Voices of Interfaith America

In an election season marked by chaos and division, Interfaith America’s Faith in Elections podcast cuts through the noise and deepens the conversation, highlighting the remarkable stories of everyday faith leaders who are working to build bridges and uphold democracy.

Join hosts Jenan Mohajir and Adam Phillips as they speak with Interfaith America Faith in Elections grantees about how faith convictions motivate their civic engagement and service. 

The Faith in Elections Podcast is part of the Voices of Interfaith America Podcast network. Episodes will be released each Thursday leading up to the 2024 presidential election. 

Host Bios: 

Jenan Mohajir is the Vice President of External Affairs at Interfaith America. Inspired by faith and family to work for change at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and religion, Jenan has served in leadership at IA for 15 years where she as has trained hundreds of interfaith leaders from diverse backgrounds to foster a vision and practice of civically engaged interfaith leadership. Jenan completed undergraduate work at DePaul University and is pursuing her MA in religious studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. As a natural storyteller, she performs with 2nd Story, Chicago’s premier storytelling company. Jenan proudly lives on the south side of Chicago with her children and loves to collect vintage children’s books.

Adam Phillips is the Chief Strategy Officer & Chief of Staff at Interfaith America. Adam serves as the senior lead in the Executive Office by managing internal and external inquiries from the President’s office and leads the organization’s narrative strategy, ensuring the advancement of Interfaith America’s mission and vision. Having spent two decades at the intersection of faith and public life, Adam most recently served as a Biden Administration appointee leading Localization and Faith-based efforts at the United States Agency for International Development. Working closely with the White House and Department of State, in his role at USAID Adam oversaw development policy, new and non-traditional partnerships, as well as democracy and diplomacy initiatives in nearly 100 countries. Adam has been a TEDx speaker, his work has also been featured in The Atlantic, CNN, Washington Post, NPR, Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine and the Christian Broadcasting Network’s 700 Club.

Visit Interfaith America to learn more about the organization and our podcast. 

Learn more about how you can support your community this election season with Interfaith America's Faith in Elections Playbook. 

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Following a spring semester when universities made headlines, columnist, author, and Professor David Brooks joins Eboo to discuss the need for institutions of higher education to teach diverse viewpoints, broaden definitions of success beyond traditional measures of intelligence, and nurture students as whole persons. Reflecting on past and current trends of hyper conformity and the pressures placed on students, they also explore the potential for university life to guide moral character and model the connection between the political and the spiritual.

Guest Bio: Best-selling author David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times, a commentator on “The PBS Newshour,” and a frequent analyst on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic, and op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal. Brooks is the founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute, and his most recent book, “How to Know a Person” was published in 2023.

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In a plenary session for the 2024 Teaching Interfaith Understanding Faculty Seminar, Eboo Patel and outgoing Middlebury College president, Laurie Patton, discuss how Middlebury’s campus culture evolved in the years since 2017, when political scientist Charles Murray’s visit was met with upheaval. Patton elaborates on Middlebury’s conflict transformation efforts, including the successes of the Engaged Listening Project, the challenges of countering a national narrative, and the outcomes of building a resilient culture, evidenced by her community’s constructive engagement of tensions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the spring of 2024.

Guest Bio: Dr. Laurie L. Patton is the 17th president of Middlebury College and the incoming president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Patton is an authority on South Asian history, culture, and religion, and religion in the public square. She is the author and editor of ten scholarly books and three books of poems, and has translated the classical Sanskrit text, The Bhagavad Gita. She was president of the American Academy of Religion in 2019 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 in two categories, philosophy/religion and education.

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Read the full essay here: ‘Will Palestine Still Exist When This War is Over?’ My Answers to My Children’s Questions.

Earlier in April, Jenan Mohajir joined her colleague, Rebecca Russo, to narrate their personal stories and reflect on their Jewish-Muslim friendship they insist on maintaining in the face of ongoing devastating news from Israel/Palestine. Listen to the full episode here. 

Interested in reading similar stories? Check out our Interfaith America Magazine for stories from across the country on the intersection of religion and American civic life. 

