At Maryland university, students use photos to build interfaith understanding

BALTIMORE (RNS) — At a table with other University of Maryland students and campus leaders, Keven Guruswamy, a senior psychology major and Seventh-day Adventist, held up a photograph of his collection of Bibles arranged on a shelf.

Some of the Bibles were in Tamil, others in English. Some he acquired himself and others were gifts, including from his grandmother, who has since died. He said his experience growing up in a religiously mixed family — which includes Hindus and Christians — introduced him to “the beauty of interfaith cooperation.”

The photo was one of several Guruswamy brought to a two-day retreat in mid-October as part of “ Picturing Pluralism,” a semester-long photography and dialogue project bringing together about 30 University of Maryland Baltimore County students and 10 faculty and staff. In a fraught national political climate for college students, the goal is to create an experience on a religiously diverse campus that leads to meaningful connections.

Faculty interviewed by RNS described UMBC as one of the country’s “most religiously diverse campuses,” pointing to a student culture spanning multiple branches of Christianity and Islam as well as Jewish, Sikh and Dharmic groups. For example, student groups have recently hosted a Muslim women’s fellowship, a Sikh festival, a queer Orthodox Jewish gathering and a South Asian Christian organization, according to photography project organizers and participants.

Yet the university, founded in the 1960s and which today enrolls about 13,530 students, lacks some of the religious infrastructure found on other college campuses, said Matt Hoffman, director of the Center for Religion, Spirituality and Pluralism on campus. UMBC has no formal chapel, and demand for prayer and religious practice space means different communities use the same facilities.

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