Rev. Mark E. Fowler from the @tanenbaumcenter joins us this week and discusses his journey from a Presbyterian upbringing to becoming an interfaith minister. Rev. Fowler guides Tanenbaum to the fulfillment of its mission to promote justice and build respect for religious difference by transforming individuals and institutions to reduce prejudice, hatred, and violence. He is a graduate of the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, is an ordained Interfaith/Interspiritual minister, and is a Dean of second-year students at One Spirit Interfaith Seminary. In this episode, he explores the concepts of interfaith and interspirituality, emphasizing the importance of community and understanding among different faiths. Rev. Fowler shares insights from his work at the Tannenbaum Center, which focuses on combating religious prejudice and promoting justice. He reflects on personal experiences with spirituality, the impact of wounds from religious traditions on peoples’ spiritual journeys, and the intersection of faith and activism.

Takeaways

Reverend Mark Fowler emphasizes the importance of community in interfaith work.
Interfaith work involves knowing one another as neighbors and supporting each other.
Interspirituality transcends traditional interfaith concepts, focusing on shared humanity.
Tannenbaum Center aims to combat religious prejudice and promote justice.
Personal experiences with religion can shape one’s spiritual journey significantly.
Wounds from past religious experiences can influence current spiritual exploration.
Christian privilege can be an invisible barrier to understanding religious diversity.
Engagement in interfaith work can lead to healing and community building.
Joy can be found in spending time with family and friends.
The importance of investigating the relationship between culture and religion.

Chapters

(04:23) Understanding Interfaith and Interspirituality

(09:13) Personal Journey and Spiritual Background

(18:21) The Role of Tannenbaum Center in Interfaith Work

(27:31) Navigating Privilege and Spiritual Identity

(33:12) Finding Joy and Community

Resources:

Tanenbaum Center: https://tanenbaum.org/
Mark E. Fowler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-fowler-9468b36
Follow Tanenbaum Center on IG: @tanenbaumcenter
Join our online community at Sanctuary Collective Community

If you want to support the Patreon and help keep the podcast up and running, you can learn more and pledge your support at patreon.com/queertheology

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.

(9s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy. And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how Tuning each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. Hello. Hello. I’m excited to bring you another guest interview on the Queer Theology Podcast. Today we are talking to Reverend Mark E Fowler, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Tannenbaum, a secular non-sectarian nonprofit, providing thought leadership, innovative trainings and comprehensive solutions that foster respect for religious and non-religious beliefs and practices.

(52s):
Its mission is to promote justice and build respect for religious difference by transforming individuals and institutions to reduce prejudice, hatred, and violence. As CEO, Reverend Fowler is responsible for all of tenant bomb’s departments, the design and implementation of all tenant bomb trainings and the expansion of tenant bomb programs nationally and internationally. Reverend Fowler is a sought after keynote speaker and facilitator in all of tenant bomb’s core program areas, and has addressed organizations globally on issues of equality in race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. Recently, Reverend Fowler delivered the keynote at the 2020 Diversity Best Practices Emerge Conference was featured in a fireside chat with Robert Cook, CEO, and president of F IRA’s 2020 Diversity Summit, and continued in his role as navigator at the 2020 unveiling of out Next’s latest curriculum outta the closet and into the C-suite.

(1m 42s):
Reverend Fowler earned a BA in English and Education at Duke University and was trained as a mediation and conflict resolution specialist with the NYC Department of Education. Reverend Fowler is also a graduate of the One Spirit. Interfaith Seminary is an ordained Interfaith slash Interspiritual minister and is a Dean of second year students at the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary. We are so glad to have you here today, Reverend Fowler. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, Reverend Mark, thank you so much for being here with us today. It’s just a joy to get to talk to you and share your story and share your work, And I know our listeners are gonna be really jazzed to hear about it. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. So we’d like to start these interviews by asking if we were out at a queer dinner party or maybe like a church coffee hour, how would you introduce yourself to someone that you’re just getting to know?

