This week, I am celebrating the 5th anniversary of the publication of The Interfaith Family Journal. I am so proud of this little workbook. There is no other book anything like it. It provides support to couples and families of any or every religion, or none. I created the journal as a resource for therapists, clergy, and interfaith families. It encourages you to engage with family history, practices, and beliefs, from birth to death. And it seems to be appreciated by everyone who uses the writing prompts, the conversation guides, and the creative projects.
But don’t take my word for it! Read the reviews posted after publication:
“The questions asked get you to dig deep and make connections. “
“As I got deeper into the material, I learned that this wasn’t just a book that could help interfaith families, but ALL families.”
“This generous book invites all of us to dwell in the richness of life’s most enduring and meaningful questions.”
“The Interfaith Family Journal would be a perfect gift to any engaged couple!’
“It will make such a positive difference in the lives of so many families – of all configurations.”
The last five years have been frankly terrifying as we navigated the pandemic. And with the state of the world, and the national election looming, it may feel difficult to remain optimistic. In these times, we all need hope and inspiration. For me, our ability to build relationships across boundaries of religion and culture can still provide that inspiration.
So, I encourage you to share my sense of hope, and give the gift of this affirming resource to your therapist, your clergy, and friends and relatives entering interfaith relationships. And if you’ve already read it, please do help the book reach more people by posting a review. Thank you!
In 2023, after years of pandemic torpor, I somehow emerged into renewed energy and inspiration. So, drumroll, here are the top five Being Both 2023 highlights:
The Audiobook. This was the year I finally achieved the dream of publishing an audiobook for Being Both, just in time to celebrate the book’s 10th anniversary. Because accessibility is a social justice issue. Right away, the audiobook hit #1 in two different Amazon “Hot New Release” categories. Buy it now, on CD or download, for the therapists, clergy, and interfaith couples in your life. And for anyone who was waiting (10 years!) for the audiobook.
The Videos. After discovering that there were no videos on multiple religious practice for use in high school or college courses, I started making them. The “Got More Than One Religion?” series is available on youtube. Share them with teachers and professors you know who teach “world religions” in social studies or Religion 101 courses.
The Curriculum. I also discovered that there was no curriculum on multiple religious practice for high school teachers. So, with support from the Interfaith Center of New York, and in partnership with social studies curriculum expert Dr. Tim Hall, I created a teacher toolkit. Share it now with the high school social studies teachers in your life.
The Podcasts. I have been a guest on over a dozen podcasts since Being Both first came out, including several this year. The deepest conversation this year was probably with Addie Pazzynski, for her excellent podcast, Called to Be Multiple. Tune in!
The Course. After creating the videos and high school curriculum on multiple religious practice, I was invited by Rabbi Lex Rofeberg to facilitate a three-part online mini-course at Judaism Unbound’s UnYeshiva. “Jewish and…Buddhist? Pagan? Christian? Can You Do That?” starts in just three weeks. So, sign up now to join the conversation!
I began today walking my dog across a field of fallen leaves rimed with sparkling frost. My camera could not seem to catch the multicolored light, even when I crouched down on the ground, at which point my giant rescue mutt thought this was a marvelous game and tackled me. So I put away my phone, and tried to just breathe in the crisp, clean air of winter’s arrival. I am a child of New England, and so I love winter with the passion of someone exiled to live in the south, and with the anticipated grief of all humans living through climate change.
Note that my mood has been, well, moody. The war rages on. The dark closes in. The final days of any year can trigger depression. And so we try to lift our spirits with sparkles–leaves edged with sparkling frost, Hanukkah candles, strings of lights, sugar crystals on cookies, sparks from the Yule log.
But today, at least, I have cause to celebrate! After ten long years of trying to dream it into existence, the audiobook edition of Being Both was published today. You can now borrow it at your library through Libby, or download it through Barnes and Noble, or Google Play, or Audible, or anywhere else you find audiobooks. This is your chance to hear me narrate my own story, and the stories of so many others, including a new Author’s Note reflecting on the past decade.
