2017 Interfaith Youth Camp: August 14-18.

On the week of August 14-18, Drake University’s Comparison Project, along with the Des Moines Area Religious Council and the Iowa Sikh Turbanators, hosted its first interfaith youth leadership camp. We invited high-school students from each of the 15 communities featured in A Spectrum of Faith to participate in the camp.

The morning hours of the camp were spent creating digital stories about personally meaningful faith experiences and sharing them with one another. The afternoon hours included site visits to six different places of worship and discussion of interfaith principles and practices as contained in Eboo Patel’s Interfaith Leadership. On the final afternoon of the camp, we screened the campers’ stories for the general public.

The camp was, above all, an opportunity for campers to share their religion with others and learn about some of the other religions that are practiced in the greater Des Moines area.  Beyond that, it was an opportunity to learn about the principles and practices of interfaith understanding and dialogue, and by doing so, to become interfaith youth leaders.

Here are the stories that our campers created: