DONALD ABRAM ’16 grew up on the South Side of Chicago with a single mother and a grandmother who took him to church every Sunday, no excuses—and he tried using them all, down to not having clean socks.

Every week he would see church members joyfully worship. He never really understood what that was about even though he was an active member of the congregation. Then, on a cold December day when he was 14 years old, Abram says he heard a distinct call from God.

After coming home from school and warming himself by his space heater, Abram dozed off. In a dream, he saw himself walking down the center aisle at church, but as a celestial being, not a physical one. He looked up to the pulpit expecting to see his pastor standing there, but instead he saw himself preaching. Abram says he woke up shocked and shaken.

His father was a minister, and though Abram never lived with him, he knew the Sunday morning routine and what a preacher’s life entailed—and he wasn’t having any of it. Throughout his childhood, people had told him, “I see the call in your life,” but he says he ran from it.

Abram wanted to be a force for good—but in the form of an FBI agent, not a minister. Still, he talked to family, seeking advice and interpretation about the dream, which was now recurring. Ultimately, he had to come to grips with the vision on his own: He decided that God was in fact telling him to preach. So he went to his pastor, who decided to test him with a trial sermon. Abram preached his first sermon, and the pastor and elders confirmed that this call was a real one.

He vividly remembers one moment in the sermon when he thought: “This is what I saw in the dream. This is what I’m supposed to be doing, and I know that.”

You’ve heard of the preacher’s kid. But this was a preacher kid. All throughout high school, Abram delivered sermons at Greater New Mount Eagle Missionary Baptist Church, a black congregation. At first he mimicked his pastor, but soon he found his own rhythm and style, earning the nicknames “Fireball” and “Firecracker” for his blazing energy. Abram says he feels communion with both God and the audience when he’s in the pulpit.

“There are things that I will say and things that I will do that are not on my manuscript, and the Holy Spirit drops that down in my spirit and it comes out,” says Abram. “I am just so in tune with that moment that I know this is what I’m supposed to do—this is what I’ve been called to do.”

While growing up, Abram’s interactions were mostly with black people. His original plan was to attend the historically black Morehouse College, which Martin Luther King Jr. and Spike Lee attended—that’s where successful African American men went to school where he was from, Abram says. But when he received a Posse Foundation scholarship to Pomona, he began to rethink those plans. After researching the College, he decided to go west. Another big change was on the way.

THE DECISION TO come to Pomona was another turning point for Abram and the beginning of a four-year transformation. In the classroom, he was challenged to think of his faith more critically through courses like Professor Erin Runions’ Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Runions’ goal is for students to approach the Scriptures as literature, from a scholarly perspective rather than a particular religious tradition. Looking at the Bible through this new lens created an inner struggle, he says.

“It was incredibly difficult for me to take on a class that removed the sanctity of spirituality from the text.” says Abram. “Initially it felt really disrespectful to me. I didn’t feel like we were giving the due deference and respect.”

But the no-holds-barred questioning of the Bible gave him permission to reexamine his belief system. “There were a lot of questions that came up that I didn’t have the space to bring up on the South Side, with my pastor or my father,” Abram says.

The perspectives and points that Abram thought were great in the classroom ran counter to what he was taught in the church. He grappled hard with his faith, controversial texts and the ways he saw the Bible used to perpetuate injustice. In conversations, family members and his pastor noticed his worldview shifting.

As Abram’s advisor and teacher, Pomona College Politics Professor Lorn Foster witnessed that shift as well. Over time, Foster says, he saw an evolution in Abram and “a willingness to be more open about things than when he entered Pomona College. … His faith was more dogma when he entered the door.”

Abram would agree. Whereas before, he says, his spiritual practice revolved around a God that had a strict code of rules and regulations, at Pomona his perspective has widened and deepened into a recognition that the core of his belief is about relationship with Christ, not religion, he says. This ongoing faith journey is one of both reclamation and tension.

It is also a journey of relationships. On campus, he says, he encountered types of people he never had before—students from marginalized backgrounds that were markedly different from his black Chicago experience. He met undocumented students, gay students, students with mental illnesses—identities and stories that were new to him and that he felt the church he was raised in either ignored or was blind to. Over time, Abram became concerned not just about God but also about God’s politics, as he understood them. Another call began to stir in his heart.

