Phoenix Ban could not believe that Alex Fernandez was Buddhist, too.

‘What ethnicity are you?’ asked Ban, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.

‘Spanish,’ said freshman philosophy major Fernandez, responding to Ban’s raised eyebrows: ‘Oh, I was raised a different religion.’

‘Can you believe he’s Buddhist? It’s such a small world,’ said Ban, tapping a friend on the shoulder.

This was a typical conversation at the first-ever Speed Faithing, an Israel Week event put on by the Interfaith Student Council on Monday at the Winnick Hillel Center. It opened up conversation about the values and beliefs of different faiths.

Participants sat on the ground in pairs and rotated clockwise every five minutes to face a new partner and topic. The structure started out with a two-minute time limit, but conversations flowed so smoothly that it was a shame to stop them, said Ismail Pathan, an organizer of the event.

Pathan, a junior finance major, read prompts for each conversation that hit on deeper topics as time went on. The conversations started with sharing favorite movies and ended with stories of taking initiative to change the world.

The Interfaith Student Council chose to host the conversations speed-dating style instead of finding people from different religions to stand on a stage and to list textbook facts. No single person represents the people of an entire religion, said Leah Nussbaum, an event organizer.

‘We’re really going to try to stick to what ‘I believe’ rather than what ‘we believe,’ so it’ll be more about values — what I think, why my religion’s important to me,’ said Nussbaum, a freshman selective studies major.

Paired for one conversation, Carolyn Fine and Samantha Schnapper already knew each other before the event. Fine, a sophomore advertising major, and Schnapper, a sophomore history and education dual major, talked passionately about what Jewish fasting traditions mean to them.

Hunger is an issue the Interfaith Student Council stressed in its conversations because it is common to people of every religion, Pathan said.

Even though students usually stay away from discussions of religion and politics when meeting new people, sophomore communications design major Sylvia Boyd said the experience was enlightening.

‘Most people my age don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to be friends with you because you’re Buddhist, or you’re Jewish and I’m Christian,’ she said to one partner. ‘And I think that’s something new. It’s something unique to our generation.’

Boyd told her partner that she would like to get to know more people of the Islamic faith so she could help prove stereotypes wrong. She wasn’t the only one.

‘A lot of people don’t know Muslim people, and they get what they know about the religion and about the people from the news,’ Pathan said to the group after expressing his concern that people don’t know enough about one another.

The apathy of college students is what Emma Goldbas, a sophomore international relations major, is researching for a class project. She said the enthusiasm of the participants defied what she had previously thought.

‘I think it’s really cool that you guys came and were able to talk about getting involved in religion,’ she said, addressing the crowd. ‘And especially at a university where everyone’s more concerned with partying and having a good time.’

Ban’s opponents nodded as they sipped cans of soda, leaning on their pool cues. Announcing that he believed in karma, Ban clanked a striped billiard ball into a corner pocket.

sfanelli@syr.edu

Published on March 5, 2012 at 12:00 pm