Greg Voisen
Well, welcome back to Inside Personal Growth. Joining me from the good state of Michigan. Is that right?

Kelly James Clark
That is correct.

Greg Voisen
Is Kelly James Clark. And we're going to be speaking with Kelly about his new book, which is called Raging Fire. And we'll put a link to that. And he's going to hold up the book, right there, Raging Fire: What I've learned from Jesus, the Jews and the Prophet. And this is an interesting book. And this is for those of you interested in spirituality and your growth in spirituality and expanding your consciousness. Our conversation is going to give you an opportunity to do that. If you want to learn more about Kelly, James Clark, you can go to kellyjamesclark.wixsite.com. That's where you can learn more about him. And this is not his only book. He has many books. How many books do you have to your publishing background?

Kelly James Clark
including books that I've added, edited, probably more than 3030.

Greg Voisen
So, he is not new to writing. And this book is definitely an opportunity for people to take a deep dive. And so I want to let them know a little bit about you. Kelly, James Clark is PhD, University of Notre Dame is distinguished professor of philosophy at Ivan Holden. Hall doon had been holding it see I got it wrong anyway, even though I told me that and diversity of Istanbul Kelly has held previous positions at Grand Valley State University, Calvin University and Gordon College and visiting appointments at Oxford University, the University of St. Andrews, Peking University in the University of Notre Dame, he's an author, editor and co-author of more than 30 books, including this one, we're going to be talking about raging fire of love what I've learned from Jesus, the Jews and the prophets. He's got other books called strangers and neighbors, friends, a Muslim Christian, Jewish reflections on compassion and peace. So look him up on the web. He also won third place in the Christianity, today's book of the year. But he said, which might not sound like much, but the Pope's book was eighth. So he writes broadly, and he speaks widely on compassion, tolerance and peace. And that's what we're going to be speaking with today. I can't remember did your forward on this one was the foreword it was the Dalai Lama or No, it's the Dalai Lama. Yes. Yeah. Well, when you get the Dalai Lama to write the foreword, Darren, that's a good deal. That's a good day, let me know I was not unhappy. No, you shouldn't have been unhappy. So you know, this book delves into a lot of things. And I've come up with some questions. So, my listening audience can get an idea of not only the book, but you as a person and also what they would want to take away at the end of this interview. So I'm really, because you've written so many other books. Kelly, what inspired you to write raging fire? And what do you hope and how it will impact the conversations around love? In all of these various traditions, but Abrahamic traditions, and traditional and traditional,

Kelly James Clark
yeah, I. So I, I, after 911, I became I had written academically about liberty and tolerance. And by that, I mean, I wrote articles that basically nobody read. And then after 911, I, I thought these things that I was exploring academically and abstractly, about liberty and tolerance were issues that were desperately needed in the public around the world. And I knew after 911 Although I don't think I had a Muslim friend, I knew after 911 that Christians would be very likely to blame all Muslims, for the attack on 911. And the Islam would be looked at as a as a religion of violence, and that Arabs would be viewed as kind of subhuman violent, camel jockeys. And I, I thought that that, that I had been working on tools that people could employ to resist that the intolerance that I saw coming. And so I began, I began to put together a book called Abraham's children, and it included essays by five Muslims five Chris Christians, five Jews, and they were prominent Muslims, Christians and Jews. And one was the former President Jimmy Carter. And he wrote a really nice piece, mostly about his reflections on peace in Palestine. And I will say, as he approaches the end, I had a grant and I offered each one of the writers $5,000. And in the end, when I had the money and went to distribute it, Jimmy Carter just said, give it to a charity that works on these issues. Everyone else was an academic, they were only too eager to get their $5,000.

Greg Voisen
Well, that's Jimmy Carter, I'm surprised he's gonna give it to Habitat for Humanity, which is probably where he would have liked to seen it gone. Yeah,

Kelly James Clark
he was very, extremely kind to work with.