Through his analysis of biblical texts, readings on black liberation theology, and his relationships with other students, Abram says he began to see Jesus not only as a spiritual savior but also as a revolutionary figure—an advocate for the poor and those on the fringes, who upended traditional religious institutions and whose central message was one of unconditional love. Religious leaders in that day were also government figures, and Jesus pushed back, Abram says. He points to the story of Jesus turning over tables in the temple in anger as a profoundly political act. “You could call it a protest. You could call it a sit-in. You can really call it an act of rebellion in many ways to a system that keeps [down] those in society who are viewed as less than or who are viewed as different or not as valued. And he is saying, ‘This system has to come down. This system has to stop. Because what you’re doing now on a very micro level is taking advantage of people.’”

NOW RELIGION AND POLITICS have become one and the same for Abram. Yes, his call was a personal transformation, but he was also called to transform institutions and systems of injustice, the politics major says.

Whenever he returns to his home church sanctuary, he preaches a message on how life in the pew and life in the public square are inextricably intertwined. In his sermons he is subtle, but intentional and strategic in weaving in his politicization, Abram says, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive as he offers critiques of materialism and urges congregants to fight for the most vulnerable in society. “I think the church is not able to see those connections because we focus on abortion, gay marriage or passing out Thanksgiving dinners,” says Abram. “We’re not focused on structural change.”

Abram points to inequities in the criminal justice system, massive wealth disparities and the behavior of Wall Street investors—and he believes the most effective ways to combat those inequities are through policy and government as well as a mobilized church. “Christ has called you to condemn that which is wrong,” and Abram believes the church writ large has missed some of what he sees now as obvious sins.

Along the way, Abram has become a fierce advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement, which he believes is “an indictment of the black church.” Of course, he says, the black church has held a key role in the civil rights struggles of the past. But on other issues the church has been silent at best.

“Black Lives Matter is actually doing what Jesus did. Not only are they saying, ‘We’re combating white supremacy.’ They are combating misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, discrimination against those who are differently abled,” says Abram. “I think Black Lives Matter has hit at the root of what it is Christ has called us to fight against but also the root of what the church has failed to address.”

Abram has held two internships in Washington, D.C.—one at the Center for American Progress and another with Joshua DuBois, formerly the head of the Obama administration’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He remains hopeful that change will happen both in the church and in public policy.

In the fall, he will attend Harvard Divinity School for a master’s of divinity degree. He may also pursue a master’s in public policy. Inspired by DuBois’s work, Abram wants to start a faith-based consulting firm, advising government, businesses and political campaigns. He says he may even run for public office someday.

“Jesus came as a liberator. Therefore in all that we do, we should do it in the name of liberation. And we should do that with conviction, with power and with strategy. … I want to be in a position where my faith is central to policies or advice that I give so that it can be impactful and beneficial for those that are most marginalized in our society.”

And preaching?

“I will continue to preach. I will always be a preacher.”

From Abram’s view, his call hasn’t changed—it has only grown.

—Photos by Drew Reynolds

WHEN ASKED WHAT she would save if the building were on fire, Professor of Religious Studies Zhiru Ng looks around for a moment at her office in Pearsons Hall. Like most academic offices, it is full of accumulated objects, big and small. There are two large, beautifully carved Buddhas, a hanging scroll with calligraphed

Chinese characters saying, in loose translation, “Serenity illuminates,” and a long wall of bookshelves packed with volumes and small religious items, including a painted statuette of Dizang, a figure in Buddhist mythology about whom she has written a scholarly book.

Finally she points to her bookshelf. “I think my books are very much a part of me,” she says, “because to me, meditation is learning.” But then she shrugs and smiles. “Although if there is a fire, there is a fire.”

Sentimental attachments are not a part of Ng’s world. Her world is one of transience and acceptance. Or as she would say, emptiness. Not a very heartwarming word in English, and she says it’s pretty much the same in Chinese. But for Ng, emptiness isn’t something to be avoided. It’s something to be understood and embraced, even if it takes a lifetime of meditation and study.

As an example of what she means by the word, she points to the larger of the two Buddhas, inherited along with the office from her predecessor, Professor Emerita of Religion Margaret Dornish. “Like this Buddha,” she says. “Every day it is aging and it is undergoing change, right? But we don’t see that. We see it as a fixed form. … So emptiness is not saying there is nothing, but rather that the essence of things and of our lives themselves and the events in our lives are like this Buddha. They seem to have a fixed nature, but the nature is really never, ever fixed. It is in constant change, even though the naked eye can’t see it.”

