{"product_id":"acts-of-faith-isbn-9780807026335","title":"Acts of Faith","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWith a new afterword\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Acts of Faith\u003c\/i\u003e is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel’s story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people—and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.\u003c\/p\u003e“A beautifully written story of discovery and hope.”\u003cbr\u003e—President Bill Clinton\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[A] visionary book, part coming-of-age memoir and part call-to-action . . . A shining vision of the possibilities of interfaith cooperation and pluralistic discourse.”  \u003cbr\u003e—Adam Mansbach, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“The best recent American statement about living one’s faith in a pluralistic society.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003eRobin Lovin, \u003ci\u003eChristian Century\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Remarkable . . . A well-written, compelling testimony to how one man is trying to ensure that different religions can live side by side in peace.”\u003cbr\u003e—Paul Raushenbush,\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eBeliefnet.com\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Eboo Patel is an exciting new voice of a new America: diverse but not divisive, hopeful but not utopian. He speaks for all of us from a rising generation of bright, brown, and bold Americans who have much to offer a country embarking on a new millennium and in need of new blood.”\u003cbr\u003e—Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, executive director of the Zaytuna InstituteNamed “one of America’s best leaders” by \u003ci\u003eU.S. News and World Report\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003cb\u003eEboo Patel\u003c\/b\u003e is Founder and President of Interfaith America, the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Under his leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies, and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division. Eboo served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses, and has written five books. He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Eboo lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and their two sons.Introduction: The Faith Line\u003cbr\u003e Someone who doesn’t make flowers makes thorns.\u003cbr\u003e If you’re not building rooms where wisdom can be\u003cbr\u003e openly spoken, you’re building a prison.\u003cbr\u003e shams of tabriz\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Eric Rudolph is in court pleading guilty. But he is not sorry. Not for\u003cbr\u003e the radio-controlled nail bomb that he detonated at New Woman\u003cbr\u003e All Women Health Care in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed an\u003cbr\u003e off-duty police officer and left a nurse hobbled and half-blind. Not\u003cbr\u003e for the bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta that killed one, injured\u003cbr\u003e dozens, and sent shock waves of fear through the global community.\u003cbr\u003e Not for his hate-spitting letter stating, “We declare and will wage\u003cbr\u003e total war on the ungodly communist regime in New York and your legislative\u003cbr\u003e bureaucratic lackeys in Washington,” signed “the Army of\u003cbr\u003e God.” Not for defiling the Holy Bible by writing “bomb” in the margin\u003cbr\u003e of his copy.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In fact, Rudolph is proud and defiant. He lectures the judge on the\u003cbr\u003e righteousness of his actions. He gloats as he recalls federal agents passing\u003cbr\u003e within steps of his hiding place. He unabashedly states that abortion,\u003cbr\u003e homosexuality, and all hints of “global socialism” still need to be\u003cbr\u003e “ruthlessly opposed.” He does this in the name of Christianity, quotxi\u003cbr\u003e ing from the New Testament: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished\u003cbr\u003e my course, I have kept the faith.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Felicia Sanderson lost her husband, Robert, a police officer, to\u003cbr\u003e Rudolph’s Birmingham bomb. During the sentencing hearing, she\u003cbr\u003e played a tape of speeches made at her husband’s funeral. People remembered\u003cbr\u003e him keeping candy for children in his patrol car and raising\u003cbr\u003e money to replace Christmas gifts for a family whose home had\u003cbr\u003e been robbed. Felicia Sanderson pointed to Rudolph and told the\u003cbr\u003e court, “He has been responsible for every tear my sons have shed.”\u003cbr\u003e Judge C. Lynwood Smith sentenced Rudolph to two life terms,\u003cbr\u003e compared him to the Nazis, and said that he was shocked at Rudolph’s\u003cbr\u003e lack of remorse. But many others felt a twitch of pride.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Eric Rudolph might have been a loner, but he did not act alone.\u003cbr\u003e He was produced by a movement and encouraged by a culture. In\u003cbr\u003e the woods of western North Carolina, where Rudolph evaded federal\u003cbr\u003e agents for five years, people cheered him on, helped him hide, made\u003cbr\u003e T-shirts that said run rudolph run. The day he was finally caught, a\u003cbr\u003e woman from the area was quoted as saying, “Rudolph’s a Christian and\u003cbr\u003e I’m a Christian . . . Those are our values. These are our woods.”\u003cbr\u003e Of all the information published about Rudolph, one sentence in\u003cbr\u003e particular stood out to me: Rudolph wrote an essay denying the Holocaust\u003cbr\u003e when he was in high school. How does a teenager come to hold\u003cbr\u003e such a view?