Greg Voisen
I'm sure that I'm sure. And I

Kelly James Clark
got the former president of Indonesia, which is the most populous Muslim country in the world, and I and I'll say this, and hopefully this will strike a chord with your readers, I had no idea that Indonesia was the largest, most populous Muslim country in the world. I knew almost nothing about Islam, I'm embarrassed to say now, and I think a lot of us don't know much in the West don't know much about Islam, and we don't know many Muslims. And that I think it's to our detriment. At any rate, they published the book, we did a conference in Washington, DC, we also did a joint evening, in a church in Alexandria, Virginia, which is, I think, the most diverse community in the United States. And that that church wanted to do any event that involved Muslims and Jews. And I said, Well, I'll do it. If you serve them dinner, not just that you have dinner served, but you serve them dinner, then we'll come and we'll do something. And you because I think a lot of good things happen when people are in a position of being a servant and are passing food back and forth to one another. Anyway, they did that. To different Imams or mosques in town came and brought members of their mosque. One of the synagogues came, and they decided at the end of that evening after the program, that they would work together on poverty reduction, but there were values that they shared. But they didn't have to agree on what they thought about God or the afterlife. But that's okay. They agreed a lot about what should happen in this life. And that is people should not starve to death. And so

Greg Voisen
that well, and people, people, as you've said, should be compassionate with one another. Um, yeah. I mean, they, you know, what do you think is fueling your talk? This was a book called raging fire. Yeah. And you're talking about Muslims, but the anti semitism around the Judaism and the Jews is just in an all time high in almost every city. Yeah. What do you think's proliferating that particular kind of anger against I get that we've got Israel, we've got Netanyahu, we've got all of these other extenuating circumstances, but not a reason to go out and bonk people over their head that are trying to worship at their church, or their synagogue, I should say at their synagogue, right? Yeah.

Kelly James Clark
I mean, most synagogues in big cities in the United States have to have round the clock security. Right? By semanas. anti semitism is so bad. And yeah, it's not good. And so my very first chapter is called fear and the failures of love. And I work in cognitive psychology of religion, and I work with cognitive psychologists and social scientists and neuroscientists. And I think the most powerful motivator for most human beings most of the time is fear. I think we want to say love makes the world go round. And it it, it may make the world go round, but it's got to correct for all the fear there is in the world. And fear is a super powerful motivator and every not just politician. Or not. Well, I won't say every politician, many politicians prey on our fears, and make them worse. The media preys on our fears. We like bad news. We don't like good news. First, you know,

Greg Voisen
this old statement, right? Like I've done personal growth interviews here that the show is called Insight, personal growth. Yeah. And it's always been said, and you can put this any way you want psychologically, philosophically, theologically, but fear has always been said the false expectation appearing real. And, you know, it's like, yes, okay, I put it in my head and from a psychological standpoint, I believe that those Jews could be a threat. I believe those muzzle could be a threat. Yeah, what I don't get and here's where you deeply explore this theme of love across different religious traditions. What are some of the most surprising commonalities you found between Jews, Jewish Jesus, Jewish teachings, and Islamic principles? I think this is where the metal hits that pedal hits the metal. It's kind of like, if you picked up the Koran if you picked up the Bible, if you picked up these all of these various tools in your one person I can ask, you're gonna find common themes amongst all

Kelly James Clark
of Yeah, I, I didn't know about love. And each of these traditions I knew Christianity quite well, it's my own tradition. And I knew Judaism well enough, at least through the Hebrew Bible. And but I didn't know much about Islam. And I was asked to write a white paper for the Fetzer Institute on loving the Abrahamic traditions. And honestly, I came with my own biases, I thought, what I would find is that Jews were just tribal and parochial, and that love only extended to their Jewish neighbors. And that Christianity is universal love, and God is love, and all is good. And then in Islam, you would just find an emphasis on justice. And with trying to do good things to get into the afterlife. That's what I thought I would find. Instead, what I found was that all three religions demand compassion. And they demand it at all sorts of levels. And they demand it for the most. The most, I guess, outsider in society, the most oppressed, they they all demand it for the for poor, the widow and the orphan. I was shocked to find out that Islam says that you the aim that releasing slaves, they thought compassion required you to release slaves, you can't treat them like human beings if you if you enslave them. And so I found compassion at every level, not only for yourself, and your family, and for your kin, but also for your tribe and your community. And for strangers, which they call Islam calls them near neighbors, but people near you, but who are different from you and believe different from you and Islam. I grew up in a culture that had both Jews and Christians, and they were all the Prophet said, we all need to live together. We're all followers of God, we need to live together. But also, and this is the thing that shocked me, they all say that we we are required to show love in various ways for our enemy. And we're not supposed to fight and we're supposed to love them. And each of each of the traditions is unequivocal about about loving stranger, neighbor, and even enemy.