And blind faith in permanence, she believes, has serious consequences for the human condition. “I think all human beings—the way we function in life is that we assume a permanence about everything, and that is the cause and root of a lot of our suffering.”

It was these concepts—all encapsulated by the word “emptiness”—that propelled Ng from simple curiosity about Buddhist traditions to a lifetime devoted to study and contemplation. “The first dharma talk I attended was by the person who would become my religious teacher,” she recalls. “And he was talking about emptiness, which was at that time totally over and beyond my head. But I w remember, after the lecture, the friend who brought me there asked me, ‘So how was it?’ And I said, ‘I don’t quite understand it, but I’m very sure this is it, and this is something that I am going to pursue in life, and that someday, I’m going to understand this emptiness, and that will change my life.’”

GROWING UP IN SINGAPORE as a child of Chinese immigrants, Ng thought of Christianity as the religion of the educated, but personally, she found it too harsh and too culturally strange to be attractive. Her mother and grandmother, on the other hand, practiced a form of popular Chinese Buddhism known as Pure Land Buddhism that the skeptical young Ng dismissed as naïve and superstitious.

At school, she started off in the sciences, and then won a competitive government scholarship for a special program designed to produce English teachers. There, in classes of two to five students taught by British expatriates with doctorates, she fell in love with English literature. “Literature really made me explore life,” she explains, “because in English literature, or any kind of literature, I think, you’re going to raise the question of suffering. You’re going to raise the question of the meaning of life. You also raise the question of death, and the impermanence of life always runs through all their writing. And I was struck by that, but I also felt deeply that there was never really an answer.”

Then, during her last year of high school, her grandmother died, and Ng’s life changed. “When I attended the funeral, I became enthralled by the death-and-dying rituals,” she says, “because they talk about how you will be born into what is considered a pure land, and in that pure land, you have as your parents the lotus flowers.”

That peculiar image intrigued her, partly because it seemed to signal a release from the burden of filial piety, a Chinese tradition emphasizing the deep respect and devotion children owe their parents. “Filial piety is very, very much something I was raised with,” she says. “But I always felt guilt that I never really loved my parents as much as they loved me. And so, when I participated in those rituals, my grandmother’s death rituals, and I came across those verses, I was fascinated. Because how could my parents then be lotuses? And that actually started me off on my journey.”

As she continued her English studies at the National University of Singapore, she tried to learn more about Buddhism outside the academic setting. She signed up for classes with a Buddhist monk from Taiwan and was drawn deeper and deeper into Buddhist philosophy, which spoke to her as nothing ever had before.

She says: “I found, actually, in my study of Buddhism, that this is something that holds some answers for my existential questioning as to: What is the meaning of life? Why do people suffer? And how do we respond to people suffering? … I found that teaching to be very useful, but also very hard to realize. I wanted to dedicate my life to the study of Buddhism, whatever that means. So I decided after I finished my undergraduate studies that I would become a Buddhist nun.”

Since then, she’s never looked back. “Sometimes students ask me why do I become a monastic,” she says, “because in the modern world monasticism really means you are tying yourself down. We have lots of rules and regulations. … But in early Buddhism, the idea of monasticism really means to go forth. It’s a path of liberation, in the sense that you put down things that are unnecessary baggage, and that allows you then to pursue this path. So it’s really a renunciation of certain patterns of thought. For some people like me, I guess, the monastic life is the perfect path to do that. Ideally in Buddhism, the monastic life should be an environment that really nurtures that kind of inner liberation.”

As a monastic, Ng continued on a spiritual journey that carried her from Singapore to Taiwan for her religious training, and then, unexpectedly, to the United States. “Originally I imagined that I would be going to maybe India or to Sri Lanka to study after my religious training, but my teacher actually was very specific. He really wanted me to come to the States.”

At the University of Michigan, she studied Indian Buddhism in the canonical languages of Sanskrit and Tibetan. Then she completed her doctoral studies at the University of Arizona, focusing on Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In 2000, she joined Pomona’s religious studies faculty to replace the retiring Professor Dornish.