If you've ever wondered what bridgebuilding looks like, look no further than Jenan Mohajir and Rebecca Russo. Just two weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th and the subsequent Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza, Jenan - who is Muslim and the mother of three beautiful Palestinian children - and Rebecca - who is Jewish and has multiple personal and familial connections to Israel (and is also the mother of three beautiful children) - came together to publish an op-ed insisting on "the importance of seeing each other and each other's people as fully human." In this episode, they tackle tough questions about what it means to be Zionist, pro-Palestinian, a committed partisan, and an unwavering bridgebuilder. 

Guest Bio:

Jenan Mohajir is the Vice President of External Affairs at Interfaith America. In this role, Jenan focuses on building strategic relationships and programs with new partners across Interfaith America's emerging sectors. Inspired by faith and family to work for change at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and religion, Jenan has served in leadership at IA for 15 years, where she has trained hundreds of interfaith leaders from diverse backgrounds to foster a vision and practice of civically engaged interreligious leadership. Jenan completed undergraduate work at DePaul University and is pursuing her M.A. in religious studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. As a natural storyteller, she performs with 2nd Story, Chicago's premier storytelling company. Jenan proudly lives on the south side of Chicago with her children and loves to collect vintage children's books. 

Rebecca Russo is the Vice President of Higher Education Strategy at Interfaith America. Rebecca oversees I.A.'s higher education strategy in this role, focusing on bridgebuilding programs and partnering with senior campus administrators. Rebecca has worked with IA since 2014 and sees college campuses as a laboratory where students can deepen and challenge their worldviews and learn to build relationships across divides. Rebecca has worked in higher education for over a decade, including roles as the Director of Engagement at Northwestern University's Fiedler Hillel and Executive Director of the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International. Rebecca holds a B.A. in Middle East Studies from Brown University and an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Rebecca is inspired by her interfaith experiences living in Morocco and Jerusalem and by the Talmudic concept of "these and those are words of the living God" to work toward a society where religious diversity is engaged actively and positively. Rebecca lives in Chicago with her family and enjoys singing, hiking, and chasing around her three children.

In the face of rising national polarization amid a turbulent election season, Eboo Patel and Mónica Guzmán discuss the role of curiosity, humility, and civil dialogue in a democratic society. They also discuss Guzmán’s new book I Never Thought of it That Way, emphasizing the responsibility we all share to embrace diverse perspectives with an inquisitive spirit and reflect on privilege and exclusivity in elite institutions and the challenges of insularity and assumptions that come with it. 

Eboo Patel is joined by American theologian, writer, and editor of Sojourners, Jim Wallis, to discuss his new book The False White Gospel. Wallis shares his belief that white Christian nationalism is an enemy of democracy and pluralism due to its exclusionary theology and emphasis on dominance. They discuss a vision for creating a new, multifaith American church that partners across differences and revitalizes religious communities in addressing social issues.

Guest Bio: Jim Wallis is the inaugural holder of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Chair in Faith and Justice at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, and the Director of its new Center on Faith and Justice. He served on President Obama’s first White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and is the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, including God’s Politics; his latest book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy, was released on April 2nd, 2024, and is available wherever you buy books. In 2022 and 2023, Washingtonian magazine named Wallis one of the 500 most influential people shaping policy in DC. Wallis is also the founder of Sojourners.

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.

Widely known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the NBC sitcom The Office, Emmy Award nominee Rainn Wilson talks about his new book 'Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution,' the future of religion and spiritual themes in Hollywood, and the spirituality of his famous character Dwight Schrute.  

Guest Bio: Rainn Percival Dietrich Wilson is an American actor, comedian, podcaster, producer, writer, and director — widely known for his role as Dwight Schrute on the NBC sitcom The Office (2005–2013), for which he earned three consecutive Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. 

Other film credits include lead roles in the comedies The Rocker (2008) and Super (2010), as well as supporting roles in the horror films Cooties (2014) and The Boy (2015). In 2009, he provided his voice for the computer-animated science fiction film Monsters vs. Aliens as the villain Gallaxhar and voiced Gargamel in Smurfs: The Lost Village. He has played a small recurring role of Harry Mudd on Star Trek: Discovery (2017) and Star Trek: Short Treks (2018), as well as a supporting role in The Meg (2018). He is also the voice of Lex Luthor in the DC Animated Movie Universe. Outside of acting, Wilson published an autobiography, The Bassoon King, in 2015 and co-founded the digital media company SoulPancake in 2008. 

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).