Immediately on release, the audiobook went to #2 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases in the Religious Education category. (There is no interfaith or multifaith or interreligious category, which is frustrating). Finding Being Both can still be a mystery. Where is it shelved in bookstores? Parenting? Religion? Memoir? From the outset, this book about people who defy categorization, has defied categories. And yet, it persists.
Please help spread the word, and bring affirmation and support to interfaith families who might listen to, rather than read, books. Let your clergy friends know. Let your therapist friends know. They all need to understand the people–parents, children, clergy–who speak up and speak out in this book.
And thank you, again, to everyone who has supported Being Both for the past decade now. I remain convinced that love that crosses boundaries, love that models peacemaking, is needed now more than ever.
The first three episodes in my new educational video series “Got More Than One Religion?” each run less than two minutes by design, in order to stay short and snappy. But brevity is often at odds with complexity. So I wanted to expand on some of the terms listed in episode one, “Got More Than One Religion? What Do We Call That?”
Note that people don’t tend to use academic terms to describe their own identities. Most people who practice more than one religion will give very specific and personal descriptive labels, such as “I’m a Quaker who also practices Buddhism,” or “I’m a Catholic exploring the African religious heritage of my ancestors,” or “I’m from an interfaith Hindu and Jewish family, and we celebrate both.”
Nevertheless, academics and theologians, who often are working in separate academic silos, have created a rather confusing profusion of terms in order to study and describe us, and I thought it would be good to gather them here, and provide context for which terms are used by whom, and why.
Multiple religious belonging (MRB), or double-belonging. The MRB term was developed by Catholic theologians, and later adopted by Protestant theologians. It is still used by some academics. One problem with MRB is that some theologians who use the term continue to express doubts about whether people can or should practice more than one religion. This term is also problematic because it is a reminder that religious institutions are the gatekeepers for who will “belong” and be accepted as a member. So for many of us, this term is linked to the exclusion (including rejection from religious education programs, and the investigation or expulsion of clergy) that has occurred when people claim, or defend, practicing more than one religion.
Multiple religious practice or participation (MRP), religious multiplicity. These terms acknowledge that people sometimes do participate in or practice more than one religion, whether or not religious institutions condone it. Pew Research uses MRP, and internally, I am told, even pronounces the acronym “merp.” I find these terms to be relatively neutral, accurate, and useful, and frequently use them myself. However, these terms are also a real mouthful, and will sound like academic jargon to the casual listener.
Mixed, mixedness, mixité. In Europe and some other parts of the globe, sociologists and anthropologists have done a lot of important work on Christian and Muslim interfaith families in particular, including on the religious practices of the interfaith children. The couples they study are often made up of immigrants (from Africa, the Middle East, or Asia) marrying into established or colonizing white Christian populations. As a result, these couples are often intercultural and interracial as well as interfaith. European academics use the term “mixed” to refer to these couples (and their children) and find the “inter” labels negative. But “mixed” doesn’t work as well in the US context. Because of the history of race in the US, “mixed” is usually interpreted to refer exclusively to racially mixed couples or people, who are not necessarily interfaith. And mixed couples, or people, even when they are interfaith, do not necessarily practice both religions.
Bricolage, liminal, syncretic, borderland, hybrid, hyphenated. These are various terms also used by sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies professors. Syncretism has been vilified by some religious authorities as “forbidden,” but has been resuscitated by some academics. The issue I have with “hyphenated” is that when two identities are hyphenated, the first term because a modifier and the second term becomes a noun and gets more weight. So, Jewish-Buddhist sounds like a Buddhist who still has some lingering Jewish identity, whereas Buddhist-Jew sounds like someone who still has a strong Jewish identity but who has taken on some Buddhist practices. The hyphen does not give the two religions equal weight. So while some individuals may choose to describe themselves accurately with a hyphenated identity, I don’t think hyphenation works very well in describing the overall phenomenon.