TODAY, STRIDING ACROSS the Quad or standing in front of a seminar class, Ng cuts a striking figure. With her tightly cropped hair and purple-gray monastic robes, she has become a familiar if somewhat singular presence on campus. Her classes—such as Worlds of Buddhism, Life Story of the Buddha, Religious Traditions of China, and the Lotus Sutra in East Asia—attract a wide range of students, from religious studies majors connecting the dots between world religions to Asian Americans hoping to get a better grasp of their cultural heritage to religious seekers searching for spiritual clues in Eastern thought.

“My colleagues say that they probably have fewer seekers than I do,” she says, “and I think that has to do with the way Buddhism is portrayed and understood in American culture, in the sense that Buddhism is often seen as a religion that’s less institutionalized, a personal religion, something that you could actually pick and choose from.”

But despite her evident dedication to her religious order, Ng isn’t trying to convert anyone. Buddhism, she says, is not that kind of religion. “Buddhism is really about epistemology,” she explains, “in the sense that you’re trying to unlearn how you know the world and coming up with a different way of experiencing knowing the world that involves internal transformation. I always tell my students that we wear contact lenses, but we don’t see the contact lenses, so we already have preconceived constructions of things. So it’s always very good to expose yourself to something new.”

For most of the students in her classes, those “contact lenses” are shaped by the assumptions of Western culture—assumptions about life and death, time and change that are very different from those in Buddhist thought. “Much of what I do in my courses is about unpacking these kinds of assumptions with my students so that they are aware. And I think it fits very nicely into the liberal arts setting because you are really questioning culture and questioning the way you construct knowledge, including religious knowledge.”

Indeed, at a time when many religions—from Christianity to Hinduism—are dealing with a clash between the dogmatic teachings of churches, temples and seminaries and the more irreverent, scholarly approach of religious studies programs, Ng finds that Buddhism is something of an exception. The first stage of meditation, she says, is described in Buddhist texts as “hearing”—as in hearing the teachings of the Buddhist masters—but that word was part of an oral tradition. “Now for us hearing really means reading, right?” she says. “So it means studying, in other words.”

For most of her students, this first stage of meditation—study and learning—will be as far as they go, but she believes that just wrestling with the concept of emptiness for a semester is enough to open a lot of eyes to a wider view of the world.

“When they first come across this, especially if they have never had any exposure to Asian thought, they might be a little bit perplexed,” she says. “It’s very difficult to get to the crux of it. But I think you’ll be surprised at how many of them feel that this is such a wonderful, different way of looking at things. And they enjoy the new lenses that it gives them.”

However, that is only the first step in what is, for Ng herself, a lifelong process. In Buddhist meditation, beyond hearing is contemplation, and beyond contemplation is internal transformation. That process, she says, may take a lifetime or—if you factor in the concept of rebirth—lifetimes. But Ng has no doubt that it’s worth it, not just in the end, but at every step along the way.

“It means not grasping onto anything in your life,” she says, “but accepting the fact that it is part of the impermanence, and rejoicing in the fact that there’s always that change. It’s a rejoicing that is not like happiness that brings you up and down, but it’s a rejoicing in the sense that this is life, and life itself is already enough as it is, and that it has all its miracles. And if you just open your eyes and look at this and accept the changes, you will find a lot of things that are joyous about it, and you will be much more at peace in your life.”

—Photos by Carrie Rosema

THE STORY WAS in the works for weeks. The Los Angeles Times was preparing a front-page profile of California’s first Muslim judge, Halim Dhanidina ’94. And the paper was carefully vetting its subject, checking his background as the son of Indian immigrants, interviewing former colleagues in the D.A.’s office, and watching him preside over criminal proceedings at the L.A. County Superior Court in Long Beach.

After three months, the judge remembers getting a call from the reporter with some bad news. Editors were considering killing the story. The reason: “We’re not finding anything controversial.”

In the end, the paper ran the article after all. As far as the judge was concerned, the only thing controversial was the headline, which he called “almost inflammatory.” It read: Faith Leads State’s First Islamic Judge to the Bench.

Though modified online, the printed headline played into the worst preconceptions about Muslims that Dhanidina had been battling since his student days at Pomona College. He thought the wording portrayed him as a zealot who would impose sharia law from the bench. Which is exactly what anti-Muslim critics warned against, at websites with names like Jihad Watch and Creeping Sharia. Some wondered whether a Muslim judge in “Caliph-ornia” could be impartial when sentencing “jihadis, honor killers and those who assault non-believers.”

