In the two weeks since terrorist attacks jarred the nation, the University has seen uncommonly high levels of dialogue between different religious groups.
Now, religious studies professors Peter Ochs and Abdul-Aziz Sachedina are trying to create an international institute that would establish a permanent base for this sort of inter-faith cooperation, benefiting both the University and the international community.
The organization, dubbed the Children of Abraham Institute, would bring together an international group of scholars and religious leaders of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths to study together. The eventual goal is to have these leaders spread inter-faith understanding to the world population.
"We academics don't always represent the community," Sachedina said. "We hope to become facilitators to a connection to that community."
Ochs and Sachedina also are co-founders of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, an international group of scholars who meet annually to study the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - and examine similarities between them. Ochs and Sachedin_a will use the SSR to support the founding of the Children of Abraham Institute.
Sachedina emphasized that the Muslim community needs to take an active role in this effort.
"The Muslim element has long been absent in American civil religion," he said. "Muslims and Jews in the United States have never sat down and had a serious dialogue."
One goal of the institute is to bring a positive religious element into both violent and non-violent international conflicts.
Diplomatic leaders often think religious issues only exacerbate conflicts and avoid them in peace negotiations, Ochs said.
"Religion should not try to govern, but to guide governance," Sachedina said. "Those in power must understand that."
The proposal for CHAI also cited such non-violent issues as biomedical ethics and capital punishment as areas of interest.
Closer to home, Ochs and Sachedina said they hope to preserve the good will shared between University students and faculty members of different faiths, which was observed at the Sept. 11 vigil on the Lawn and the Sept. 13 Teach-In at the amphitheater.
"Emotions of the moment will fade," Ochs said. "We're trying to keep a peaceful heat when terror is not on the horizon."
Dustin W. Batson, chairman of Student Council's religious and ethnic affairs committee, said he is trying to foster undergraduate interest in the Children of Abraham Institute.
"It is my hope that students will be able to create an idea that religion can and should play a positive role in international politics," Batson said.
In order to bring the CHAI's values to the University community, Ochs and Sachedina are organizing an event, scheduled for Oct. 24, in which they will demonstrate how their international meeting operates. The topic of the meeting will be the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael as told in the three Abrahamic religions' scriptures.
"This is where the bonding takes place," Ochs said. "It's not in the end result, but in the process"
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