Hawzah News Agency-One such gathering already unfolded at St. Bartholomew Catholic Church in Columbus, United States, which also hosted the most recent Muslim-Christian panel Nov. 13 before a diverse audience of about 140 people.

“Ideally, we’d like to find a busy, public lunch place where we can be very visible,” participant David Harpeneau said.

The idea is to show people that Christians and Muslims not only can grow in respect and harmony but can build true bridges of fellowship and friendship.

Harpenau was a Catholic member of a mostly Catholic-Muslim panel that began meeting regularly in 2015, a few months after St. Bartholomew Catholic Church was spray-painted with graffiti phrases taken from Quran. From those meetings sprang a Jan. 20 public panel discussion highlighting bridge building between Christians and the Islamic Society of Columbus Indiana.

Harpenau said the latest scheduled panel chat was aimed to be “an attempt to create greater understanding of the differences and similarities between these two faith traditions.”

He mentioned that bringing issues to light more than once can be helpful to reach a larger audience.

“We often learn in very small steps,” Harpenau said. “And we often change our perceptions about others in gradual, small steps.”

David Carlson, a philosophy and religion professor at Franklin College and a frequent speaker in Columbus, spoke on interfaith bridge building, a topic he has covered a number of times locally in the past four years. The planned local monthly lunchtime gatherings are an idea borrowed from Carlson, who meets weekly with a Christian-Muslim group at Shapiro’s Deli in Indianapolis.

Carlson has been adamant, especially in the past several years, that Hoosier Muslims he has met and become friends with are peace-loving people and not to be confused with followers of a totally different, radical form of Islam highlighted via the terroristic Islamic State.

Hapeneau said he believes peaceful interfaith dialogue “will identify the signs of hope in our our nation and the world as people of different faiths realize our diversity is something to be celebrated.”

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