“If you’re going to ask me about sharia law, you’re going to be misled, because I don’t know anything about it,” said the judge during an interview at his tidy courthouse office, decorated with cheerful artwork from his two children. “I’m an American that works in the American legal system. You can ask me anything about that and I’ll give you a better answer.”

Dhanidina, who holds a law degree from UCLA, has been answering questions about Islam and the law since that day in 2012 when Gov. Jerry Brown announced his ascension to the bench as a milestone for Muslims. Dhanidina, just 39 at the time, says his religion had never been a defining issue in his career until then. During his 14 years as a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, prosecuting gang-related murder cases, many colleagues didn’t even know he was a Muslim.

Though he felt awkward at first, Dhanidina now embraces his high-profile role as a public figure from his community. Yes, he worries that carrying a religious banner may detract from his accomplishments. He wants to be recognized for his public work, not his private beliefs. Yet he believes the focus on his faith serves a purpose, because it makes him “a symbol of inclusion.”

“Part of the value of diversity is for people to know about it,” says the judge, who often speaks at schools and on professional panels. “The role of Muslims in American society right now is very tenuous. There are efforts to make Muslims feel they’re not welcome in the U.S., that they don’t belong here, that they should not be allowed to come, to stay, to participate in institutions.”

For fellow Muslims, seeing his success proves the opposite: “There is a place for you, too.”

The judge also believes that his public visibility can help change perceptions among non-Muslims, many of whom get their impressions about Islam from the media or the Internet. It’s easy to believe in stereotypes about a group, he notes, when you don’t personally know any of its members. “That’s why Muslims in the public eye need to be open,” he says, “because it helps to demystify this idea of what ‘these people’ are like.”

Of course, Dhanidina’s work as a judge is an open book. His court is open to the public; his rulings are public record. That helps dispel any suspicions that he may be somehow secretly imposing his personal ideology on the court.

“People think that if you’re a Muslim, you believe in chopping off heads and oppressing women,” he says. “But it’s very easy to say what a Muslim would be like as a judge if there aren’t any Muslim judges. Well, now there is one here in California. So if anybody wants to know what a Muslim would do as a judge in an American court, they would come to Department Eight of the Long Beach Superior Court and see for themselves.”

PRESIDING IN COURT one recent afternoon, Judge Dhanidina displayed a carefully studied judicial demeanor. He begins every day with a formal flag salute, “in respect of the rights we enjoy.” On the bench, he is disciplined, efficient and formal, almost courtly. With defendants, he is respectful and encouraging, telling one who presented a good probation report to “keep up the good work.” And throughout, he maintains perfect posture in a robe that looks tailored to his fit, six-foot-one frame.

His goal is to run a courtroom “with dignity and decorum,” he says, where justice prevails and everybody feels they are treated fairly. “They would never know they were in the Muslim guy’s court,” he adds, “unless somebody told them.”

Outside the hallowed halls, the judge lets his hair down. An easy smile softens the slightly severe look of his gray goatee, precisely manicured along the ridge of his chin. He is friendly and chatty with a group of students from his daughter’s elementary school, visiting on a field trip. “You were awesome in the musical,” he says to one. “Are you playing softball in the fall?” he asks another.

“I want the young people to feel I’m just a regular guy,” says the judge, because it sends a message that they can make it too.

In many ways, he is a regular guy. Softball coach, loyal Cubs fan, aficionado of Spanish rock, dad who drives his kids to school. But Dhanidina also is driven to excel, to be the best in whatever he does. He attributes his competitive streak to his immigrant parents, who always strived to succeed.

“When you meet Halim, or appear before him, what strikes you is not his faith, but that he’s such a smart, hardworking judge,” says Long Beach Supervising Judge Michael Vicencia. “So whatever kind of preconceived notions people may have had, the second they meet him all of that goes away because you’re so impressed by what a good judge he is.”

So far, nobody has formally complained about Dhanidina’s performance, says Vicencia, who fields complaints against judges in Long Beach. And nobody has raised concerns about his religion either.

At his swearing-in, Dhanidina assiduously sidestepped a potential public controversy, avoiding the brouhaha that erupted in Brooklyn last year when a fellow Muslim judge swore her oath on the Quran. Instead, he chose not to swear on any holy book, dismissing the issue as irrelevant.

For a judge with such an even temper, though, it’s surprising to hear Dhanidina admit that he is “certainly sensitive to slights.” When the governor’s office received hate mail in response to his appointment, he acknowledges matter-of-factly that “it hurt my feelings.”

