R & SL Day brings spirituality out of the Chapel

Mike Alberti Staff Writer

Different religious holidays pass throughout the academic year—observed privately and quietly in most cases. Today, however, Feb. 18, the office of Religious and Spiritual Life (R & SL) is dedicating an entire day to examining campus religion and spirituality.

This first annual R & SL Day will be held in the Chapel and the College Center is a collaboration between the RSL office and the 12 different campus groups that it advises and supports. It kicked off this morning with a mural project in the Chapel. The campus community was invited to participate in painting the mural, which is centered on religious identity at Vassar.

“We’re really...hoping that the mural project itself will be a chance for students to engage questions of religious and spiritual identity, and we think that our interns have really come up with a good way to do that creatively,” said Sam Speers, Director of the R & SL Office. “We haven’t had a day like this before and we hope to make it an annual thing. We hope that the combination of the tabling, the art project, the dinner and the panel discussion...engages the wider campus community,” added Speers.

The mural project will continue throughout the day, and the Office and the 12 student groups will be tabling in the College Center from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The groups will have a range of interactive activities, from prayer flag-making hosted by a Tibetan monastery, to Chai tea-making, quizzes, and arts and crafts projects.

“I think it will be really exciting to see these different groups on campus announce their presence and celebrate their tradition and identity with the support of the College, which is something they don’t get the chance to do in so big of a way,” said Margaret Spilman ’09, an R & SL Office intern and a member of Episcopal Community at Vassar College and the Ecumenical Protestant Group. “And it will just be a lot of fun,” she added.

At 5:30 p.m. there will be a student panel in the Rose Parlor, moderated by Professor of American Culture Randolph Cornelius and Professor of Cognitive Science Ken Livingston, that will focus on the question: “Are you presumed nonreligious at Vassar until proven otherwise?” The panel will be open to the public and will feature students from different religious and spiritual backgrounds.

Rachel Wetz ’08, an R & SL Office intern who will participate in panel, said, “We wanted the focus of the panel to go beyond the Office because it’s something that obviously concerns the whole campus. We didn’t want it to be the kind of panel that you go to in Rockefeller 200. It will be participatory. It will be more of an open discussion that will depart from the experience of the panelists.”

The day will then culminate in the Villard Room with a free dinner of Halal food ordered from the local restaurant Kabab Palace. The mural will then be moved to the Villard room to engender discussion, while R & SL provides music from different religious traditions.

While many different sources provided inspiration for the day, R & SL staff said that they wanted to reflect the diversity of students’ spirituality.

“People talk a lot about diversity at Vassar, but not religious diversity,” said Wetz. “We wanted to extend this conversation to the larger campus and explore the ways in which religion plays into people’s everyday life.”

R & SL Office intern Charmaine Chua ’08 explained, “A lot of people feel that since it’s a secular campus, there’s no place for religion here. We’re trying to make religious life part of the dialogue on campus.”

“I don’t think that at Vassar we take the time to celebrate people’s religious identities, where for a lot of people on campus it’s a really big part of who they are,” added Spilman. “We really need to recognize, celebrate and try to understand people’s religious beliefs and spirituality. Vassar can benefit a lot from exploring aspects of the community that usually go unheard or unthought of, and one of those aspects is religion,” she said.a