DePauw Stories

Leaders from the DePauw University Center for Spiritual Life have received a prestigious recognition from the NASPA Spirituality and Religion in Higher Education Knowledge Community awards.

Each year, the Outstanding Spiritual Initiative Award recognizes a program that promotes spiritual and religious growth on a college campus, with special consideration given to creative programs that reach an interfaith or multifaith audience. DePauw was chosen as the 2026 recipient of this award in recognition of the Jewish and Muslim community dinner organized by student leaders in the face of rising national and global tensions.

After the events of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent violence in Gaza, DePauw’s Muslim and Jewish student groups — who share space at the Center for Spiritual Life — gathered to formulate a response that would prioritize solidarity over division.

“Initially the executive teams from both our Muslim and Jewish student organizations met to draft a joint statement,” recalls Maureen Knudsen Langdoc, university chaplain and associate dean. “But as they talked with one another, the students realized that words were neither adequate nor sufficient in the face of such pain. They wanted to do something more embodied.”

The students decided to organize a meal where both halal meat and kosher food would be available, and around which the entire campus community could find space for connection and healing. Although a few words were shared at the dinner by Jewish Life Advisor Rabbi Bruce Pfeffer and Muslim Life Advisor Imam Ahmed Alamine, the communion shared by those in attendance did most of the talking.

“This dinner is a community effort that so well embodies the importance of support systems for spirituality and religion in higher education,” said a NASPA representative at the time of the award’s announcement. “Universities are meant to educate the whole person and spiritual and religious identities are essential to students' growing understanding of themselves.”

This Interfaith Community Dinner has since grown into an annual event. While it remains first and foremost for Jewish and Muslim students, it is open to all as a gathering that carries a depth of meaning for the entire community. The event has since shifted to a larger kitchen and dining hall at Gobin Church, the historic Methodist church at the heart of DePauw’s campus.

“As this story has organically spread beyond our immediate community to alumni and friends, it has become a story that we love to tell and even more so a story we want to live,” says Jonathan Martin, associate chaplain and director of the Center for Spiritual Life. “For our Center for Spiritual Life, this feels like something of the way stories found their way into sacred texts — shared memories of a holy experience, that become an oral history, then a written record, then an ongoing, living tradition.”