Opening Doors to Understanding at Texas Christian University

We were inspired by our recent trip to Texas Christian University. Our event gathered seven students from different religious and spiritual backgrounds for a conversation about where their beliefs, practices, and values show up in everyday life. After the workshop, one of the participants emailed to share about their experience. Their words pointed to two outcomes that we have seen over and over again. The learning we witnessed in our workshop — as shown in the participant’s response — is, in many ways, reflective of the ways photovoice can be used to generate interfaith understanding.

First, as people share photos and stories about where their faith shows up in everyday life, it becomes evident that even though everyone in the conversation comes from different religious or spiritual backgrounds, there are many similarities between their beliefs, practices, and values. In this particular workshop, for example, nature, generosity, and inclusiveness emerged as themes. And seeing these points of convergence, the student who emailed realized "humans are more similar than different in some fundamental ways.” These similarities, of course, do not erase our very important differences. 

A second observation from their email highlights another common outcome of a workshop or project. When people share about the ways they are flourishing as a religious or spiritual person, their stories and photos can invite a desire to deepen one's own beliefs, practices, values, and experiences. We have never seen someone convert to a different religion because of their involvement in photovoice—that's not the intention of our work. Instead, people tend to walk away from a photovoice workshop or project with a desire or longing to go deeper into their own faith. This might be a Christian who, after hearing a Muslim describe their prayer practices, begins to explore ways within their own tradition to have a deeper, more meaningful practice of prayer. Or it might be a Jewish participant who finds something inspiring in the Evangelical Christian practice of spontaneous prayer and wants to bring that act of spontaneously recentering toward the divine into their own life.

In the case of this TCU student, they came away from our workshop with an intention to spend more time reflecting on their beliefs and paying attention to how they show up in daily life. Many of the other participants expressed greater clarity about their sense of belonging on campus.  And this particular participant wanted to spend time reflecting on their values and what is most important to them, to find clarity.

We really learned a lot from and loved our time at TCU and we would love to visit your campus or community too. Please schedule a meeting to start that conversation.