Team USA member Brie Loskota was one of the key members of an interfaith initiative on the campus of USC (University of Southern California) in Los Angeles. What began as an informal circle of like-minded students ultimately grew into an international conference entitled 'Beyond Violence: Religious Sources of Social Transformation.' In this section, Brie talks about the genesis of the initiative and some of the joys and pitfalls involved in running an interfaith group.

It's all about dialogue: TEAM USA member Brie Loskota (center left) in discussion with conference attendees, including Rabbi Reuven Firestone (far right)

"The interfaith USC student group that we started was part of a conference on Abrahamic religions and their ability to create violent conflict in the world and also their ability to resolve violent conflict in the world and we wanted to have a youth component considering that we were at a university.

We went through the different offices, USC has an office of Religious Life so they gave us some students through the Hillel, through the MSN and MSU to find students who were interested in coming together and talking and dialoguing. We hired Melodye Feldman of Seeking Common Ground to then construct a youth retreat where we took them out to the mountains for a long weekend. We took them through this process of living together in an interfaith community for three days and how do we deal with these prejudices and how do we deal with the things that come up for us when people say things that are hurtful or when there is misunderstanding or where there is dishonesty.

One of the most illustrated things is this young man Eric who is really good looking, nice clean cut American sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. We did this game, where each of the students makes a mask out of...I don't know what it is...but they make a mask and then they paint it and they paint the outside to be how the world views them and they paint the inside to view how they would like the world to see them.

What Eric did was he painted the outside, it was just white and the inside was this rich tapestry of color and it was amazing to see this kid who embodies these American values and just sort of looks like an average person is yearning for the world to see him in a rich way and so that...the experience that came out of that was that the students who came out of that continued to meet throughout the rest of the summer at the Catholic Center at Hebrew Union College at the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation. And then after our program ended, I am not sure how long it lasted, but they continued to meet with each other and have dinners and go to the movies and what not so it was a great experience for a lot of them.

Beyond Violence: Rabbi Irving Greenberg in discussion with a student attending the conference

This ultimately led to the conference 'Beyond Violence', held from May 5 to May 7, 2003 on the campus of USC in Los Angeles. We were overwhelmed by the response, not in the least because we were able to attract an amazing range of speakers from a wide religious and political spectrum, including the Grand Mufti Dr. Mustafa Ceric of Bosnia-Hercegovina; Dr. Charles Taylor of McGill University in Montreal; Rabbi Reuven Firestone (who is featured in 'The Quest for Peace'); Dr. Samah Jabr of the Bethlehem Psychiatric Clinic; Rabbi Irvin Greenberg from the Jewish Life Network in New York, and many more.

As for myself, I just finished a masters in Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College and am in the process of starting an institute on interfaith relations at USC with Hebrew Union College in cooperation with the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation."

A new conference has been scheduled for 2004.