Last Thursday, in participation with the United Nations (UN) World Interfaith Harmony Week (WIHW), Andover held a panel for students to discuss how and why they practice their faith. The Interfaith Council kicked off the week with a cake in Paresky Commons (Commons), spread “Love Your Neighbor” interfaith cookies around campus, and hosted a film festival over the weekend.
Mary Kantor, Roman Catholic Chaplain and Interfaith Advisor, explained how she started the tradition of celebrating WIHW at Andover in partnership with campus faith groups, aiming to pay tribute to an anniversary through dialogue across different religions.
“I’m in my 16th year as Catholic Chaplain at Andover and am the one that spearheaded the initial celebration of the week at Andover. The first celebration of this UN Interfaith Week was in 2015, the 10th anniversary of the UN week, and also the 50thAnniversary of a significant document in the Catholic Church calling for dialogue with other religions and other truths… Catholic leaders were being called to mark this anniversary somehow with events building dialogue across faiths so I, [the Catholic Student Fellowship (CSF)] in partnership with the other faith clubs including an atheist club, launched the week [at Andover],” wrote Kantor in an email to The Phillipian.
Kantor continued, “This year [Jewish Chaplain] Rabbi [Joshua Greenberg] and I were the main planners but were informed by and helped by [the Jewish Student Union], CSF, conversations with the advisor of [the Muslim Student Association (MSA)], and students in our developing student interfaith council. We were also both informed by us regularly being a part of conversations with faith/interfaith leaders at Andover and on other campuses and in other places,” wrote Kantor.
Greenberg elaborated on the structure of this year’s programs over the week.
“This year, we started with the [Student Interfaith Panel], and we showed three documentaries over the course of the weekend on Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon, a Christian Catholic documentary, a Jewish documentary, and a Muslim documentary. Each documentary talked about and dealt with questions around religion and gender and/or sexuality,” said Greenberg.
Despite Andover’s commitment to supporting diverse groups of faith, students still encounter challenges while practicing them on campus. One of the panelists, Ryan Levine ’27, noted the difficulty of keeping kosher since most of Commons’s food options contain seafood, pork, or mix meat with dairy.
“I find myself having to order a lot of food, because today, there was shrimp pasta, and then there was Hawaiian pizza with pork in it, and then there was a series of meat also with cheese and meat. So, there’s nothing really that I can have alone. There’s really no protein options, and I find that disheartening a little bit. I feel like [Andover is] doing all this work to have a Jewish student union, and then there’s other students that can’t eat this food, and yet there’s no other option of plain chicken, something like that, and it feels a little bit disheartening,” said Levine.
Azzaam Abdur-Rahman ’27, another panelist, noted the ways in which Andover supports Muslim students. He described the close community of the MSA, which he is a part of.
“Our club advisor is [Noureddine El Alam, Instructor in Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science]. He’s very supportive to us. I’ve come to be really close with him, and I think most of us in the MSA can relate to that. We’re a very small community on the campus, which comes with its challenges, but it also comes with some benefits that we’re very tight-knit with each other,” said Abdur-Rahman.
Dikko Garba ’28 reflected on how his understanding of diversity has expanded, shaped by both his experience on campus and his upbringing in Brooklyn, New York. Garba emphasized differences in perspective, belief, and lived experience as forms of diversity.
“Diversity, since I’ve gotten here, [has] come to mean a lot more than just race for me, because even though there’s a lot at home, I think depending on where you are, there are different views on life… [when] there is a large body of people from different places, they’re going to have different views on the same religion for the same text,” said Garba.
Garba continued, “I also know that near my house, just 10 minutes one way, my mom lives closer there, there’s a bunch of Jewish people. Brooklyn has the second most dense population of Jewish people; and also 10 minutes the other way, we have a lot of Muslim people, and also we have a lot LGBTQ+ people where I live. So I think it’s a common view, there’s a lot of similarities, but sometimes the things that we tie our identity to are the things that divide us the most.”