Dhanidina, who won election to his first full term in 2014, doesn’t consider himself a victim who harbors grievances. But he has experienced his share of prejudice in the past. Like the dinner-party guest openly expressing anti-Muslim sentiments. Or the thoughtless coworker using the pejorative term “towelhead.”

Then there was the defense attorney who once tried to save a murderer from the death penalty with a thinly disguised appeal to religious prejudice. Dhanidina was the prosecutor at the time and had won convictions for the double homicide. In the penalty phase, the opposing lawyer argued that the jury should show mercy consistent with “our” Judeo-Christian values, not like those of the prosecutor who follows “different” traditions.

The strategy failed, but Dhanidina never forgave the judge in that 2008 case for not stepping in to stop it. “The argument itself didn’t hurt me,” he says, “but the fact that the judge did not officially stamp it as inappropriate, that stung more.” Later, when he faced the same lawyer again in a different case with a different judge, Dhanidina made a preemptive strike, asking the court to prohibit him from making the same offensive argument. The judge agreed, admonishing the defense lawyer, “If this is not an appeal to prejudice, explain to me what it is.”

“That was a very gratifying moment for me,” concludes Dhanidina, “because OK, somebody else has acknowledged that this isn’t right.”

IT’S OBVIOUS, SAYS DHANIDINA that animosity toward Muslims has worsened in the quarter century since he worked for better interfaith relations as a student at Pomona. The terrorist attacks of 911 and subsequent Middle East wars have stoked public fears about the perceived connection between Islam and violence. The judge blames both sides: the terrorists, for cloaking themselves in a distorted reading of Islam, and self-serving politicians, for exploiting the violence to scapegoat an entire religion.

“It’s baffling to Muslim people like myself, and millions around the world, who have never seen any kind of doctrinal link between violence and their religion,” he says. “We don’t understand how other people can make that connection.”

Less than a month after the interview, the issue of Islam and violence was back in the news in a shocking way. In the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a gunman vowing allegiance to Islamic terrorist groups massacred 49 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Since many of the victims were gay, the case also refocused attention on the treatment of homosexuals in Islamic countries, including a handful where homosexuality is punishable by death.

The issue is not new to Dhanidina. Even fellow Muslims have asked him how he can reconcile legal issues such as gay marriage with traditional Islam. Asked another way, can a Muslim judge be fair to homosexuals?

Coincidentally, Dhanidina had already addressed that question in a controversial case watched closely by gay rights advocates. The case involved a police sting that led to charges against a 50-year-old man for lewd conduct and indecent exposure in a public park. In a blistering, 17-page ruling handed down in April, Dhanidina blasted the Long Beach Police Department and local prosecutors for what he called an “arbitrary enforcement of the law” that specifically targeted gay men. The judge found that police “harbored animus toward homosexuals” and that the prosecution was fueled by “the rhetoric of homophobia.”

“When I think of what values are important in a society, equality is right at the top,” the judge says. “That’s probably because I’ve never been in a majority. Of anything. Anywhere.”

DHANIDINA BELONGS TO the Ismaili religious community, a historically persecuted offshoot of the Shia branch of Islam, known for its modern, progressive views. “We don’t believe in the religious superiority of one group over another,” says Dhanidina, whose Thailand-born wife was raised Roman Catholic. “We believe that different religions are just different paths to the same place.”

His ethnic heritage traces to the Gujarati people of western India, an illustrious community that also includes independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, British actor Ben Kingsley, and Queen lead vocalist Freddie Mercury. His grandparents were born in Tanzania, part of the Indian diaspora in East Africa during British colonial rule. His parents, Lutaf and Mali, met at a Tanzanian teachers college. The couple came to the United States in the early 1960s when his father got a scholarship to Northwestern University. Eventually, most of the extended family came here too.

Born in 1972, Dhanidina was raised with his older brother in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, where Northwestern is located. At home, language and food were a natural blend of Asian, African and Anglo-American influences. (“Growing up, I didn’t even know which word came from which language.”) He graduated from Evanston Township High School in 1990, still using the first name Al-Halim.

He arrived as a freshman at Pomona at the height of the First Gulf War, finding himself peppered with questions about Islam, “as if you were the spokesman for everybody.” At the time, he was one of literally a handful of Muslim students on all five Claremont campuses combined. “We still managed to find each other to start the Muslim Students Association,” he recalls. Initially, the group rallied around a campaign to keep dining halls open later during Ramadan, which requires fasting until after sunset. From that victory, the goals evolved, stressing education to combat stereotypes and promote better understanding.