Greg Voisen
I think, you know, is is off the wall question but your your father passed away kind of recently, right? I have that correct? No,

Kelly James Clark
my father passed away. Actually, my brother has been in the hospital and nearly died, but my father died young. Okay, next one, he passed away. Okay.

Greg Voisen
Okay. I maybe have gotten that wrong. But you know, when we look at finitude, all religions are trying to allow us to come to grips with what happens afterwards. Yeah. Because we all look at this as the whole, you know, you can say, Well, are you afraid of death? Are you not afraid of that? Talk about the fears? You know, and obviously, these radical groups. And in particularly kind of Muslims, you were talking about the attack at the the 911. If you talked about justice, as well, I heard that mentioned. It's kind of like an eye for an eye at that point. And they didn't care if they died, and they were going to go up. I think everybody that's out there is like, well, how many virgins? Are you going to get afterwards? You'll hear people joke about that. Right? It's it's like, it happens everywhere. What is the what is the misperception that the public has about this? Muslims in this belief that they would go do something so heinous? And we're talking about radical ones not most of them? Because we got to divide this here. This is not all the people that are part of the Muslim religion. What would you say about that? Yeah,

Kelly James Clark
I so I work in religion and violence, as well. I don't talk about in this book. And let me just take the the leader of 911 I think it was Mohammed atta I think it's his name. And he wrote wrote this tribute to ally before he went and killed himself. So he wrote this beautiful tribute. And everyone said, Oh, he attacked because he was a Muslim. But while he was training for in the flight school in Florida, every night, he'd go out to a bar and get drunk, he snorted cocaine. His girlfriend was a stripper. He lived with her when she broke up with them. He snuck into her house, and she had a couple of kittens. And he tore the kittens into little pieces, and distributed his body parts all over the house. And I just can't find my cell thinking that he was really a very good Muslim. And, and but what he did was he wrote a document that tried to show he was, and he was just trying to cover up. In fact, he was yeah, he was trying to show to people that he was better than he was right? Reputation Management. And, of course, he didn't think people would know the secrets of his life. And I think that he, they attacked, mostly because they felt powerless. And they felt an injustice had been done to retribution kind of degree. And it was retribution. Not and it wasn't. It wasn't over religion, primarily, it was primarily over all sorts of things that happened in the Middle East, that that make people really angry, the number one motivator for mostly young men, if they're going to be radicalized is a sense of isolation, a sense of powerlessness, and a sense of injustice that they're going to right. Yeah.

Greg Voisen
And, you know, when you look at whether it's Ukraine, and at this point, Russia, and the war, and you look at the number of young men that are recruited by Russia, to fight in that war, you only have to follow the money, because they've been repressed so long that they can somebody can pay them some money to go fight in a war that they were impoverished before. And now they're getting paid to do something. Yeah, oh, well, who's going to take into account that I'm going to lose my life in the process of this? I mean, it's, it's really just almost totally diabolical. When you look at the scheme of, you know how that war is going in? The there's no reason for it at all. But back to your book, you discuss this destructive power of fear in relation to love. Can you elaborate on how overcoming fear this is a key one can lead to a deeper interpersonal and interfaith relationship, because you've mentioned fear now, five or six times. And I my sense is that, however, people are perceiving fear. It's normally a perception that's distorted. Yeah, normally.

