Roundtable:Interfaith Campus Walking Pilgrimage forBuilding Interreligious Studies on Campus: Examine curricular, co-curricular, interdisciplinary, community partnership and/or other elements; strategies for developing a culture of active engagement, etc.

This is for the roundtable on "Building Interreligious Studies on Campus: Examine curricular, co-curricular, interdisciplinary, community partnership and/or other elements; strategies for developing a culture of active engagement, etc."

(Last year I presided at one of the roundtables, and we all made many connections and generated interesting ideas. I would be happy to do that again, if my proposal does not work for your goals.)

In these “post-pandemic” times with their lingering effects, we as educators know that people are uniquely in need of healthy ways to restore their bodies and souls. At Bethany College, tucked into Appalachian foothills in a deeply rural environment, I and others have found restoration in the hiking trails on our campus. Our Religious Studies club has hosted guided hikes a couple of semesters, where students can discover these trails right in their backyard. On these journeys, students can stumble across waterfalls, hear birdsong, and amble under tulip, fir, and beech trees. Using a small grant from Interfaith America, we are extending the benefits of these trails by constructing an interfaith walking path that incorporates sites already established on our campus (a prayer labyrinth and also a Muslim prayer room, for example) as well as new sites that we are developing with partners  (cherry trees planted by Japanese club that explain their significance in Japanese religions, for example). We are also taking this opportunity to give formal designation to some sites (an unmarked Native American burial mound just on the edge of campus). We are making friends from the Shawnee tribe who likely has ties to this site and plan to bring representatives to campus. 

Bethany is incredibly diverse with about 45% of our student body being students of color. While racially diverse, we are not very religiously diverse. Our students by and large identify as Christian, spiritual but not religious, and “nones.” Through this walking pilgrimage, my project team is creating ways that we can present religious diversity outside of the classroom by utilizing our natural setting as a canvas.  hrough this project in progress, we are inviting students and community members to engage in a multitude of religious experiences by creating stations along our trails and walking paths. We are actively creating intermittent stations around campus where participants can scan QR codes that link to meditations, music, poetry, and art from a variety of religious traditions.