Bi-religious, non-binary religious identity, spiritual fluidity. These terms may sound like they are being borrowed or appropriated from the evolving language used to describe gender and sexuality, and in some cases, they are. However, in some cases they have been used for many years by multiple religious practitioners to refer to themselves. The synergy between spiritual fluidity, and fluidity of gender and sexuality, is reenforced by the fact that interfaith couples are more likely to be LGBTQ couples, and vice versa. So in many cases it is LGBTQ people who are noting the synergies, and using this language to describe their own religious or spiritual identities. (Note that Duane Bidwell makes the case for using “spiritual fluidity” in his important book, When One Religion is Not Enough).
Interfaith. Interfaith is the term many (most?) people use to describe their own families formed by people of two or more religions. And it is used by some children who grow up in “doing both” interfaith families to describe their identities. Some people object to the “faith” part of “interfaith” because it prioritizes the Christian (or Muslim) emphasis on belief as a synonym for religion (see below). But “interfaith” remains the best search term to find resources and support. This is why it continues to be the most common term I use in writing about both interfaith families, and interfaith identities.
Intermarried. This term is used by traditional Jewish institutions, particularly in the Conservative movement, and by some other religious minorities that oppose “intermarriage.” I’ve written a whole piece on why I try to avoid this term, for the Forward. But the most obvious reason is that not every interfaith family centers on a marriage–couples have children without marriage, and a family could consist of a single parent with a child.
Interreligious. Substituting “interreligious” for “interfaith” appeals to people who want to avoid the “faith” in interfaith, as a synonym for religion. Some religions are faith-centered, notably Christianity and Islam, while others could be said to center more on practice than on faith (Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism). The two terms (interfaith and interreligious) share another issue, in that they are both often used to describe interfaith/interreligious conversation, engagement, or programming, all of which may actually exclude interfaith families (read more on this here). So the fact that these word can have two separate and potentially exclusive meanings is problematic.
Interspiritual. This term is often used to describe practices that draw on many spiritual traditions, not just two, or, not just the ones in your heritage.
Multifaith. Both interfaith and multifaith sometimes refer to programming or engagement that brings people together for a panel, a meal, a course, or community service. I have seen people argue strenuously that multifaith should refer to families, and interfaith should refer to programming. But others have argued that it should be the other way around. To me, interfaith works better for families, since so far, most of them still only include two religions (though that is changing). And multifaith works better for programming, since at this point in US history, we should be including more than two religions in what used to be called “interfaith dialogue.” But I have made my peace with the fact that people will go on using them interchangeably, and that not everyone agrees about which should be which.
Being Both, Doing Both. These are the terms I described at length my book Being Both, to refer to interfaith families who practice both religions represented in their families. It is gratifying that others now refer to “doing both families” or “being both families” when discussing interfaith family practices. But these terms only make sense within a conversation about religion, not as stand-alone phrases.
My little sister and I, in our interfaith family in 1964.
We have reached December, the last month of the fourth year of the pandemic, in the midst of an excruciating war in Israel and Gaza . And whether you feel like you are in the mood for dancing or not, December means that many interfaith families are about to join in the dance of Hanukkah and Christmas. This year, Hanukkah begins and ends before Christmas, with a comfortable cushion of space between them. But no matter how the dates fall, and whether you celebrate one of those holidays, or both, or neither, all of us need to cultivate empathy for our partners and family members in December, while also practicing self-care. And we need to be mindful of how this season can trigger both joy and sadness.
Just before the pandemic, I created a new resource, The Interfaith Family Journal, to help any and every family figure out how to honor diverse religious or spiritual or cultural roots, and formative childhood experiences. This workbook can support you in creating a plan for December (and every other month) that works for your family. The Journal traces a process of writing prompts, discussion topics, and creative activities. The result is a unique resource for therapists, clergy, and interfaith families (and makes a great holiday gift for all those folks). Here, I distill from the Journal eight ways to plan for a deeper, more mindful, and peaceful season:
1. REFLECT
Ask yourself about how you experienced December as a child. What did you celebrate? How did you feel about the dominant Christmas music, decorations, movies, in American popular culture? Were you aware of being part of the religious majority or minority? How have those feelings changed over time?