Kelly James Clark
Yeah, I think that's right. Fear creates enemies when they're not there. Right? People, people can exploit our fears. I think most most of our so called enemies aren't really our enemies. I came to learn that 99.999% of Muslims don't want to kill us, and aren't terrorists and are a lot like you and me. So, coming to learn that I'm semi embarrassed to even say it now. But I have found in all my travels around the world, with Muslims, Christian Jews, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Dallas, Confucianism, it's pretty much everybody is the same as everybody else. They, they want to live in peace, they want a better life for their children. They want their children to get educated, they want to sleep at night, they don't have to worry about being on their head or them dropping bombs on someone else's head. That's the way most people are are like, and so then we, we generate these fears of these people who are just like us, you know, they're not killers. Some of their leaders can move them to kill, by preying on their fears, and our leaders can respond in fear to them, and it's a pretty it's a really deadly historical cycle. There's just no doubt about it.

Greg Voisen
Well, it's it's I think, it's I just doing an interview with a gentleman and his book is called open. And I remember him saying, Look, we become so divisive as a result of our beliefs around things we see on the internet. But, you know, in a hand he used an example where he himself had become completely convinced that anybody associated with the NRA was a bad person. Because of all of the gun, the shootings, but what he decided to do, and here's an interesting thing is he said, I was gonna go learn how to shoot a gun and see who the people were, because he never picked up a gun in his life. And he was surprised as he took on this journey, to go out to the gun range and learn about the people and the reasons as to why they were learning how to shoot guns, that they weren't that much different from him. Right? They did have other fears, but they were human beings with reasons that they had for that. And I think this goes around your narratives that you weave in, in the personal anecdotes and reflections. You have these personal and how your personal experiences meaning those personal experiences I just brought up, actually shaped your understanding of love and faith. Because we all have personal experiences that we carry with us that certainly shape our understanding of what love and faith is. What did you find out?

Kelly James Clark
Yeah, I want to say that just so your audience knows for sure that I'm a philosopher and I love arguments. And I think arguments are nearly totally useless. The what has been most transformative to me was not an argument there was a another person. And they were encounters surprising encounters that I had with people who are different from me. And my very first one that I write about in the book as I I was a conservative Protestant, fundamentalist and, and all the way through college, I was like that and I thought all Catholics were going to hell. I had arguments while Catholics were going to hell and I took them course from the Reformation and I, I had all sorts of reasons and data and history and, and then I went to Notre Dame, which is a mistake for people who think Catholics are going to hell, and I don't recommend it, you know, the premier Catholic University in the United States. And I started to meet a lot of Catholics. And I wasn't argued out of this, I just got to a point where I just couldn't believe they were all going to hell, I just thought these are really good people who are doing the best that they can to try to understand reality, and had similar experiences with Muslims. Getting to know Muslims is as fritton Muslims who friended me. I'd like to say that I was the great friend or here and I was the great lover here, but, but I thought, like intellectually, Muslims, Christians and Jews to try to get along a little better. But I wasn't really persuaded of, I guess the full humanity and sincerity of Muslims, tilts, some of them friended me. And the friendships are transformative. And I, again, I love arguments, but nothing was more important to me than people who friended me. Well,

Greg Voisen
you know, it, it is something that happens, and I don't think we intentionally do it. But many of us are not exposed to huge amounts of diversity. So you say, Well, what community do you live in? Do you have Hispanic? Do you have black people, the Muslims? Do you have Jews? Do you have whatever you do, but you're not really looking for it? You're like, you know, you're kind of going on with your life. And you you don't really realize how biased you become. Yeah, right. And I have a question for you.

Kelly James Clark
Just say one quick thing to that. Yeah. I have a friend who teaches at a seminary in town. And he had his seminary students who are mostly like in their 30s. Now they're not they don't go to seminary right away. Lots of times. Anyway, he asked them to keep track of, for one week, of every single person they met. And he had, I don't know, a dozen students, 16 students, and they came back and all 16 had only met people who are who believed like them had the same color skin. They there's a phone book, that's the Christian phonebook. So they, if your car needed to repair, you go to a Christian prayer repairment if you need bread, you go to the Christian bakery. Their kids go to Christian schools, they go to Christian youth leagues. So for one whole week, they never met anyone who was different from them. And I don't think that's unusual. And what that means is that if you think that compassion for people who are different from you is a good thing for the flourishing of the world. And you need the courage to step out of your comfort zone.

