Benedictine breakfast focuses on King as interfaith leader
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered for many things, but often overlooked is his role as an interfaith leader, says Eboo Patel, the founder and president of the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core.
The keynote speaker at a Monday breakfast in Lisle honoring King's legacy and co-hosted by the College of DuPage and Benedictine University, Patel told the crowd about how a young King attended a speech by former Howard University President Mordecai Johnson.
"And President Johnson is speaking that day on the topic of Christian love," Patel said. "And who does he lift up in that talk as the prime example of Christian love in the 20th century? A Hindu from India ... Mahatma Gandhi."
Years later, Patel said, King took a pastorate in Montgomery, Alabama, and was chosen to be the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association.
"And King says to himself, 'We are going to go Gandhi in this town,'" Patel said, drawing laughs from the audience.
Patel also discussed the Montgomery bus boycotts and how the civil rights leader's house was firebombed.
"In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King writes in his autobiography, it was Jesus who furnishes the inspiration for this but it is Gandhi who gives us the method," Patel said.
That message resonates with Patel, who attended Glenbard South High School in Glen Ellyn and now heads the Chicago group aiming to build on the interfaith movement with the help of young people.
Besides detailing Gandhi's impact on King, Patel also mentioned how Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery and how King spoke out against the Vietnam War.
"Martin Luther King Jr. was a great interfaith hero," Patel said. "One who saw in other traditions and other religious communities people to be learned from, ideas to be inspired by, opportunities for cooperation."
In his discussion, Patel said faith easily can become a "bubble of isolation" and at times can even be viewed by some as a "bludgeon of destruction."
"If we want to make of our world, as King would call it, a beloved community," Patel said, "If we want the interaction between people of different religious traditions to be characterized by bridges rather than barriers or bubbles or bludgeons, we have to get busy building them."