Voices of Interfaith America

Najeeba Syeed and Eboo Patel explore the ethics and future of interfaith work amid deep divides across religious communities. They focus on the impact of global wars and crises on religious communities and discuss the role of institutions in promoting interfaith understanding through open-mindedness and deep listening.

Guest Bio: Najeeba Syeed is the inaugural El-Hibri endowed Chair and Executive Director of the Interfaith Institute at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has been a professor, expert practitioner, and public speaker for the last two decades in conflict resolution, interfaith studies, mediation, restorative Justice, education, and social, gender, and racial equity.

She has facilitated conflict resolution processes for conflicts in many schools, communities, and environmental and public controversies. She served as the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Politics Section and was a member of the Academy’s Religion, Social Conflict, and Peace Section. She was elected by the body of the American Academy of Religion to serve on the governing body of the Program Committee. She is a past board member of the National Association for Community Mediation, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation and serves on the Higher Education Advisory Council for Interfaith America, and Advisory Council for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Tanenbaum Center and past chair of the Pasadena Commission on the Status of Women. She served on the Teaching Team for the Luce American Academy of Religion Summer Seminar on Religious Pluralism and Comparative Theologies.

Danielle Allen is a political scientist, professor, and director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Allen explains the Declaration of Independence's error about democracy, how she navigates a cluttered world of power, and the opportunities she sees to marry religious ideologies with civic identities.

Guest Bio: Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. She is a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy. She is also a seasoned nonprofit leader, democracy advocate, tech ethicist, distinguished author, and mom.

You can tune in to all episodes on our website, Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday at 5 a.m. CST.

Jonathan Eig, an American journalist, and biographer, gives us a deeper insight into MLK Jr.'s life as a civil rights activist and the lessons we can still learn from his work about the role of religion in activism. He also discusses MLK's hopes for our nation and why young people today are skeptical of the Church.

Bio: Jonathan Eig is the bestselling author of six books, including his most recent King: A Life, which The New York Times hailed as a "monumental" new biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is a National Book Award nominee.

Jonathan's previous book, Ali: A Life, won a 2018 PEN America Literary Award and was a Mark Lynton History Prize finalist. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He served as consulting producer for the PBS series "Muhammad Ali," directed by Ken Burns. The Esquire magazine named Ali: A Life is one of the 25 most excellent biographies of all time. Joyce Carol Oates called it "an epic of a biography" that "reads like a novel." His books have been listed among the best of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

You can tune in to all episodes on our website, Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday at 5 a.m. CST.

Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. As the violence abroad and at home escalates, Ripley and Patel discuss “high conflict” – what it is, how it impacts individuals and society, and ways to resolve high-conflict situations.

GUEST BIO:

Amanda has spent her career trying to make sense of complicated human mysteries by following survivors of all kinds. Her most recent book is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, winner of a 2022 Christopher Award. Her previous books include The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, which was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary, and The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way, a New York Times bestseller which was also turned into a documentary film.

Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Guardian, the Harvard Business Review, and the Times of London. Her stories helped Time win two National Magazine Awards. Previously, she served as an Emerson Collective Senior Fellow and the host of the weekly Slate podcast How To!

You can tune in to all episodes on our website, Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. New episodes drop every Tuesday at 5 a.m. CST.

Ayad Akhtar, American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, joins Eboo Patel at the Chicago Humanities Festival to discuss art, creativity, and cultural sensitivity. They emphasize the need to engage with and respect different identities in a diverse democracy rather than resorting to simplistic labels like "victim" or "racist."

Bio: Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called "a tour de force" and The New York Times called "a beautiful novel...that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life." His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations).