People sometimes ask us what Paths to Understanding actually does. It’s a fair question. On any given week you might find us on a television set with Jeff Renner, in a room full of clergy from a dozen traditions, on a call with a small town that just downloaded a toolkit, or in a statewide forum with the Secretary of State. It can look like four different organizations. It isn’t. It is one mission, carried into different neighborhoods.
Our mission is simple to say: gathering neighbors and growing trust. What has changed over the years is not the mission but the places where we’ve learned to practice it.
Where it began: a neighborhood called media
Our founders, Rabbi Raphael Levine and Father William Treacy, did not set out to build an interfaith organization. They set out because they were worried about the whole of society. In their day, people of different faiths rarely spoke to each other in public, and almost never as equals. So they created Challenge, a television program that brought people of diverse faiths together to talk about the issues of the day, and to ask what the collected wisdom of many traditions might offer the world.
The show did something quietly radical. It reminded viewers that beneath our differences we belong to one human family. That was bridge building, done in the neighborhood of media, at a time when the living room television was the closest thing most people had to a public square. Today Jeff Renner and Challenge 2.0 carry that work forward, still asking the same questions in a very different media landscape.
The interfaith neighborhood
The second neighborhood is the one most people associate with us: the interfaith and interreligious world. Here we bring people of diverse wisdom traditions into relationship and conversation, not so that we can all become the same, but so that we can together lead our community to strengthen its social contract while keeping and celebrating what makes each of us distinct.
Some of this work is patient and unglamorous. We gather interfaith organizations that might otherwise work in parallel and never meet. Some of it is public and visible, like the Moral Voice for Fair, Free, Safe, and Honored Elections, where leaders from many traditions stood together to say that how we treat each other around an election is a moral question, not only a political one. And some of it stretches well beyond Washington. Nationally we partner with Interfaith America, Braver Angels, Faith 250, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, and others who share the conviction that religious difference can be a source of civic strength rather than civic division. You can join this effort called “Faith in America” here. We’d love to see a video from you, attend our two webinars, and share the message on your social media.
The neighborhood down the street
The third neighborhood is the most literal one. It is the block, the town, the small city where people live next to each other and no longer quite know each other.
For this we built the Potluck Project toolkit, a practical guide for anyone who wants to gather neighbors and grow trust where they live. It is designed especially for people who are nervous about starting, who suspect that the folks across the street have given up on the idea of a shared life, and who are not sure a shared meal can make a difference. The toolkit has now been downloaded more than 250 times, and it is being used in towns and neighborhoods across the country. It has also found a second life we didn’t fully expect: several of our national partners have folded it into their own programs. Better Together America and the Utah Governor’s America’s Potluck effort all use the Potluck Project. A potluck, it turns out, travels well.
The civic renewal neighborhood
The fourth neighborhood is one many people don’t know exists. Across the United States there are roughly 12,000 organizations working on civic renewal, on trust, on democracy, on helping people find their way back to each other. That is an enormous amount of good work. It is also, too often, isolated work.
The same loneliness we see between neighbors on a street, and between groups and organizations in a town, shows up between these organizations too. Good people are solving the same problems in separate rooms, without knowing that the room next door has already found a way through. So we lead the Thriving Together Washington State Civic Innovation Forum, where these organizations can meet, learn from one another, and discover the connections that turn into collaborations. Last week we were joined by the League of Women Voters, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, and several faith-based election support efforts. Nationally we take part in the same kind of gathering through our partnership with Renew to Thrive’s Thriving Together US forums.
This is not a side project for us. Creating connections among the people who are trying to create connections is one of the most important things anyone can do right now.
Why it is all one thing
Step back and the pattern is hard to miss. A television studio, a sanctuary, a church basement with a folding table, a statewide forum. Each is a different room, but the work inside them is the same. Every one of them asks us to invite people who have not been invited, to make sure everyone speaks as an equal, to hold disagreement without letting it become contempt, and to keep the conversation going long enough for trust to take root. Those are the skills of bridge building, and they do not change from one neighborhood to the next.
That is why we say all of this is one mission. Rabbi Levine and Father Treacy were gathering neighbors on the airwaves. Our interfaith partners are gathering neighbors across traditions. The Potluck Project gathers neighbors across a fence. The Civic Innovation Forums gather neighbors across a whole field of organizations. We are not doing four kinds of work. We are gathering neighbors and growing trust, in different neighborhoods.
And there is always room at the table for one more.