Greg Voisen
And yeah, it's a it's it's really a dichotomy. I know, I do work with the homeless. And frequently when I go out, I have to shift my perspective about, you know, well, who are these people that I'm giving a gift card to when? And how did they get here? And it's interesting how many times when you're paying more attention to who they are, than versus you by asking questions that are open ended around, how did you get out on the street, how immediately, they actually just didn't lie, they become alive, right? And you see them just as souls, walking the planet, who had a different course or direction that hit them, and usually financially or through drugs or whatever it might be. But the reality is the reality, you still have to show the compassion. And so, you know, in the process of writing this book, what I think some of the listeners might want to know where what are some of the theological, theological challenges you faced, especially regarding views that might diverge within the same fate? You know, right? Yes, that's what we're talking about here.

Kelly James Clark
So, so I learned this, there is no such thing as Judaism or like a stereotypical, stereotypical Jew, there is no such thing as Christianity. There are multiple Christianity's we all know this. We all know there's Protestants and Catholics and Eastern Orthodox and Baptists and Baptists that St. Most Baptists are not right enough. And so then there's Second Baptist and third Baptists, and the list could go on and on. And so there's so much theological diversity in every tradition, I had to figure out how to write about what I thought was common to the traditions. And I decided that I was just going to stick with their most sacred texts. So the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Koran, I use some a few other texts, but it doesn't take long before people start to diverge. And then when people start to diverge, even within a tradition, they start to fear and sometimes even hate one another. So I had to find within two, I had to figure out how within traditions, to cultivate a kind of common language. And I also had let the religion speak for themselves. So I think Islam has a really different view from the, from the Christian tradition, and maybe a better view, honestly, than the Christian tradition on love of enemy. Because what I argue is that love, the highest form of love, and each of these traditions is the raging fire of love that we feel something in our hearts, we don't just do things for people, you could go out to your homeless people and give them a bunch of cards, you could do something good, but you don't love them until you start to care for them. Right. And that takes a lot of work. And, and I could hear in your voice, how you work to create that compassion for them. That's the highest form of love. But it's really hard to have that for enemies.

Greg Voisen
Well, I actually, you know, I, I remind them of the things that they're doing because of my personal growth background. Like when I approach somebody, and the guy round him has six beer cans, and is staggering around and I'm saying, you know, this is not good for your life, nor are you going to get anywhere. And I'm actually preaching to agree, I'm the undercover evangelist. But I think it's important they hear because they don't hear that all the time. They're not being influenced other than the people around them who are other homeless people. Right. And so I think it's good for them to get a little bit of dose of medicine from me, who walks up and says, Hey, I want to help you. And there's no strings attached here. But I am observing something about your behavior, which if you really want to make a difference in your life, you need to change because you're not going to get anywhere the way you're going right now. And that's frequently my message. So what is one key message or insight that you hope readers will take away from the book raging fire, and they literally could, you know, right now just pull into their DNA and really become a better person as a result of reading your book.

Kelly James Clark
So I hope that they're inspired to, to, to fuel the flames of the fire for people who are different from them. So I hope everyone takes that away that and that you're you understand traditions that are different from yours. Better if you're an atheist, and you had really negative views of Muslim As Christians and Jews, I hope that you understand them and their traditions better. This is a book I wrote for everybody, but what can they do? What can they take away? I, I argue in the book that God may so love the world, but we finite creatures love, usually just one person at a time. And, and so I say that people should go out of their houses and walk down the street, because in the United States, it's not uncommon to have a, a Muslim, Jew or a Christian, a black person, a Hispanic, somebody who's really different from you, that you may fear. And I say get out of your house and walk down and knock on the door and invite them for a cup of coffee.

