OCU’s first ever “Better Together Week” to surround Love Not Hate Day began April 3.
The Wesley Center and OCU Better Together partnered to host events every day from April 3 – April 7 to promote religious tolerance.
These events include: The World Religions Expo April 3, a photo activity during Evensong April 4, Love Not Hate Day April 5, free lunch with interfaith guests at the Wesley April 6, and an Islam and Interfaith Panel Discussion April 7.
Love Not Hate day is from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. in Tom and Brenda McDaniel University Center. There will be free food donated by Sodexo, t-shirts to tie-dye, and a performance by OCUpella.
“It is very intentional to include people of many faiths and of no faiths,” said the Rev. Dr. Rodney Newman, director of student religious life. “It is in our best interest as a nation and as a democracy that we find ways to understand each other and to work together with one another.
These sorts of events are a way to remind us of the importance of that and to give us the opportunity to talk to each other and express the differences that we have.
The tradition of Love Not Hate day started eight years ago and has been celebrated every year since. In 2008, the theater department was doing “The Laramie Project,” a play surrounding the hate crime and murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming.
Westboro Baptist Church announced that they were going to come and protest that. There was a discussion on campus about how to respond. The decision was that instead of confronting them, they would greet them with people sharing the opposite message. Jennifer Long, the director of student religious life at the time, had 1,000 t-shirts printed and distributed to students with the message “Love Not Hate.”
Every year, Love Not Hate Day is sponsored to recognize the OCU community upholds those same values. The day is a celebration and is one of the Wesley center’s biggest events of the year. All who want to attend are invited.
Alanah Hosford, cellular molecular biology sophomore, expressed an appreciation for the sentiment behind this event.
I think the fact that OCU tries to promote a message of kindness and inclusion is great.
The Interfaith Youth Core’s Better Together Day is April 7. Love Not Hate Day was moved up a week to correspond with that. By having a whole week of events, Newman said he hopes that the message will be amplified and emphasized.
“Religious diversity is a fact of life,” Newman said.
Interfaith work is not an attempt to find the lowest common denominator of what we all agree on. True interfaith work acknowledges honest conversation, which means there will be disagreements. We do so respectfully, while genuinely trying to listen to each other and to understand and cooperate with the other.
This will not be the last Better Together week. Newman said he hopes to make this a continuing event each year.
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