Who the hell is Eboo Patel?

Besides the 2016 Commencement speaker

The Tab recently broke the news that this year’s commencement speaker is Eboo Patel.

But what do we know about him, and why is he coming to Wake Forest?

He is a member of President Barack Obama’s inaugural Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships and is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based international nonprofit that aims to promote interfaith cooperation.

The organization “seeks to promote a different narrative that instead emphasizes cooperation among different religious and secular communities. IFYC works to foster what it calls a critical mass of interfaith leaders on college campuses that will later craft and drive this dialogue of interfaith cooperation.

IYC helps students on over 200 campus worldwide.

Inspired partly by Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement and educated in Sociology and religious integration, Patel founded a cooperative living community for activists and artists in Chicago.

Furthermore, a friend of Brother Wayne Teasdale and blessed by the Dalai Lama, Patel was inspired by his work with religious leaders in order to develop IFYC. His mission in life is to bring young people of different faiths together around service and dialogue.

He shares his views on the blogs of the  Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, NPR and CNN. He has also published several books– “Acts of Faith:The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation,” “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America,”  “Hearing the Call Across Traditions: Readings on Faith and Service,” and “Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action.”

Eboo Patel is a National Rhodes Scholar

Eboo Patel preaches religious tolerance and hopes to make interfaith cooperation a social norm within our one generation. His open-mindedness, toleration, and optimism for our generation will make him an extremely interesting speaker, and yes, he is quite different from Stephen Colbert’s comedic remarks last year. 

Most people do not know who Eboo Patel is. However, when I explained his accomplishments, awards, and accolades, the general response was, “Oh wow! That’s pretty cool.”

The Wake Forest campus is buzzing, and students are excited to see how a liberal, diversity-focused speaker will address a homogenous crowd, Wake Forest.

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