Last year, BYU student McKay Bowman (Philosophy and Political Science) had a problem to solve: BYU’s Council for Interfaith Engagement and the Wheatley Institute had sponsored him to create an interfaith-related program. Unfortunately, the program he initially pitched to them didn’t work out.
As he pondered his next move, he read an article about the Kennedy Center’s #1 ranking for number of students studying abroad. He says, “That sparked a thought: so many students must be having interesting interreligious experiences abroad, just as I had during my international internship the previous summer. Yet there wasn’t a platform where students could gather and share their experiences. That thought turned into my core idea: a post-international program seminar designed specifically to help students articulate, through writing, the interreligious experiences they had over the summer.”
He explained his idea to Andy Reed and Mike MacKay, two of his mentors from the Department of Religious Education. When they liked his concept, Bowman met with Quinn Mecham, Associate Director for Academics and Research at the Kennedy Center for International Studies. Bowman already knew Mecham, having participated in his discussion seminar during the Global Religious Experience lecture series in the fall of 2022.
When Bowman pitched the idea to him, Mecham thought it was a great fit for the Kennedy Center’s focus on transformative international experiences and for the Global Religious Experience lecture series theme. And so, the Global Religious Experience Seminar was born.
The Seminar
Mecham quickly recruited Reed for the project, which Reed was happy to agree to: “I am constantly looking for ways to help students recognize the spiritual connections that emerge when they reorient themselves toward the holy,” he says. Reed was a perfect fit for the project, as he is the Richard L. Evans Chair of Religious Understanding and Chair of the BYU Council for Interfaith Engagement. The seminar became a collaboration between the Kennedy Center, Religious Education, and the Council for Interfaith Engagement.
Together, Mecham, Reed and Bowman began planning the seminar: fellowships would be given to a small number of student applicants who had recently returned from international study programs and wanted to discuss and reflect on their experiences related to faith and religion while abroad.
Student participants would meet once a week throughout fall semester at the Kennedy Center and, as Mecham explains, “engage with visiting scholars of religion as well as BYU faculty to talk about how seeing religion in other parts of the world helps to inform their faith.” They would also receive writing mentorship as they worked on essays about the way their international experiences shaped their faith.
Once they had the planning sorted out, it was time to solicit applications. Though they began advertising only a month before fall semester started, they received more than fifty applications for the twelve fellowships they planned to give out. “That response was when I first felt confident the program had a future beyond its first iteration,” Bowman says. “It wasn't just a good idea—it was something both students and faculty wanted to participate in together.”
One such applicant was Kiki Aldridge, a Public Health major who’d recently studied abroad at the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. “I thought that the idea was cool and would also stretch me outside of my comfort zone,” she says. “I had never attempted a writing project like it before!” Despite feeling some imposter syndrome (“I am not much of a creative writer or literary storyteller,” she says), she was one of the twelve students accepted.
Ponder, Discuss, Reflect
Once the seminar started, Reed and Mecham traded off facilitating student discussions. The speakers each week, says Reed, included “faculty from across campus and also a few individuals who were not from BYU but have written about their own experience and the experiences of others in sacred space and through spiritual processes.” They represented orthodox Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and Latter-day Saint experiences, and students were able to engage with and learn from them each week.
In addition to participating in the discussions, students were expected to write a final essay. Aldridge wrote her essay about her experience in the Cambridge Mosque, in conjunction with a reflection on a lecture from the classes at Cambridge. “It helped me process my experiences about shared sacred space,” she says. “I felt very hesitant when it came to writing in this style, but I learned so much! I learned how to slow down and take things in, and all of the meetings we did over fall semester helped my writing and critical thinking.”
Reed says, "We hoped that students would be able to connect their experiences as global citizens and as human beings to the spiritual moorings that are put into sharper focus when we are outside of our normal environment." A vital part of that process, he explains, is taking the time to ponder, discuss, and reflect on their experiences. “I think students were surprised at how meaningful some of those experiences were to them in their own development as students at BYU and as children of God.”
All twelve essays can now be read on the new Global Religious Experience Seminar website. For Bowman, reading those essays was the most meaningful part of the experience. “Anyone reading this article,” he says, “should take the time to read one of the student essays available on the Global Religious Experience site.”
Reed agrees, “Each of the students brought a unique perspective and also had unique experiences throughout the world on their study abroad programs. Reading each of those on the website will give individuals an opportunity to think about how impressive our BYU students are and how deeply they think about life and the spiritual parts of their personal development. Each of the essays shows what spiritual growth looks like, with its warts, challenges, and success as individuals search for meaning in the world.”
A Meaningful Experience
Now that the seminar is over, everyone involved agrees that it was a wonderful and beneficial experience. Aldridge was one of several students who submitted their papers to the Religious Education Student Symposium; she and two other participants had the privilege of presenting their papers at the event last March.
Mecham feels that the benefits to those who participated are threefold: “First, they got to be part of a community of other students who have also had international experiences and are interested in global religion, and they got to be part of student discussions. Second, they learned from a very interdisciplinary set of guest speakers who have thought and written a lot about religion. Third, they received writing mentorship to learn how to write about personal experiences and religion in a compelling way for their audience.”
For Bowman, whose idea sparked the entire seminar, the whole experience exceeded his expectations. “The central hope was always to elevate student voices. I wanted students to be elevated in how they thought and articulated their interreligious experiences. This was achieved directly through the seminar, which offered thoughtful instruction from twelve scholars and drew remarkable work from the students. I also hoped to elevate the visibility of student voices. This hope came from my realization that so many students are having interesting interreligious experiences, yet we rarely preserve or share them. Now, through the Global Religious Experiences site, student essays are publicly available.”
Applying for the Seminar
Bowman had another hope for the seminar that has also come to fruition: “From the beginning, I wanted it to have institutional support and the potential to become a recurring program. Thanks to the Kennedy Center, both are now a reality.”
As he hoped, the Global Religious Experience Seminar has become a recurring program; it will be held every fall. Interested students are encouraged to read more about the seminar and apply online. Applications are due on 15 August.
“Apply!” Bowman encourages. “You don't need to have participated in a religion-focused study abroad to be accepted. In fact, the majority of accepted applicants last year had not. What matters most is having an interesting and thoughtful proposal.”
Aldridge adds, “You will all come from different majors, but the group is the perfect size to where you still get to know each other and become better because of it. The setup was brilliant for encouraging collaboration while also still being a deeply personal and reflective experience.”
“For any students who are considering applying,” says Reed, “if they are interested in reading excellent literature, being inspired by other students and their comments and reflections, and joining with a couple of faculty in the process of learning more about what it means to be human and what it means to be created by God, then I think this is a meaningful class for them.”