(2m 30s):
Those is probably two different locations. Sure. Give us both of those answers then I wanna, I wanna hear the, the coffee hour and the cocktail party answer. Right. So at a, at a cocktail party or at a, a dinner or something like that. I’d probably say that I’m Mark, that I’m a native New Yorker, have been doing work in and around the community from a spiritual perspective for probably about 20, 25 years. And that includes being members of various different religious communities. I think if I were just kind of like hanging out at the church social, I’d probably talk about or say that, you know, I’m Mark Fowler, native New Yorker.

(3m 15s):
My journey started in the Presbyterian Church in Harlem and has kind of made its way through a number of spaces to now being a practicing interfaith Interspiritual minister. Yeah. And so can you talk about what interfaith means to you? I know lots of, it’s kind of a buzzwordy thing And I think lots of people, especially from Christian backgrounds, have good intentions when they head into interfaith work. But so what does that, what does that look like for you? Yeah, so personally, first I think I would say that I was not a person who was necessarily looking or searching for an Interspiritual path, and primarily because I grew up in a Christian environment, Presbyterian in Harlem, as I said.

(4m 5s):
And there is sometimes this, there are lots of assumptions and stereotypes about the difference between the black church experience as a theological precept and black people going to a church. And there’s kind of like this idea that, you know, there’s always, you know, tambourines and Hammond organs and you know, visitations of the Holy Ghost and all of that. And that was not my early experience. My experience in our Presbyterian church was one, things were a little bit more solemn, there were anthems, but it was a much more kind of relaxed, if you will, worship experience.

(4m 46s):
And for me, there weren’t other members of our family that practiced a faith different than the one that we all generally like went to. And so even in growing up in Harlem, like there was a Catholic church, which was predominantly InCorp, you know, had black congregants. There were places where other religious organizations gathered, but there wasn’t a lot of interaction between them except for if people happened to know each other in the buildings or the neighborhoods in which they lived. But there wasn’t a lot of visitation back and forth as I would grow older. Interfaith really did have to do with coming in contact with having some understanding of, and in some instances, beginning to practice or consider practices in traditions outside of the ones that I was familiar with.

(5m 40s):
When I think about interfaith work today different than in interfaith experience, interfaith work is often because we’re in the United States, most everything is kind of colored by Protestant Christianity in particular. But they generally, they tend to be spaces where people kind of like put their toe in the water at the, the very highest level of just meeting and knowing people of other traditions in deeper practices. It is communities that consciously and actively come together to know one another as neighbors and to be able to be of support to one another in times of trouble.

(6m 22s):
So an example of this for me, several years ago, there was a rabbi who was taken hostage in their temple via gunman himself and two other congregants. While that was going on, he had been a member of an interfaith group of religious leaders in their community. Nobody called them. As soon as they heard that the rabbi was in trouble, they self dispatched to that location to take care of his people while that horrible situation was being dealt with. And for me, that’s kind of one of the highest levels of interfaith experience and interfaith cooperation because you are no longer just like a representative of your faith.

(7m 10s):
You are a person that I know you are a member of my extended family and community, and if something happens to you, that’s wonderful, I celebrate that. But if there’s something that happens that’s troubling or there’s trouble, we are here for that as well. And I would say that inter spirituality is even a different construct than interfaith. Oh. So I, I love the distinction that you just made between an interfaith experience versus interfaith work. And not to like, I dunno put words in your mouth, but it, it’s, it sometimes feels like interfaith experiences might be a little bit like a melting pot, whereas like interi work is like everyone still remain retains their distinctiveness, but you’re working sort of together honoring those differences and working together like amongst and within them.

(8m 1s):
So yeah. Yes. And then, so I had a follow up question, but now I wanna know more about this inter spirituality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So into spirituality is an ideal theological concept that I think really came into more knowledge, or at least was published about in the late nineties, early two thousands. There’s a book called The Mystic Heart, and then there’s another book called The Interest, the Becoming Interspiritual Age. And in both of those books, it talks about kind of like the condition that would exist beyond interfaith work as, as we were just been talking about it.

(8m 41s):
So where the concern for human humanity and the concern for human beings is outshined by any individual theological concept. And if anything that which we say we believe is actually in service to this larger ideal of global community, that there is no separation between people. There may be differences, but there’s no separation, there is no experience superior and inferior. And that whatever the goals and challenges we have of the day are for all of us to meet in a place that leaves us all.