2. DISCERN
Ask yourself which of your childhood winter holiday rituals you want to continue in adulthood, or take on in the future? What traditions do you want to transmit to any children in your life? Is this because they have religious meaning, spiritual meaning, and/or cultural meaning for you?
3. INQUIRE
Ask your partner(s) or other intimate family members or co-parents how they felt during December as children. Do you understand how your childhood experiences overlap, or diverge? What are the differences? What are the synergies?
4. EMPATHIZE
Ask your partner which public expressions of the season–-public town displays, on the radio, on TV–might–make them feel joyful, nostalgic, sad, or alienated, this year. Do you understand why? How has this changed for them, over time? How has it changed with the loss of grandparents or parents? Note that secular or cultural does not necessarily mean less important than religious or spiritual!
5. SENSE
No matter what religious (or non-religious) affiliation(s) or identity you have chosen for your family or children, are there multi-sensory December experiences that you would like to retrieve, or pass down, or take on? Music? Recipes? Crafts? Is your partner okay with tasting, smelling, hearing these with you?
6. PLAN
The number of celebrations can feel overwhelming in December, especially for interfaith families. Make a plan! Which holidays this month will you spend with which extended family members (and when)? Which will you spend with friends? And which will you spend with just your partner(s) and/or kids? Make sure that your partner feels comfortable with the plan.
7. GIVE
Whether or not you celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah as a family, December can be an inspiring time to think about helping your community, and to prepare for New Year’s resolutions. Especially in this ongoing pandemic, and ongoing war, community service can help to keep the midwinter blues at bay. Talk to your family members about starting a tradition of December giving, or December action, to help to heal your community, or the world.
8. SNUGGLE
No matter which traditions you celebrate, the scientific reality is that this is the darkest and coldest time of year in the northern hemisphere. It is probably not a coincidence that near the midwinter solstice, we try to brighten our world with the Yule hearth, Christmas lights, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa candles, or firecrackers for the Chinese Lunar New Year. So be gentle with yourself, and with your family members, as we move through the darkest days of another challenging year, until we tilt again towards the sun.
Note: The first version of this piece was published in 2019 in Psych Bytes, a publication that subsequently folded in the pandemic.
Ten years ago today, Beacon Press published Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. I have devoted the past decade to helping families to bridge religious boundaries, promote interfaith education for all, and advocate for social justice. My work has been lifting up the voices of those in interfaith families, in order to help the world to understand that we are, by our presence, reducing religious intolerance and creating a more peaceful world.
To celebrate this 10th anniversary, I had long planned a trip to New York City to finally narrate an audiobook edition of the book. Of course, I had no idea when I planned this trip that I would be heading to New York just as a war was breaking out.
The Film Center Building, at 630 Ninth Avenue
In the studio
I think I was in shock, as many people were, but I had a director and engineer and studio booked, thanks to all of you who donated to the Kickstarter campaign to make this happen. So I got on a train from DC to New York, and then made my way to the studios at John Marshall Media, in the striking art deco Film Center in Hell’s Kitchen, to begin recording. There, my director May Wuthrich and my engineer guided me in the surprisingly complex art of narration: breathing in the right places, speaking with the right expression, scanning ahead for the sense of each sentence, nailing every pronunciation, and making inevitable edits as you go along.
For three days, I sat in a soundproof booth, reading the 237 pages of the original book. In a new Author’s Note for this 10th anniversary edition, I reflected on what has changed, and what has not, in the past decade. And I recorded a thank you for top audiobook supporters, including Paul Miller, Kathy Hill-Miller and Fred Miller, Margaret and Rich Kelley, Larry Ravitz and Marika Partridge, and Wid Chapman and Shachi Shah. Each day, utterly exhausted after hours of performance on this tiny stage, I commuted “home” on the subway to the lovely oasis provided by Wid and Shachi.
Despite spending my days shut into a glass booth with no cell phone or internet, of course I was thinking about Israel and Palestine the entire time. I was worried about friends and family, about missing the news, about what I should or could be doing in response, and, honestly, about whether the stress would affect my voice. And I was worried that my book, especially ten years on, would seem irrelevant, or naive, under these harrowing circumstances.
