UPIKE students and professors attend Festival of Faiths
0Written By Tori Breeding
On Thursday, April 26, Rob Musick, chaplain, and Sumer Bingham, assistant professor of religion, led a group of students to the 23rd annual Festival of Faiths in Louisville, Ky. The students present were Jennifer Smith, Coy Holstein, Everett Smith, and Tori Breeding.
The Festival of Faiths is a five-day, multi-faith celebration of music, poetry, art, film, and dialogue with spiritual leaders, practitioners, and teachers. This year, the Festival focused on the sacred insight of feminine wisdom.
The students attended two speaker panels durning the festival.
One was Dark Nights of the Soul, where panelists talked about suffering being an unavoidable part of the human condition. The most memorable speaker was Kenza Isnasni, a Muslim woman whose story about how, as a child, she watched her parents die at the hand of a racist shook the crowd into silence. Isnasni spoke about how this experience led her to find her family roots in Morocco and called her to help others through their suffering.
The other panel the students attended was the Culture of Addiction. Healers came together to show how accessing the feminine wisdom can help people to accept their deepest wounds and help them to forgive. The panel included two graduates from Thistle Farms, a no-cost haven for women who have experienced trafficking, violence, addiction, and abuse.
“The panels really helped me understand my suffering and heal,” Jennifer Smith, junior, said.