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This is the PathWays house, home to Lilly Fellows, recent Duke graduates who are committed to living and working for a year in a poor Durham community. With funding from the Lilly Foundation and support from Duke Chapel, the PathWays program includes courses, summer internships, postgraduate fellowships, and a "vocational discernment" component that combines mentoring and reflection.
Amanda Earp was a Lilly Fellow the year between earning her bachelor's and entering divinity school. As a person of strong religious faith, she says she had high expectations going into the experience. "I liked the idea of living intentionally in a community where I was able to live as a Christian on the outside, not just on the inside," she says.
PathWays is one of the most visible recent initiatives designed to enable a student with religious convictions to contemplate a life of service. This outreach effort dovetails with Duke's evolving perspective on the role of religion in its relationship with Durham and other communities beyond its walls. The PathWays house includes office space for a community minister, a Duke Chapel staff position created in 2006. Placing a community minister and the PathWays house in a neighborhood with both a rich historical heritage and the social blights of crime and drugs was intentional. The idea, says Wells, the dean of the chapel, is to make a socially disadvantaged neighborhood and the chapel more visible to one another, "to build trust and understanding through friendship, rather than seeing poor neighborhoods [solely] as a problem that needs to be solved."
PathWays has also become one of the models for the kind of decentralization of religion that the university is looking to create. The notion of moving Duke's religious center away from the physical structure of the chapel is one of many recommendations that Wells and Kocher included in a report to President Richard H. Brodhead last spring, "The Chapel and Religious Life at Duke: Some Issues and Proposals." Echoing the trend unfolding organically among students, Wells and Kocher noted the importance and imperative of engaging with other religions.
"Twenty years ago, 'religion' at Duke (in relation to Religious Life) essentially meant mainline Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Judaism. Thus the mode of interaction was ecumenical," the report notes. "Today 'religion' includes all of the above, plus Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the plethora of Protestant para-church groups and the non-Trinitarian groups (Unitarians and Mormons). Thus the mode of interaction must be interfaith. In twenty years' time, one must assume the scene will be even more diverse."
Recommendations to help the university make the transition from ecumenical to interfaith include the creation of a Faith Council comprising representatives from major world religions. In addition to Wells and Kocher, the other participants represent Judaism, Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, Islam, and the Interfaith Dialogue Project. The group is seeking a Hindu representative.
The council meets monthly during the academic year to study sacred and other significant texts from the major world religions and to discuss such pressing global and campus issues as human rights, immigration, poverty, alcohol use, sexuality, and ethics and the environment.
In a university setting such as Duke, there are conflicting and often incorrect assumptions about the role that religion plays in the life of the community, says Wells. "One misperception is that religion is irrelevant," he wrote in a newsletter to the Friends of Duke Chapel. "In a secular world, the only valid role for religion seems to be as a form of therapy, as a motivational force for personal restraint or social improvement, or as a guarantee of quasi-ethnic loyalty. It is thus hard to imagine criteria by which any one religion might be more worthy of endorsement than any other."
A second misperception, he observed, is that religion is inherently dangerous. "Since the European wars of religion 400 years ago, the opinion has become widespread that if you leave people of faith alone together for any length of time, they'll kill each other. Contemporary religious practice gives a disturbing degree of validity to such misperceptions. In such a context, religious leaders must take active steps to show that they are pursuing truth and meaning in such a way that may often be unsettling but will never be violent."
Just as the student-driven Interfaith Dialogue Project helps participants better understand and appreciate their religious upbringing, the Faith Council provides a welcoming environment for people of diverse backgrounds to explore the tenets of familiar and unfamiliar religions. All Faith Council representatives serve in advisory roles to student religious organizations, so the group serves as a conduit of sorts for intellectual and personal conversations about religion and spirituality.
The Faith Council fills a critical void, according to Ted Purcell, one of two advisers to the Interfaith Dialogue Project. "When I was growing up, I heard Southern Baptists say that God doesn't hear the prayers of Jews," he says. "A lot of us got into interfaith conversations on our own to get past that kind of religious dogmatism. The Faith Council deepens participants in their own tradition; it's about mutual enrichment, not proselytizing."
Abdul-hafeez Waheed has been the adviser to the Muslim Students Association since 1998, and represents Islam on the Faith Council. He says that in the past decade, and particularly in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Muslims have had both an opportunity and an obligation to educate others about Islam, the second-largest religion in the world after Christianity.
"Even before 9/11 we had built relationships in Durham," says Waheed. He meets regularly with local leaders in the Christian and Jewish congregations "to help Durham residents build what Martin Luther King Jr. called 'the beloved community,' a society where discrimination, hunger, poverty, and homelessness do not exist." In 2000, he notes, a campus visit by Nation of Islam leader Wallace Deen Mohammed was co-sponsored by fifteen different campus and community groups, from the Freeman Center for Jewish Life and the Black Campus Ministry to Durham's Immaculate Conception Catholic Church and the Ar-razzaq Islamic Center.
"Islam is a beautiful religion that has been misunderstood," says Waheed, who converted from the Episcopal faith thirty years ago. "God wants us to be a model for our religion and live and perform in that faith every day. A good Muslim is like a good Christian is like a good Jew—they are all focused on the good of their religion."
Despite the diversity of religious experiences available at Duke, many religious groups on campus operate out of shoeboxes and lack full-time staff members. Like many campus ministers and chaplains who provide leadership to student groups, Waheed is not a Duke employee. He is paid a small stipend for his work, but makes a living selling cars. His schedule, and the lack of office space, means that his availability to students is necessarily restricted. Some religious-life group leaders are appointed and funded by external entities such as the national Intervarsity Christian Fellowship/USA or the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, while others serve in a strictly volunteer capacity.
As interfaith conversations flourish and new religious configurations take hold, finding space for worship, social and cultural gatherings, and administrative and storage needs is increasingly problematic.
In its search for quiet places on campus to meditate, for example, the Buddhist Students Association has augmented its weekly half-hour in the chapel crypt by borrowing the small prayer space of the Muslim students on Sunday evenings. Hindu and Bahá'í students travel off campus to worship at local temples.
With the exception of the Freeman Center, near East Campus, and the Episcopal ministry, which has space on Central Campus, religious-life groups are housed in the basement of the chapel. Cobbled together out of former storage and heating equipment areas, the space features low ceilings, windowless offices, exposed pipes, and files stacked wherever there's an available spot.
Not surprisingly, many religious groups have sought other locations to accommodate their needs and their numbers. Several have purchased and refurbished houses near East Campus. Wells says that addressing space needs presents a particular challenge. Rather than building alliances and promoting cross-fertilization, having religious groups dispersed across Duke and Durham could lead to a silo effect, where conversations and collaboration become more difficult, he adds. Yet economic factors all but preclude having one central location for all religious-life activity.
"It's very difficult to think about building one religious-life building because the needs of groups are so different," says Wells. "For some groups, worship space is sacred and nontransferable, while others see a virtue in being able to worship anywhere. And no one really knows what religious life will look like in twenty years. We could spend the next ten years raising money for a building that might easily become obsolete."
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