(9m 26s):
Well, I love that. I love that. So the example that you shared of interfaith work was obviously a very sort of heightened emergency situation in your work at the Tanenbaum Center. Like what does that interfaith work look like on sort of an ongoing basis? Yeah, so at Tannin Bombs, first of all, we are a secular and non-sectarian not-for-profit. So we are not a religious organization ourselves. And that can get, you know, weird because people hear the name Tannenbaum and they automatically think that we are a Jewish organization aligned with Judaism, et cetera. We’re named after the Rabbi Mark Tannenbaum, and in particular because of his interfaith work before his death.

(10m 12s):
But we are not a religious organization. So a lot of our approach to this work is from a practical perspective. And how do you build, well, our mission is to combat religious prejudice, to promote justice, to build respect for religious difference. And so some of the ways that we do that are providing people with tools, resources, skills, so that they can navigate the religious diversity or the religious environment that they find themselves in. And with a goal of people being able to build bridges, relationships, coalitions, et cetera, that honor their individual faith journey.

(10m 57s):
Or even the journeys of people who don’t ascribe to a particular faith who are unaffiliated or atheist, agnostic, spiritual, but unaffiliated. All of those that we are trying to provide in the content areas in which we work an opportunity to consider what are my own biases and obstacles to really understanding and respecting the experience of someone, and how do we actually build, how do we address the concerns that we have, the communal concerns that we have where we find ourselves. Yeah, I know with this type of, you know, values driven work that the, the personal and the professional are often very much intertwined.

(11m 37s):
And so I would love to sort of rewind a little bit for you and can we sort of dive into you, you touched upon it a little bit, but sort of what is your background and experiences with religion like growing up and into adults? Yeah. And how has that shifted? What stayed the same? Yeah, what, what was the journey to hear? Yeah, so as I said, I, you know, grew up in a Presbyterian church in Harlem. I went to a Catholic junior high school in my neighborhood in the Bronx, where at the time, in seventh grade is the year, usually people participate in confirmation. And so I remember coming home and there are classes that are like built into the day, like there’s religious instruction classes.

(12m 18s):
So I remember coming home at one point and telling my mother, oh yeah, we’re getting ready for confirmation. She’s like, yeah, you’re not gonna be doing that. Like, you can go to the class all day long, but you’re not gonna be pre, you’re not gonna be like confirming yourself as a Catholic. Yeah. And I was kinda like, oh, okay. I mean, I didn’t know that there was anything, there wasn’t, it wasn’t presented as something that was wrong with Catholicism. It was just kind of like, you have a faith tradition and that’s the one that you’re going to follow. Was a little bit unchurched for a number of years because my mother decided, and we just, my sister And I didn’t really get along with some of the other kids in the church that we went to.

(13m 2s):
So we were happy to not go. And my mother had some concerns about like the church leadership at the time. So through high school I was pretty much unchurched. When I went to college, I started singing in the gospel choir And I had never sung in a gospel choir before. I’d never had that experience. And so during that first year, there was like, you know, learning this different wonderful music, but then there was this inner experience of God that I had not experienced before. And that was something that definitely continued through college and through that experience.

(13m 42s):
And then I joined new church that my mother had become affiliated with in the Bronx, and they refer to themselves as a non-denominational church that’s welcoming of all people. And so you had still, the majority of the majority to almost all of the congregants were black, but had come from a variety of experiences. Yet the church itself really kind of modeled the pastor’s training. And so it kind of operated as a Baptist church to a certain degree. And that church still exists. And I’ve had the honor of now preaching there after having been a member more than 20 years ago.

(14m 24s):
What, and then personally like, yeah, and then personally like meeting, like, you know, a friend of mine who is an AAN priestess and who was doing, who had been trained in and was doing indigenous practices and work and doing readings and things like that, which was also something that I had not experienced before my barber at one point. And at that time I actually had dreadlocks who was a Buddhist, who invited me to come to the temple to, you know, to meditate and chant. So I was just being introduced to other people’s experiences.

