Rev. Jim Wallis remembers when he was organizing a protest in the rotunda of the nation's Capitol a few years ago. Leaders from a variety of Christian denominations were planning to be there - traditional Protestants, more conservative evangelicals, Catholics involved with social justice.

Then Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and a leading religious voice on issues like ending poverty and wars, got a call from Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and a strong Jewish voice on those same issues.

"Do you have room for a rabbi?" Lerner asked.

Of course, Wallis told him. During the protest, Lerner read a passage from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. Then he was arrested along with the Christian protesters and they all were taken to the District of Columbia jail.

There Wallis watched Tony Campolo, a Baptist minister, and Lerner, the rabbi, sitting on a bench engaged in a vigorous discussion about the meaning of Jesus.

"You all get arrested for your faith together, then you discuss theology," Wallis said, using that moment to describe the growing efforts to link sometimes antagonistic faith traditions around progressive issues. "What's going to bring us together is a common mission."

Wallis will speak about crossing religious boundaries at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 21, at Grainger Hall, 975 University Ave., at an event sponsored by the University of Wisconsin's Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions.

Wallis has been in the news lately for his efforts to forge a coalition of religious voices around health care reform. He has also taken on talk show hosts like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity over the accuracy and the tone of their opposition to health care reform proposals.

He suggested in a phone interview last week that faith communities might have a role to play in changing the nasty tone of the current public debates, in part by showing how historically contentious groups can work together. He also said that faith communities could provide safe places for public discussions by asserting that "we're not going to allow in our space this kind of vitriol and hostility."

Of course, Christians, Jews and Muslims (to say nothing of factions within each religious tradition) have no shortage of incidents in their past or present where beliefs were used to fuel hostility. Nowhere is that more evident than in the lands of Israel and Palestine.

But Wallis argues that even there, the faith communities ought to be taking the lead in conflict resolution, with faith leaders holding themselves accountable for looking for ways to make religion part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

He finds hope in the generation in their teens and 20s who are interested in service projects and in what other people believe. He pointed to the Interfaith Youth Core, developed by Eboo Patel, an emerging voice in the American Muslim community. That group brings together young people of different faiths to work on projects like building houses. Along the way, they begin to talk about what they believe.

Wallis offered the inspiring story of a young Palestinian Christian student at Bethlehem Bible College in the West Bank who went to Auschwitz, the famous Nazi concentration camp, where he fasted and prayed for three days in one of the death chambers to develop a deeper appreciation for what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s.

"I find that enormously helpful," Wallis said. "We need to accept a vocation of conflict resolution as a religious people."

Phil Haslanger is pastor of Memorial United Church of Christ in Fitchburg. phaslanger@gmail.com

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