getting paid, but they’re also learning.”

Discovery about other faiths often comes when religious student organizations work together on a project. At Willamette, Catholic and Jewish students recently jointly sponsored a model Passover Seder. Macalester’s Council for Religious Understanding has held monthly meetings focusing on topics such as fasting and interfaith dating. At Johns Hopkins, a February “Open Your Eyes” banquet gave Hindus and Jews a chance to lead a discussion on their concepts of God.

But often the interreligious understanding comes at times when individual students question each other about their beliefs.

“One of the workers at the meal service (cafeteria) asked if I worship Satan and I said I didn’t,” said Megan Van Dyke, a Wiccan from Napa Valley, Calif., who often wears a necklace featuring a pentacle, or five-pointed star.

“He was very embarrassed about it and has been very nice since then.”

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While chaplains and organizations spearhead many of the religious activities, students’ personal pursuits of faith round out the religious diversity on campus _ from spending time with an ultra-Orthodox family to growing spiritually by answering questions from agnostic friends.

Susan Anderson, a senior affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), said she formed a Thursday-night covenant group with her friends.

“Sometimes we talk about our highs and the lows of the week,” said Anderson, of Minnetonka, Minn. “Sometimes we talk about what we like and don’t like about Macalester. Sometimes we pray, but the main thing is it’s very supportive.”

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