Berkley Center

Background: On November 11, 2013, Georgetown student Joelle Rebeiz interviewed Rev. Kenneth Bedell, who has had a long and prolific career as both an educator and a theologian. In this interview, Rev. Bedell spoke about his time abroad and his strong belief in the importance of empathy and cross-cultural understanding. By looking at the initiatives at the US Department of Education's Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships office through the eyes of others, he hopes to do his part in building a world in which everyone has the chance to prosper.

How did your professional trajectory take you from studying chemistry as an undergraduate to a career in theology and interfaith work?

There is a strong current that flows under all of the work that I do, and it all started when I was a chemistry teacher in Swaziland, Africa. My undergraduate degree as a chemist gave me the qualifications to be able to travel and teach, but the result was that I found myself in a cultural setting that was just completely different from anything I had ever experienced before.

This period in my life definitely shaped the way I see things now; being a chemistry teacher was instrumental in giving me exposure to another way of life. I learned a lot, both in the way that I look at the world, and in gaining a tremendous respect for how much I can gain and learn from exposure, interaction, and participation with other cultures.

When you came back to the United States, you worked to promote technology use in the church. What was that like?

Actually, let me step back and tell you how I came to be interested in this. I was serving as a United Methodist pastor in Maryland, and I’d starting hearing talk about personal computers. This was in the late 1970s when they were just starting to appear. In the early 1980s, I found out that the community college nearby offered a course where you could learn about these "Apple 2 computers"—which is what they were called at the time. So I decided to take this course to see what the buzz was all about. This was around the same time that people were just beginning to use word processors in offices and business settings.

I had a member of my congregation come to me, and she told me: “I’ve been working as an administrative assistant.” She was really honest with me and didn’t hesitate or hold back—she said, “My boss is a terrible speller, awful with grammar, and has trouble expressing himself clearly, so I do all of his correspondence, and it looks good. For years, I’ve felt that my self-worth came out of fixing my boss’s work, so that he looked good, and the company looked good. Now there’s this word processor coming into the office that corrects his spelling, and tells him if he’s made a grammatical mistake; what is this machine that’s taking over my job?”

This experience was really telling. Seeing how computers really worked, and hearing people talk about them led me to think: "Well, what is truly happening to our culture? How are we going to be impacted?" And out of these questions I ended up getting a graduate degree in sociology, to look at these bigger questions about the impact of technology on us as individuals, and on our culture in the broader sense. That, then, also led me to ask: "What does it mean for globalization, if different cultures have a common technology? How does this impact our communication?" But, more importantly, "Who are we as individuals, and how is this going to impact our cross-national, and cross-cultural communication?"

I am more convinced that ultimately, the real issues here are about us as individuals, and getting over our provincialism. Getting the chance to teach in Swaziland let me see how common it is for people to only see things through their own eyes. I saw technology as a way to become open, and to engage ‘the other’ by sharing in community, in growing, and in learning. It turns out that technology sometimes does facilitate that—and it’s pretty exciting!

With a degree in chemistry and sociology, and an underlying interest in faith, how did you come to the work you do today?

An underlying piece of using chemistry as a means to teach, and then working with technology, had always been my interest in the big questions of faith. I’m a Christian, and the questions about what it means for me to be a Christian, and, in the broader scope, what it mans for others to be part of a Christian movement, has always been a stream that feeds into the work I do. It also really is a part of the work that I’m doing now with the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge—I’m always looking at what’s happening in the community, what people are doing to support each other, where the role of community service is, and where to fit in the big questions of religion. How do these pieces all fit in together and create a community of faith?

The truth is, when President Obama was elected, I was looking for a transition. I was looking at lots of positions, and I happened to know a number of people who were working to help the president put together his administration. I contacted them and said that I was interested in the work that they were doing. Obama was very clear about his intention to continue the work that President Bush had started in faith-based and neighborhood partnerships, and I wanted to be a part of that.

What kind of work does the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships do? Specifically related to the community and campus challenge—one of the things that we want to work on is ensuring that helping develop community service and interfaith engagement in colleges is not just something that gets lost in the future. We don’t want to say, “Well that was fun; now we have to move on to other things.”