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The answer is simple: people taught him. Eric Rudolph had always\u003cbr\u003e had trouble in school—fights, truancy. He never quite fit in. His father\u003cbr\u003e died when he was young. His mother met and followed a series\u003cbr\u003e of dangerous iconoclasts who preached a theology of hate. The first\u003cbr\u003e was Tom Branham, who encouraged the Rudolph family to move next\u003cbr\u003e door to him in Topton, North Carolina. Eric was soon drawing Nazi\u003cbr\u003e symbols in his schoolbooks at nearby Nantahala High School. Next,\u003cbr\u003e Eric’s mother moved the family to Schell City, Missouri, to be near\u003cbr\u003e Dan Gayman, a leading figure in the extremist Christian Identity\u003cbr\u003e movement. Gayman had been a high school principal and knew how\u003cbr\u003e to make his mark on young people. He assumed a fatherly relationship\u003cbr\u003e with Eric, enrolled him in Christian Identity youth programs, and\u003cbr\u003e made sure he read the literature of the movement. Gayman taught\u003cbr\u003e Eric that the Bible was the history of Aryan whites and that Jews were\u003cbr\u003e the spawn of Satan and part of a tribe called the “the mud people.”\u003cbr\u003e The world was nearing a final struggle between God’s people and Satan’s\u003cbr\u003e servants, and it was up to the “conscious” Aryans to ensure victory\u003cbr\u003e for the right race. Eric took to calling the television “the Electric\u003cbr\u003e Jew.” He carved swastikas into his mother’s living room furniture.\u003cbr\u003e His library included virulently anti-Semitic publications such as \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eProtocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Anne Frank’s Diary: A Hoax, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe International Jew. \u003c\/i\u003eUnder the tutelage of Gayman and other radical\u003cbr\u003e preachers, Eric Rudolph’s hate did what hate always does: it spread.\u003cbr\u003e I imagine these preachers felt a surge of pride when Rudolph responded\u003cbr\u003e to Judge Smith’s question about whether he set off the bomb\u003cbr\u003e in Birmingham with a smug, “I certainly did.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Middle school students in Whitwell, Tennessee, are giving tours of\u003cbr\u003e one of the most profound Holocaust memorials anywhere in the\u003cbr\u003e world: a German railcar that was used to transport Jews to Auschwitz.\u003cbr\u003e The young people ask guests to imagine how it might feel to be one of\u003cbr\u003e the seventy or eighty Jews packed into that tight space, hearing the\u003cbr\u003e wheels clanking as the train took them to torture and death. They explain\u003cbr\u003e that the railcar is filled with millions of paper clips, each one a\u003cbr\u003e symbol of a Jew murdered by the Nazis. One student says that to see a\u003cbr\u003e paper clip now is to think of a soul. The sign at the entrance of the\u003cbr\u003e memorial reads: “We ask you to pause and reflect on the evil of intolerance\u003cbr\u003e and hatred.” The sign on the way out states: “What can I do to\u003cbr\u003e spread the message of love and tolerance these children have demonstrated\u003cbr\u003e with this memorial?”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One Whitwell student tour guide, about to graduate from eighth\u003cbr\u003e grade, reflects, “In the future, when I come back and see it, knowing\u003cbr\u003e that I was here to do this, it will be not just a memory, but kind of like\u003cbr\u003e in your heart, that you’ve changed the way that people think about\u003cbr\u003e other people.”\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Whitwell is a town of fewer than two thousand residents, located\u003cbr\u003e outside Chattanooga in the coal mining region of southeastern Tennessee,\u003cbr\u003e about a hundred miles from where the Ku Klux Klan was born.\u003cbr\u003e It has two traffic lights and a whole lot of god bless america signs.\u003cbr\u003e The mines closed thirty years ago, leaving the region even poorer than\u003cbr\u003e it was before. You can count the number of black and Latino families\u003cbr\u003e in Whitwell on two hands, and you won’t need any of those fingers\u003cbr\u003e to count the number of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims, because there\u003cbr\u003e aren’t any.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Why would white Protestant kids in a poor region with a history\u003cbr\u003e of prejudice care so much about educating people about Judaism? The\u003cbr\u003e answer is simple: people taught them. The principal of Whitwell Middle\u003cbr\u003e School, Linda Hooper, wanted the students in her school to learn\u003cbr\u003e about cultures and people who are different from themselves. “Our\u003cbr\u003e children, they are respectful; they are thoughtful; they are caring. But\u003cbr\u003e they are pretty much homogeneous. When we come up to someone\u003cbr\u003e who is not like us, we don’t have a clue.”\u003cbr\u003e She sent a teacher to a diversity conference, and he came back\u003cbr\u003e with the idea of a Holocaust education project. “This was \u003ci\u003eour \u003c\/i\u003eneed,”\u003cbr\u003e Hooper said.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Over the next several years, the students at Whitwell studied that\u003cbr\u003e horrible time, met with Holocaust survivors, learned about the rich\u003cbr\u003e tradition of Judaism, and taught all the people they touched about the\u003cbr\u003e powerful role that young people can play in advocating for pluralism.\u003cbr\u003e Lena Gitter, a ninety-five-year-old Holocaust survivor, heard\u003cbr\u003e about the project and wrote the students a letter: “I witnessed what\u003cbr\u003e intolerance and indifference can lead to. I am thankful that late in life\u003cbr\u003e I can see and hear that the teaching of tolerance is alive and well and\u003cbr\u003e bears fruit. When you ask the young, they will do the right thing.\u003cbr\u003e With tears in my eyes, I bow my head before you. Shalom.”","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48532121616613,"sku":"NP9780807026335","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/acts-of-faith-isbn-9780807026335","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}