But no. This book, these families, and this movement, continue to give me hope at a time when we all need it so much. I felt this with my whole being while reading these words from the final chapter of Being Both:
As I write this conclusion, religious hatred continues to instill fear, incite violence, and prevent peace in the world. Christian supremacists open fire on Sikhs and burn American mosques to the ground. Muslim extremists drive moderate Sufi Muslims out of northern Mali. Jews, Muslims, and Christians still cannot seem to find a way to coexist peacefully in the Middle East. None of this violence has purely religious roots: the causes include ethnic and socioeconomic differences, political manipulation, territorial disputes. Yet demonizing other humans as religious “others” makes such violence psychologically possible.
Reading those words into the microphone, words first drafted more than a decade ago, they could not have seemed more relevant. And so, I made a resolution. I will continue this work of fostering peace across boundaries–and love across boundaries–until the day I am unable to work at all.
During these pandemic years, I did not feel very productive. Some people wrote novels, baked bread, started new careers. I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles, and a lot of worrying.
But then this fall, I felt a surge of wild back-to-school energy. And so now I have a slew of new projects, including the Kickstarter campaign to fund the Being Both audiobook. And in a matter of days, we’ve almost reached that funding goal.
And just today, in celebration of the Jewish New Year, I rolled out a new website. Why? A new website gives me the opportunity to re-envision my work, ten years after Being Both was first published. Since then, I have shifted from someone who published a book, to someone with two books, and a busy interfaith couples coaching practice, who also teaches workshops and courses. But also, there are two different kinds of resources I wanted to highlight on this new site…
1. First, I wanted a place to showcase all the interfaith family communities that provide interfaith education to interfaith kids, in DC, the NYC area, Chicago, and online. I am hoping there will be more such communities, as time goes by, including communities for families other than Jewish and Christian (for instance, Hindu and Jewish). I always had a list of these communities buried in the Resource section of my old website, but now they’re on the landing page, front and center, where they belong.
2. And second, I wanted a place to showcase resources I am producing, for educators who want to include the concept of multiple religious practice in their courses on Religious Studies 101, or World Religions. This summer, I created the three first videos in the “Got More Than One Religion?” series. And there are more videos to come. Then, I worked with curriculum expert Tim Hall PhD to create an Educators Toolkit with lesson plans developed in conjunction with the videos. You can find the Toolkit on the websites of the Interfaith Center of New York, and at Religion Matters, both organizations that supported this project, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities. So check it out. And send the link to religious studies professors and social studies teachers you may know.
And, thank you for being part of this global online community!
Next month marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. Over the past decade, I believe this book really has changed the way people think about interfaith families. And to celebrate, I am inviting you to help reach more families with the support they need to honor both religions.
A growing number of people listen to books rather than reading them. This includes young people, old people, neurodiverse people, and busy parents and professionals. Having an audiobook edition of Being Both has always been my goal, in order to increase the accessibility of this work.
Why now?
Being Both happened to come out just before audiobooks became standard practice in publishing, and that always made me sad. Meanwhile, Being Both is more relevant than ever now, with one in five U.S. adults growing up in an interfaith family. This is the book I was put on this earth to write—it’s my legacy. And to celebrate the 10th anniversary, the time for an audiobook edition is now.
Why do I need your help?
The process of recording, editing, and producing a quality audiobook is expensive. I am fortunate to be working with award-winning audiobook producer May Wuthrich. And we have booked several days in a NYC studio for the recording. I am excited to be the narrator, which seems appropriate given the memoir aspects of the book, and also saves on costs. But the bottom line is that I have spent much of the past decade devoted to unpaid work (library and bookstore talks, writing blog posts, appearing on podcasts, running Facebook groups) in service to interfaith families, with the message that there are multiple ways to have a joyful and successful interfaith relationship. I believe I have helped to create a sense of community, and actual communities. But being a writer can be lonely work. This Kickstarter is as much about affirmation as it is about funding. If Being Both has had meaning for you, has had some impact on your relationship, your family, your life, please make a gesture of solidarity by contributing.