(15m 4s):
And I would say, again, it wasn’t so much that I was on this journey to find various experiences, but they were kind of finding me. And then in the early nineties, I joined a church called Unity of Fellow Unity, fellowship of Christ Church. Church started in Los Angeles as an AIDS ministry because at that particular time, as people were dying of aids, churches were not always funeral realiz people who had died of aids. And so within the LGBTQ plus community, there were people who had been ordained in a variety of traditions, and they started providing that service that grew into a church and social movement.

(15m 52s):
And I was a member there for many years. And that one was very much kind of like spanning a little bit of indigenous African ancestral tradition to Baptist and Pentecostal moments. So there was a lot that was happening inside of that experience as well. And I would say when I started working at Tannen Bound, what I started to experience in a different way, not necessarily so much from the personal expression, but really considering all of these traditions and people that I had never really thought about or knew about in depth or detail before, what was their lived experience in terms of how they were being treated equitably or not in the areas in which we work, which are education, healthcare, the workplace, and in peace building, or some might refer to it as conflict resolution still.

(16m 52s):
So that’s kind of been the journey. And then at in 2010, I decided to go to One Spirit, interfaith Seminary. And while I was a member at Unity, I had thought about pursuing, becoming a deacon. That did not happen while I was there, but there had been this earlier call to be of sacred service. And when I decided to fully answer that call, the interfaith model was one that was really appealing to me. Yeah, that’s really cool. I, my, my mom is a big, big, like we also grew up, I grew up going to Presbyterian Church and now I’m Jewish, but she’s like dabbling in Unity Foundation.

(17m 42s):
It’s much more her speed. I know when you were talking about sort of the ways in which different traditions were sort of like finding you, I I’m thinking of two different types of progressive Christians, LGBT Christians, and one is the sort of like, bring it on. I wanna like sort of sample everything. And then there’s another sort of archetype where I think it’s like, oh no, I can’t sample other things because like, those aren’t mine to, to take. And so I, I’m like curious sort of like your thoughts on the, like the, like what are people who are maybe grew up Christian and are sort of, maybe I’m still Christian, maybe I’m not still Christian, like maybe I’m curious, but I’m not exactly sure And I don’t know how you feel about religion.

(18m 29s):
Like what are some words of wisdom that you might have as they sort of deconstruct, reconstruct, find their spiritual footing? I don’t know how wise they’ll be, but Sure. The, the words that I’ll share. So I think there are a couple of things. One is if there are experiences that people have, and this is regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. But if there are experiences people have had where there is a wound or there is some kind of spiritual injury, that can often be what’s determining and deciding where and how to follow and what I want to explore, what I don’t think is open to me, et cetera.

(19m 14s):
And I do think that there, it’s important to at least be able to identify those wounds and consider how there might be some ongoing healing around that wound so that it closes over maybe the course of your life where there’s a scab for a period and then the scab falls off and then there’s new skin and then the skin feels in. Like I feel that to connect two different bodies of work I’ve participated in for a short period, I was, I worked in an organization that supported people who were HIV positive and or trying to remain negative.

(19m 57s):
And one of the things that I learned as I was being introduced to case management was for some people in recovery, depending on when they started using a particular drug, their emotional development stopped at the time that they began using and became addicted. And I have found that model to be helpful in thinking about how people pursue their spiritual life. So depending on where and when and how that wound happened, some people may find themselves wanting to explore a spiritual life, but emotionally may be responding to it from six or 10 or 13, 20, 25, whatever moment that was, that kind of interrupted, that natural experience is something that has to be like dealt with and adapted.

(20m 47s):
And I do think, in my experience, I, I’ve served as a dean at one spirit, and one of the things that I’ve often seen kind of consistently in classes is that people come to, into spiritual work in some ways because of that wound or being disassociated from a tradition that they were a member of. And what ultimately people find is that there is some reconciliation that was really beyond their imagination of reconciling with the tradition of their, their, the beginning of their journey or where that wound happened as a way for them to move into sacred service.

(21m 31s):
So there are any number of traditions, including non-Christian ones that require an adherence and almost a rejection of other traditions. But I think what people find in their lived religious and lived spiritual experience is that you can try and not see similarities in the ways in which people worship and believe, but you’re gonna see them. And the question becomes how are you gonna respond? Where what is black and white and right in front of you appears because it will. Yeah. It’s like we all use candles, lots of us use scents.