Dhanidina, an aspiring diplomat who got a degree in international relations, knew he had come to the right school. Pomona’s diversity is what drew him here in the first place.

“I think I would not be the person I am today if I had not gone to Pomona,” says the judge, who still maintains strong friendships with a multicultural group of his freshman hall mates. “Everyone is encouraged to think big about the ways they want to make the world a better place. And I really bought into that.”

—Photos by Lori Shepler

Meghana Rao ’16

“My experience with Hinduism has a lot to do with community, and the stories within that community. So one way that I express and experience my faith is through dance. I started learning kathak, an Indian classical dance, when I was about 7. It used to be a temple dance, and you would dance it to devotional songs. I don’t know if most people think of dance as a religious experience, but a lot of those devotional songs are very personal for me, so dance has been a very helpful tool to keep me connected to my faith. It’s my way of sharing my culture and my faith with other people.

“Back at home, my religious experience was very community-related. My family would tell the old stories. That community has been a little harder to find here. There is a Hindu community, but it’s such a varied and diverse community that those aspects don’t necessarily come up as much. That’s not to say I don’t connect with people here—I just connect with them in other ways, and my faith has been more of an internal, personal experience. I imagine it’s similar for a lot of people who come here. You meet all these different people, and the ways that you connect are not necessarily through your faith.

“At home, every morning my sister and I would just sit and say this chant called the Gayatri Mantra, which you’re supposed to say nine times every morning. It’s about greeting the sun and accepting the knowledge that it gives you. Here, it just didn’t seem like the space to do that. If you have a roommate, for example, she may sleep late and you don’t want to wake her up. So that’s become an internal thing for me. When I see the sun, I think about it, but I don’t physically chant every morning. That’s an example of how it was more of a communal activity for me at home, whereas here it’s an individual thing that I say to myself. I don’t want to impose my faith on other people. It is a personal thing, and I’m OK with that.

“A lot of Hindusim is kind of a philosophy about life. It’s an outlook on how life should be lived. It’s not necessarily tied to a higher power. There’s freedom for you to shape your own philosophy and views on life within the culture and within the faith. The creation myths and things like that, I take as myths. I don’t necessarily take them as true, and that’s a personal choice. So for me there hasn’t really been that conflict between faith and academics, because I think of it in more of a symbolic sense.

“Every night before I go to bed I say prayers. In some ways, it’s more like a habit than something intentional, but I just can’t go to sleep until I’ve said them, even if it’s just kind of whispering them to myself. I think it’s kind of a connection to home.”

Jose Ruiz ’16

“My parents are from Mexico and they grew up Catholic. It’s ingrained in the culture. So just picking that up as I grew up at home, it became a part of me as well. In high school I really got curious about the religion itself, and the morals it teaches and the lessons that Catholicism has to offer. So I spent a lot of my free time just kind of exploring the Bible, exploring religious texts, spending time with youth groups at church.

“I think just coming to campus, you get this perception that there’s no presence of religion here, or that it’s kind of uncomfortable to talk openly about your religious beliefs. But as you spend more and more time here and talk to more and more people, you do find a sense of community, people who will relate to you on a religious basis. At the same time, you also end up talking to students who challenge your beliefs in terms of what your particular church has done in the past—different scandals, different wars, different administrative events that reflect badly on your religion. But I think at the end of it all, it’s definitely very constructive to be able to listen to some of those concerns but still to be able to practice your religion, so that you can help to prevent those things from happening again in the future.

“I’ve met a lot of students here who are Jewish, a couple who are Hindu, and a lot of students who are of the Protestant or evangelical faiths. So they’re always very interesting, in that a lot of our beliefs are very similar—like when you’re talking about straight-up morals or how you act with other people. Obviously there are nuances in how different religious ceremonies are held—all the history that goes behind it—but I’ve definitely been able to talk to people of different faith backgrounds and help my faith grow because of that.

“Religion evolves over time, just depending on the experiences that you go through in your life, so I guess coming to college in itself can be a way for you to strengthen your religious beliefs and anchor yourself to the beliefs and the morals that are important to you. A lot of students come here and they take whatever opportunity they can get to let go of their religion—because it was imposed on them by their parents or it just didn’t feel right or they want to experiment with other types of belief systems—and so I think in a sense that’s a good way for us to mature and kind of figure ourselves out better.

