Thirty ideas from people under 30: The Faith Leaders

The Monitor interviewed young artisans, politicians, educators, entrepreneurs and faith leaders. And they have trenchant suggestions on how to improve the world. We'll serve this smorgasbord in bite-size servings of 3 to 7 profiles per day. Today's lineup of faith leaders includes the Obama administration's leading man, the head of a Christian antipoverty group, and the director of New York University's Islamic center.

Joshua DuBois: White House faith guru

Courtesy of The White House
Joshua DuBois, Special Assistant to the President and Executive Director for the White House Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

As a Pentecostal preacher, Joshua DuBois, 29, knows the power of the spoken word. But he's convinced that action can be even more powerful than words – at least for building bridges among faith communities.

Mr. DuBois has crossed a few bridges in his life. A former campus activist in a capital punishment case, he's now a leader in the Obama White House, where he directs the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

He hopes his generation learns lessons from the past. His grandmother, a civil rights activist in the 1960s in Nashville, Tenn., taught him that interfaith cooperation helped eradicate the Jim Crow culture in the South. He offers a related insight: When religionists work side by side to relieve suffering, they foster the very virtues that lead to peace.

"It gives a dose of reality to interfaith dialogue," DuBois says. "Instead of sitting in a room and talking about our theological differences, which are very real, let's step outside that room."

DuBois champions this idea through a nine-month-old initiative called the President's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. He says hundreds of colleges are organizing service projects that bring diverse groups shoulder to shoulder for common causes.

One example: Evangelical Christians and Muslims at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have recently teamed up to feed the hungry in their city. The idea is now starting to take root on campuses in Britain.

"There's something about that humility and that service," DuBois says, "that gives it a unique power to mitigate conflict."

– G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Next: Ryan Scott McDonnell: Modern Lazarus at the gate

1 of 3

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.