About the Author: Eboo Patel

Eboo Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that promotes interfaith cooperation. His blog, The Faith Divide, explores what drives faiths apart and what brings them together. He is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. An American Muslim of Indian heritage, Eboo has a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. He is on the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Committee of the Aga Khan Foundation and the Advisory Board of Duke University's Islamic Studies Center. Eboo is an Ashoka Fellow, part of a select network of social entrepreneurs with ideas that could change the world. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/archives.html

  • Tribal Religion, Transcendent Religion

    By Published On: March 14, 2008

    There is a story about a Christian minister living abroad during World War II. His congregation sends him money so that he can return home for Christmas. When he doesn't come back, they ask him why. He says that he used the money to help a group of Jews escape Hitler's death camps and flee to safety."But they're not even Christian," writes one member of his congregation."Yes, I know," the minister responds. "But I am."

  • Murder on the Subcontinent

    By Published On: March 14, 2008

    Washington Post, On Faith. The essence of India is pluralism, the idea of different communities retaining their uniqueness while relating in a way that recognizes they share universal values. More than two thousand years ago, the Indian emperor Ashoka, a Buddhist, said, "Other sects should be duly honored in every way on all occasions." The great poet and contemporary of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote, that the "idea of India" itself militates "against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others."