We’re doing several things now to make this initiative part of American higher education, and to make sure that it continues into the future.

First, we’re trying to create a structure of interfaith engagement that ensures that the programs established by President Bush and continued by President Obama actually become part of the broader federal government. We’re also working on developing a broad base of non-federal partners to make sure that there are groups that are genuinely interested in, and informed about, this kind of work—we really want to develop a community of groups that see themselves as working together to support interfaith work. The third main focus is developing strong programs on college campuses, where we hope that institutions with established interfaith and community service work—like Georgetown—can be an example, and can set the standard for other institutions to follow. We don’t want to see this great initiative just disappear.

Where has the emphasis on working with college campuses come from?

I think that colleges are one important place that works to develop community service efforts—but even though they are just one place, we need to make sure that this work goes on. College campuses are particularly important because we see two important things happening:

First, where there are campuses that have great diversity in their student body—and sometimes in their faculties, too—the President’s Campus Challenge has been able to open up a place on campuses where minority religions can really be integrated. This, in many ways, provides a better alternative to the academic lecture-in-a-big-auditorium model, where a few people will talk about what it means to be a Christian, a Muslim, or a Sikh, and at the end everyone walks out. Our work provides a way for different religious groups to work on community service projects together, and to build some real context about why this work is important. In the best cases, students are able to reflect back on their own system of meaning and faith perspective—even if that’s a secular faith perspective—and can share with others in a meaningful way.

The second thing we see is that there are some college campuses that are not diverse, and are intentionally not diverse because they recruit students from a specific population. We’ve seen that the President’s Challenge has actually been able to create an environment for these institutions to have interfaith experiences, to connect with other groups, and to be involved with interreligious work, without having to give up the selectivity and homogeneity that defines the institution. Students on homogeneous campuses can learn not only to appreciate differences, but really can get engaged in multi-cultural and multi-religious dialogues.

It would only be fair to also point out that there are real challenges across our nation—challenges that, sadly, are also reflected in our college campuses. I’m talking about religious bigotry. People may have a certain mindset that tells them that they shouldn’t even engage in conversations across certain faith lines. So it isn’t as if every college campus, or every student, is open and eager for interfaith and cross-cultural experiences.

Having said that, I believe that the community service approach to interfaith work takes the edge off of this sort of discussion. If you start off by saying to someone: “Tell me why you hold this faith,” then people become very uncomfortable and defensive. But if you show that you’re eager to go out and give back to the community, then the conversation spurts out organically about why this kind of work is important, and about which faith traditions have led us all to this work.

Where do you believe your office has been most successful? Where does the most work still need to be done?

I think we’ve been especially successful—within the President’s Challenge—in finding and identifying institutions that are already good at doing this kind of work. Georgetown is a good example: it didn’t take the President’s Challenge for Georgetown to start engaging in interfaith and community service work. We’ve been particularly good at seeing this, and lifting it up for others so that everyone can learn from this work.

The harder part, then, is to be able to resource places that don’t already have this commitment to community service and interfaith dialogue. I think this is where the work needs to be done. Actually, I suspect that this will eventually be implemented by the leadership across higher education institutions, because this is really what higher education is all about: helping students become global participants and full American citizens who can communicate across cultural and faith lines. I believe that higher education is about more than just teaching people to get a job—it’s really about teaching everyone to become good citizens and to learn to fully participate in civil society.

How do you think the next generation of college students will successfully become a group of good and full citizens?

Well, I think it’s too easy to get caught up in the language of competition. I really believe that the next generation needs to think not about “How can I get an education so that I can be competitive in a global market?” Instead people need to think, “How can I get an education so that I can help build the whole world into a place where everybody has a chance to get a job and prosper? How can I make sure to help build a structure of humanity, so that everyone has not just the basics, but the opportunity for their own fulfillment?” Making the shift from competition and a focus on self-advancement is the most important thing; students need to focus on gaining the skills to make sure that everyone can share in the work and help uplift one another.