(22m 13s):
Most of us use our bodies in some way. Like Yes, yes, there are, there are all of these places of convergence that have to do with the experience of human beings seeking the divine in the ways in which they give language to that. Yeah. You’re also, And I love how you were like, I don’t know how wise this will be. And then it was just, I mean, just fire. So I, I often tell this story. I first told it a million years ago, close to 20 years ago when I was doing some activism on the equality ride, speaking at a conservative Christian college about, and we sort of like merged the story of the Garden of Eden and Genesis and this sort of my first gay relationship, but as a teenager, And I, like, I keep coming.

(23m 0s):
I mean, I keep on coming back to it partly because it really resonates with folks, but it’s sort of become like one of the cornerstone stories of mine. And I, And I think actually in coming up with that talk for this school was like when I really shifted in my head from like, I think it’s okay to be gay, to like I know it. And I had, And I had never until this moment realized like, oh, well, when I was a teenager was when I first had that conflict between my faith and myself. And so it like makes sense that EI was in my twenties by this point, but like going back and revisiting that moment and saying like, here’s how this is holy was so, yeah.

(23m 45s):
Like, oh yeah, of course, of course. That’s why that story in particular Yes. Means so much to me. And so, oh, that’s just, I’m, I love it. I’m seeing it on, anyway. It’s really cool. Thank you for that insight. I wanna talk more about like tenant balm and your work there in particular, we’ve sort of, given that the high level, I know that you do, you know, some events on life, some events in person in different cities. Like what is, for someone who’s not yet a part of the work, like what is, what are some like ways in or Yeah. Yeah. So there are different ways in, in our education work. So first of all, one of the things I just want to shout out my communications team for is that they do an amazing job maintaining all of our social media presences, our website, our YouTube page, all of those are places where there is, there are resources, recordings, et cetera.

(24m 37s):
In our education work, it’s pretty much directed towards teachers, But we increasingly are doing more work with parents and doing more work with school personnel broadly defined and occasionally more work with students. And so there are, there’s all of the resources that we have, but there are often trainings that are done online where people can participate in our workplace work. We do a lot of work with global corporations, large not-for-profits and government agencies. We have two convenings a year. One of ’em, which is gonna be next week, excuse me, our Religious Diversity Leadership Summit. We’re gonna be holding it in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute.

(25m 20s):
And that is our general audience conference. So people who are intrigued and interested in the idea of religious diversity, inclusion, and belonging in the workplace. We often have people who are members of, or leaders of employee resource, group of faith-based, employee resource groups, chief human resources officers, chief Diversity officers. And we’re really just presenting information from a variety of speakers and panels on what are some of the current trends and topics that are of interest to people. We also convene what we call the Religious Diversity Symposium. And that is particularly for senior leaders to really think about and strategize what’s the long-term vision and goal within their companies and their institutions on building a culture that is respectful of religious differences, including the experiences of people who are completely unaffiliated from religion altogether.

(26m 19s):
In our healthcare work, we do a lot of webinars for healthcare professionals and those involved with providing care to people who are not medical providers on the ways in which patients and families make decisions for their care that are based in their religious and spiritual beliefs. And in some instances, those who do not have a belief and may be in a healthcare institution that is faith-based in some way. And how do they navigate their experience. We’ve created curriculum for nursing students, medical students, residency programs, and we have a book that we wrote called The Medical Manual for Religiou Cultural Competence. And then in our Peace building work, I think the most direct access is through the case studies.

(27m 3s):
So we’ve written two books that are volumes of the work of our peacemakers in action who are women and men religiously motivated working for peace in active conflict zones. Their life or their liberty may have been at risk. And one of the things that we found was most important was that finding people who were relatively unknown, who you are not gonna see on CNN, you’re not gonna hear on religion news service or W or NPR, but they’re doing the work at the grassroots level and their commitment is inspired by their religious and spiritual beliefs. So now, we actually, a couple of years ago started moving towards a podcast model for our case studies.