Greg Voisen
That's a best thing you could have said, you know, I, I find that people's outpouring of compassion frequently results as another person has a need. And they help that they hope they can help that person with their need. And I was listening to a story on CBS Sunday Morning, just this last one. And little girl seven years old down in Alabama loses her money, her mother was only 29. And so they were their grandmother. And I say this story for this reason, because this talks about the outpouring of compassion. So she set up a lemonade stand because they had no money for a gravestone. This was anybody wants to go watch this, you'll be crying when you're done. At the end. There was no money for a gravestone they didn't have the money for her mother's gravestone. So she was raising money through selling lemonade to buy the gravestone for a mother. And they didn't say exactly how her mother died. And it doesn't make any difference. What makes a difference is the impact she made on so how many lives she not only in this short period of time, she goes, Well, I actually got $300 for one cup of lemonade. And in she kind of giggles, and she then said, and so at the end of the story, the reporter says she raised $15,000, where her little lemonade stand. Oh, and by the way, all that money is gonna go to support her education. Because the company that makes the gravestones decided to donate the gravestone, so they didn't have to buy the gravestone for Mother's plot, right. And I was thinking to myself, What a great story of compassion when you saw all these people coming, that they videotaped giving $1 $10 $100 Because they really loved the story, which was one of how do I help this little girl who's really hurting inside, they were all hugging her, they were giving her love, they're giving her compassion. And that brings me to this. You know, you have to have over the time of writing this book has been out there a bit. Had some critics, or significant responses to your work that have prompted you to think differently about what I'm gonna say any of the topics in the book? Have you had people dialog interface with you, Kelly, that have shifted your perspective about maybe some of the things you wrote in the book?

Kelly James Clark
Yeah, so I think I've sort of indicated some of the shifts that I've had, since I've been working, you know, for about 10 years on, bring it with projects that bring Muslims, Christians and Jews together. And I've had all sorts of things that have changed because I had so many biases when I came into this. I'll just tell you, I'll just tell you one story i i went to an interfaith dinner at a local mosque, and each table at the dinner at the mosque had some a member of the mosque that was there, and they were supposed to get going in a conversation. So it was the, the Muslim and then the rest of the table were Christians. And he asked is this long? Do you think Islam is more about love or about justice and all the Christians went around? We all said it was about justice, including me like I thought, as long as there's only about getting into the afterlife, the if you get if over 50% of your deeds are good, you get in if they're not, you get out, you're out. So and then he started to say no, I think it's love. And then he tried to explain why and all of us kept interrupting him and tried to tell him why he was wrong. And I think he was right. I didn't think it at the time. But the thing that mainly moved me or began to move me to think differently It was him. He was so patient and kind and he was compassionate. He embodied compassion. That's the thing that made me think, Alright, next time I'm going to do something different when I talk to somebody about their tradition, I'm going to listen. And how

Greg Voisen
novel is that?

Kelly James Clark
I know, I know. Anyway, and I'm just, I'm just not going to interrupt that. Now, when I do interfaith events, you know, with 50, academics. I say, you cannot tell anyone else what they believe that you have to listen and let them tell you what you believe. And anyway, that started me thinking in a whole new way about I began to think that what if Islam really is about love, and not about justice, and it got me to look at the Koran and Islamic tradition in a really different way. And it got me to look at Islam not as a militant, or even a military religion, because there is a lot of there's a lot of bias in the West that Islam built its empire by the sword. And I had to overcome that bias to see what what was the prophet really trying to teach people a long time ago to get out their sword and spread Islam by threat of death. And I just, I came to learn No, he was trying to get people to to be compassionate towards people who are different from them. Well, it's

Greg Voisen
interesting you say this, because you're talking about Christian Christian faiths, Muslim faiths. Yeah. And, and I'm, as you're talking, I'm reflecting on certain little stories, but oh, one, you know, you obviously, you had Gandhi, you had Mother Teresa, you've got the Dalai Lama, you've got all of these leaders and faith, Desmond Tutu. And it goes on and on and on. But I remember a statement made about Mother Teresa. Somebody went to her and said, Hey, will you march against this, whatever it was, and she says, If I can't march for something, I will never march against anything, right. And I and I look at that. And it's like, you know, if we had more people that thought that way, right? And just said, I'm not against, because it's this against SNESs, that puts the wall up between us that we are we're like, I'm against it. No, I can be, I can choose to be for it. But I don't have to be vocal enough to go out or outrageous enough to say, Well, I'm against that. And that brings me to your findings and experiences. I'm glad you had that transformation at that interfaith event, because that was an epiphany for you. What practical advice would you give the individuals as we sum up our interview, looking to foster interfaith understanding and harmony in their own communities? Because this is like, the quintessential question, right? It's like, okay, we've talked a lot about this, but am I gonna go down now to a Muslim mosque, and say, Hey, I'm here. And I love you guys. And do whatever? Probably not, right? No. But we're going to stay in places. And here's the thing, you've said this. we're creatures of safety. And so we stay in zones of state safety. We don't go out of a comfort zone. What? How would you help us ease out of our safety zone, into an uncomfortable zone, to allow us to experience something new in that discomfort that we get joy and pleasure from as a result of doing such thing?