Join me!
Show your support for interfaith families who need a boost of inspiration, who need this audiobook, by making a contribution. We have 30 days to make the goal, just before my recording dates for the audiobook. And because this is Kickstarter, there are fun rewards for different donation levels, so go read about those. And then join me in funding this 10th anniversary celebration of interfaith families around the world.
Exciting news! Today I’m announcing the kickoff of a new project to create resources on multiple religious practice, for educators. And I just posted on YouTube the first three episodes of a video series on multiple religious practice, under the title “Got More Than One Religion?”
I created these new resources to support high school and college educators in including multiple religious practice in courses such as Religion 101, or World Religions, or Religious Pluralism. The “Got More Than One Religion?” series aligns with going beyond the old model of presenting religions as discrete, mutually exclusive, and unchanging. The videos (each less than two minutes) introduce students to the idea that individuals can and do participate in more than one religion (or claim complex religious identities), for many reasons, in many places around the globe.
This is a complex subject (pun intended), and I take full responsibility for the inevitable distortions that occur when you compress any complex subject into a two-minute video. But I have been fortunate to have advisors for this project: Dr. Tim Hall, a K-12 Social Studies expert, who is the President-Elect of the North Carolina Council for the Social Studies and founder of the resource website Religion Matters, and anthropologist Henry Goldschmidt, Director of Programs at the Interfaith Center of New York.
In conjunction with the videos, Tim and I are also creating high school curriculum modules on multiple religious practice, and we’ll be beta-testing those with high school teachers starting now, so stay tuned for more on that. The primary texts include Being Both , and Duane Bidwell’s book, When One Religion Isn’t Enough. So if you know anyone who teaches religious pluralism in high school or college, please forward this post to them.
And if you are an educator, you can join the conversation this week! Tim and I will be co-hosting a “twitter” chat on multiple religious practice, for social studies educators, next Monday at 8pm ET, under the hashtag #SSChat. I hope both high school and college educators will join this online conversation, so hop on with us.
The Backstory:
How did all this come about? Ever since Being Both was published almost ten years ago, I have been dreaming about ways to support educators in including the “doing both” and “being both” ideas in classrooms. My first chance to really make that happen came last summer, when Henry Goldschmidt invited me to talk to high school teachers gathered from around the country to experience The Religious Worlds of New York Summer Institute, a marvelous, immersive program at the Interfaith Center of New York. At the end of my conversation with these high school educators, several of them said they would love to include the idea of multiple religious practice in their courses on World Religions or Religious Pluralism. But they needed curriculum and resources in order to do that.
Next, Henry took a leap and offered to make that happen, by pairing me with curriculum expert Tim Hall, a participant in the Summer Institute. And the Summer Institute was able to offer some National Endowment for the Humanities funding, through a grant to the Institute that covers associated projects by participants such as Tim.
So right away, I began sending Tim content and readings on multiple religious practice to use in developing the curriculum.
But then Tim asked, “Readings? Okay. But have you met any high school students lately? What we need is one-minute videos. Please send links to very short videos on multiple religious practice.”
And I replied, “Ummm, well, there really aren’t any. So I guess I need to make some!”
And that’s what I did, with the help of videographer Liz Porter. So far, we have created three episodes, focused on:
I already have ideas for more episodes, and will be looking for resources to fund the creation of more videos on this topic. Please reach out if you have ideas for episodes, or for funding.
Believe it or not, this is only the first of three projects I am launching in celebration of the upcoming 10th anniversary of the publication of Being Both. Kick off the celebration with me and send this blog post to your favorite high school social studies teacher or college religious studies professor.
Why am I reviewing a book that came out more than 50 years ago? Because the long-awaited movie finally opens next week.
As much as I loved this book in 1970 for its frank description of adolescence, the interfaith family subplot has always bothered me. The author did not grow up in an interfaith family, and had no direct experience of the matter. Instead, this beloved and iconic novel drew heavily on the myth of the stressed and confused interfaith child. You can read my perspective on all this today on the front page of Kveller:
Being Both 