(27m 44s):
And so we have two of our peacemakers, Dani Jira from Sri Lanka, and the Reverend Jackie Mana Puti from Indonesia. Their case studies are actually podcasts that people can listen to and can hear their story and their voice. And where can folks find that? On our website@tannenbaum.org. And you can just tool around to the different programs and you can find, if you go to tannenbaum.org/peace peace building, you’ll find access to the ca to the podcast case studies. Great. And we’ll put links to all of these things in the show notes. Of course, yes. You mentioned, you mentioned religiously motivated, and so I Yes.

(28m 25s):
Obviously, you know, as you said, Nan Baum is a non-religious, non-sectarian nonprofit, but of course, the people who are do the work, I imagine many or most folks are religiously motivated Yes. In some way. And so, but I, And I know also for many people, sometimes justice work or activism or peacemaking feels like maybe something separate from like their religious or the religion that they were, are used to. And so in what ways does sort of your faith or religion motivate you towards this type of workout? Like how are those intertwined for you personally? Hmm. No one has ever asked me that question before. Brian. That’s a great question. So the first job that I applied for at Tannenbaum was to be the educator and trainer for what then was called the Religion and Diversity Education Program.

(29m 17s):
Hmm. I had been a public high school teacher for 11 years here in New York City. I had been a trainer in a program at the Anti-Defamation League called the World of Difference Institute. I had actually done some work around coaching people and professional development, but, and had never really, and had been a spiritual person or involved in religion and spirituality my whole life. But I was never, ever seeking a job that had anything to do with religion. And when I saw the job description, I was like, that is really interesting. It wasn’t something that I was looking for, but when I came across it, I was kind of like, huh, this is an interesting way to kind of, you know, spend time while you’re making money.

(30m 0s):
So when I started at Tannenbaum, it wasn’t so much driven because I felt like it was, being at Tannenbaum was fulfilling a spiritual mandate for me. As much as this is a topic that, or this is an, an area religion is something that has been helpful, useful, has supported me, And I wonder what it’s like, Hmm. Within the first two years of working at Tannenbaum, one of the things that I came across was an article that was written around white Christian privilege and Christian privilege in particular.

(30m 43s):
And it was built around the idea of Debbie McIntosh’s article on unpacking the in invisible knapsack around white privilege. But this author identified that, so I can identify as white, but I’m also Jewish and there are some privileges that come with Christian privilege that I don’t get. So he then kind of took the concept and personalized it as a, a clinician, because I believe he’s a, he was a, a therapist, I believe. And just talking about like his lived experience that also is impacted by Christian privilege. I had never thought of my religious identity as one in which I experienced privilege.

(31m 30s):
Hmm. So being, being a black man in the United States, being a gay man in the United States, I was all kinds of, of acquainted and had all kinds of evidence as to the places and moments where I was not treated equitably and didn’t have to surrender any of that. But this was a moment where I had to, I, I really came to this thing like, huh. So as black as I am, and as gay as I am, because I come from a Christian background, not even practicing as I did as a child, there are things in life that I have privilege around. There are concerns about daily living that I do not have simply because I come from that background, not even fully fully practicing it any longer.

(32m 20s):
So I would say for me now, my kind of like moral drive around being a tannenbaum and leading tannenbaum has to do with that realization that I probably had about 16 years ago. That there’s a responsibility that I had and have as someone who was raised Christian in the United States and even has had an education in what it means for me personally to be a person who respects various religious and spiritual traditions and the experiences of people who are not connected to religion at all.

(33m 1s):
Yeah. It’s, you know, that’s one of the ways privilege operates right. Is that you don’t see it when you’re the beneficiary of it. Right. And I, you know, I, I know that I, my friends who are trans have talked about, especially who’ve been like, oh, when I transitioned, I suddenly, I like really got a crash course in it because I like saw the ways in which the world treated me differently. Yes. And I, as I’ve been, as I converted to ju to ju to Judaism a few years ago, I’m like, oh, I like, I, I, yeah, I see it. And I, I, I think that, like, I oftentimes hear people say like, well, America’s like not a Christian nation. And I’m like, I don’t know, like ask any non-Christian, right.