Kelly James Clark
Yeah. So you've, you've put exactly why this is so hard to do. I mean, it's not that natural for us, because we, what's natural is for us to hang around people that look and act just like us, right? That's totally natural, easy to do. I will say, in most communities in any fairly large city. There are interfaith groups that are trying to bring people together. And Grand Rapids is a medium sized city in the United States. And there are there's an Abrahamic dinner once a year there's the mosques do interfaith events where they invite people I went one time to a Sikh Si, que Yes,

Greg Voisen
yeah, they really pronounced a Sikh, I was in Australia and we were waited on by some Sikhs and I It's interesting. They're philosophy. They're so compassionate. I know. There are people, I'm, I don't know many of them. But I did run in the course of my life, my 69 years so far, I handful. And I'm gonna say this I'm probably spouting off here. And I don't really care what other people think so much about what I'm going to say, I've never found a more compassionate, loving, understanding group of people with so much tolerance and love. And I'm like, Whoa, do you know much about the Sikh religion? And I go, No, I don't, I really should learn a lot more about these people.

Kelly James Clark
And one of my so I came to the same conclusion. And probably for the same reason that I knew almost nothing about Sikhism. And these people served as food. They were engineers and doctors, and they were unbelievably highly educated people. And they're serving food. And somebody gave a talk that night, they had some special speaker and I thought he was really boring. But I was really moved by being served dinner by the Sikhs. And then I found out that there are places in India where they serve like half a million meals a day in different Sikh communities. So anyone is welcome. The door is open, they don't ask any questions, anyone can come in and get food, and they do it. So So anyway, these events are all over there. They're all over, they're worth going to. But my my big advice would be just look around your neighborhood, and have everyone over for a coffee in your backyard or something like that. And, and just start to learn about people who are different from you?

Greg Voisen
Well, I think your advice is really we have to embrace the discomfort before we can grow. Yeah. And in that means you getting in your car, whether it's electric or gas, and driving down somewhere to an interfaith group, and introducing yourself and shutting up and listening to the stories, right. And I could not be more pleased than the outcome of this interview. Because if that's all that we encouraged as a result, which was to get a lot of listener to like, hey, these two guys made sense over the last 45 minutes, I think maybe what I'll do is go check out an interfaith thing, or I'll go make a couple of calls, or I'll examine how I could do this a bit more comfortably for myself, whatever it might be, I think we need to break the mold of the kind of people we always hanging around with. Yeah, because they're always the same. If you really look at it through your life, you're pretty much hanging around a lot of the same people most of the time, and you're not going to grow both spiritually, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, until you get to experience it, and you're perfect. I'm going to tell all my listeners, please go to Kelly James Clark's website, and I'm going to give the website again out here for everyone. It's pretty simple. It's just Kelly James Clark, three first names and it's Wix wi x site.com. There you can learn about his blogs, his projects, the books, his publications, everything's there and he's prolific writer. It's been a pleasure having you on inside personal growth and having this dialogue about raging fire and most importantly, you know what we can do to change our behavior to make this world a better place.

Kelly James Clark
Thank you get Greg and I hope everybody flames a little fire in their hearts for people who are different from them. Well,

Greg Voisen
and I always usually at the end of these say Namaste now I know in the end, because I felt follow Self Realization fellowship, all those people get that but this is only I see the God knew that sees the God in me. Thank you for that. Kelly.

Kelly James Clark
My name My pleasure. Thanks, Greg.