By Lauren Reed

Hello, my friends!

Thanks for visiting me here! I created this blog mainly as a means to keep Butler’s community up to date with what I am doing in my internship for the Center for Faith and Vocation in the Fall 2012 semester. My official title, the Butler University Interfaith Liaison, is a new position that Judy Cebula, the CFV director, and I are sort of honing as we go along, which is very very exciting! Internships like this have existed in the past, but in different capacities and with different duties. The fantastic thing about this year is how diverse my responsibilities are; I’ll be attending religious and spiritual group meetings, connecting with campus leaders, and researching interfaith initiatives, but I’ll also have a chance to attend and even help facilitate religious events, network, have coffee with Butler students, help religious and spiritual groups teach and share with each other, blog about everything (something very different for me!), learn about other religions and practices, and, most importantly, EXPERIENCE things that are bigger than myself, which is, to be honest, why I have a religion minor in the first place. These are things that I would have wanted to do anyways and now I’ll just have a reason to do them, even when the semester gets busy. So, I feel pretty lucky to have this internship and I hope you’ll keep up to date with this blog so I can share my experience with you!

A little about my current path. I am a senior dance performance major with a minor in religion. I call these my useless degrees (don’t worry; I don’t actually mean it). I don’t intend for either of these areas to be a lifelong career- I want to dance until I fall apart and then get my Masters in Student Affairs and continue immerse myself in religions as a lifelong passion. I guess, if this gives me one advantage, it’s that I’m not wasting any time here at Butler. I know that what I’m doing here won’t be forever, so I want to do it all now. This year will be especially tumultuous for me since auditions for dance companies are coming up in the spring and I have absolutely no idea where I’ll end up if anywhere at all. I don’t like not knowing. The upside to this is that I have all the more reason to throw myself into my last year here and soak up everything I can. Another reason I am so grateful for the opportunities this internship will give.

So that’s that! Thanks again for stopping by and I hope you’ll visit again soon! (Is that the right blog lingo? I have so much to learn…) I’ll post in a few days with some exciting college interfaith initiatives/partnerships formed by Obama!

Peace,
Lauren