(33m 42s):
Like, ask anyone who’s like something else, right? Like, if you’re like an atheist, but your parents celebrate Christmas and you celebrate Christmas, like Yeah. Yeah. Like, you’re not Christian in some ways, but like in other ways you kind of are. And so like yeah, I think one of Those things that’s really interesting, sort of be on the other end of it and be like, oh yeah, like the America in particular is like really oriented around Christianity, whether that’s Jesus Christianity or Christmas Christianity. Like they’re, they’re both expressions of, of it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that there’s, there’s something about when things become implicit, and we generally tend to focus more on the explicit because that tends to be the shiny ball that people can kind of like look at and scream at and react to.

(34m 30s):
But what we don’t necessarily take enough time to consider is how long it took for things to, that were and are religious to become such a part of the culture and the experience that nobody even thinks about its relationship to religion any longer. It’s just the way it’s or the way it’s supposed to be. And those are usually good catchphrases as to, oh, there’s something going on, there’s something more that I need to investigate here. So your work at Tannin Bomb, obviously there’s like very specific sort of channels and areas of focus for people who are gonna be the, the most likely to get involved.

(35m 16s):
You know, healthcare professionals, corporate leaders, things like that. If there’s just someone at home listening and they’re like, I don’t know, I’m just like a, I’m like a queer person and I’m like really interested in what Reverend Mark here is saying, And I like, I, I’m like, I’m hungry for more. Like, what are some suggestions for of steps that those folks might, might take? Like is it getting involved with you somehow? Is it practices for themselves? What does that look like? So I think one of the things that, well, there are a couple of ways. So one is we have had a Faith and Pride series for going on for a couple of years. And I would really encourage people to check that out just to see not just, you know, my mad rantings, but you know, what are other people from other traditions talking about in terms of their experience of faith and pride.

(36m 3s):
Because we really are trying to, and would really welcome, like if people wanted to share, we have kind of like a, it’s through a device called a system called Memory Fox, where people can like, respond to some prompts about their experience of their intersection, of their life, of faith and, and their life and pride and like how does, how do, what are some of the lessons they’ve learned and experiences that they’d wanna share. So that’s one way for people who just wanna learn more about Tannin Beum. We have something called Coffee with Mark. I mean, I, I, it, it just, I can’t barely get it out of my mouth ’cause it’s just so crazy to be talking about yourself in the third person. But it’s the opportunity for members of our community, both old and new, to find out kind of like, what are the new things that we are doing and what are some of the projects that we’re working on?

(36m 55s):
And really to ask people, answer people’s questions about, about our work. So those are two really good, immediate ways to get involved. Cool. And it also might be that they could nudge folks at their work, people and leadership, or at the employee resource group representatives to go to go check you out too as well. They, you know, you know, if it happened that way, that would be okay. Like it wouldn’t be a bad thing. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Well, so if like folks want to stay connected with you personally and or tenon bomb as the organization Yes. Like, what are the best ways to do that? Yeah, so I am on LinkedIn, so anyone can find me as Mark Fowler, Mark E Fowler on LinkedIn.

(37m 40s):
We also have an Instagram account, which is, I believe at Tannenbaum Center. And I we’re, you know, constantly posting. And that’s an account where there’s, it’s, you know, you’re gonna get a response immediately. We’re also on Facebook and on X so people can follow me and follow us there as well. Awesome. And we like to close out by asking like, what’s one thing that’s bringing you joy these days? Oh, definitely spending time with friends and family is, is bringing me joy. This past weekend I was at my grand and niece’s, if that’s the way you say it, my niece’s daughter’s second birthday party. Mm.

(38m 20s):
Nothing better than, you know, two year olds and other kids running around, jumping in and out of the pool, eating stuff that they shouldn’t, all of that. And spending time with, you know, my sister and her children and my mother. And you know, this is a time for community And I really do, I’m mindful of the numbers of people on the planet that do not have an experience of community. So when, when I I, I don’t take for granted the numbers of places and spaces where I am welcome as that line from Cheers where everybody knows my name and they don’t necessarily care about what I do, but they just know and appreciate me.

(39m 9s):
So that’s something that gives me joy. I love that. Well, thank you so much for being here, Reverend Mark, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Brian. The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do at Queer Theology dot com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration, fort LGBTQ Christians and straight cisgender supporters. To Dive into more of the action, visit us at Queer Theology dot com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. We’ll see you next week.

The post Exploring Interfaith with Reverend Mark E. Fowler appeared first on Queer Theology.

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