“Just being challenged about my beliefs and being able to talk to other people about their beliefs and religious experiences, I was able to learn from those and strengthen my own belief in the Catholic Church and how it helps me get through life.”

Andrew Nguy ’19

“It’s a story that a lot of young Buddhists share. Someone dies, and because of the funeral rites, there is some sort of religion involved, and Buddhism happened to be the one for my grandma, so her funeral was really where things started for me, and it’s just grown from there.

“My daily routine has shifted over the course of the school year. The first semester I was pretty good, waking up early. I have an 8 a.m. class almost every day, so I would wake up at 6, brush my teeth, get some homework done if I needed to and spend about a half hour chanting the Universal Gate chapter of the Lotus Sutra for its emphasis on compassion and meditating before anybody else was up. Since then, it’s gone from a morning routine to more of a nightly routine. Since now I have more time in the evening, I started doing that—same routine, half an hour or so, but more in the evening than in the morning. And then of course, these past few weeks, with finals coming up, it’s gone from half an hour to 15 minutes to 10 minutes, to ‘Oops, I forgot today. I’ll try again tomorrow.’ That’s the life of a student.

“You won’t see me meditating in class, but the things in Buddhism show up almost everywhere in life, and I can spot it now after being Buddhist for a few years. I can see how conflicts come about. And how, if I get angry as a response to that conflict, it usually only gets worse from there. Realizing that and being able to stop myself before impulse takes over, I’m able to keep the situation a bit calmer and more conducive to actually resolving an issue.

“Being a student, it’s hard to have time in general, and time for what most people think is sitting around doing nothing is even harder. So my compromise is I do a lot of walking meditation when I’m on my way to class and in between classes. Instead of walking to class with a friend, having a nice chat about who-knows-what, I can walk and just kind of focus on my breath, focus on my footsteps as I’m walking, and just be mindful about what I’m doing. Another method I use is recitation. I use the name of Avalokite´svara Bodhisattva, the main figure in the Universal Gate chapter, as a point of focus. Concentrating on the syllables of the name and the compassion it’s associated with, I can use it as my meditation anywhere, even when I’m waiting in line for lunch.

“The purpose of it is more to be able to observe and understand the mind—which might have something to do with my being a psych major—but understanding the mind in a different context. I think the benefits of meditation show up in a lot of ways. If you were to have met me four or five years ago, before I really learned much about Buddhism, I was really impulsive and—I’m not going to lie—I still am sometimes. But meditation has helped me recognize the patterns and my habits. When I’m about to make a rash decision, it kind of pulls me back and says, ‘Stop and think about that first.’”

Ilana Cohen ’16

“This is not unique to Judaism, but the time and the cycle are very important. So for us, it’s Friday night through the day of Saturday and observing that as Shabbat in some way. Here, that has meant being at Hillel on Friday nights, pretty regularly. A lot of times, that experience would start for me at about 11 o’clock on Friday when we would pick up the food from the dining halls and bring it over here to the McAlister Center and start cooking for the people who were coming to Shabbat dinner that night. Then we would get the space ready, and often—not every week, but often—I would lead services here in the library. That, for me, was a process of recapturing the Shabbat experience of my synagogue, growing up. Then we would all do dinner together.

“There are many prayers in Judaism that you can’t say unless you have a minyan of people. You wouldn’t say them unless you have that quorum, and there are lots of different reasons why that might be true, but my favorite that I’ve heard is that it’s not that you need 10 voices so that God can hear you—it’s because then somebody does hear you. There are people around you to make the prayer work, because now there are people who know that you’ve said that prayer and support you in doing that. So any time that I’m questioning—well, why am I doing this in a language I don’t really understand?—I know that this is the way to build a community that will be supportive to me.

“So community is very important to me, and the music is also very important, and the fact that it is my history, and it almost wasn’t. My grandmother came out of Austria on the Kindertransport. It’s never why I’ve started a new Jewish practice, but there are always moments where I think, ‘This is just my family’s history.’

“Personally, I almost never use the word ‘faith.’ So when I was thinking about coming here, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to answer these questions?’ I see how it’s a word that broadly allows for anybody’s religious experience, but I think of its association with ‘blind faith,’ and believing or trusting. For me, the religious experience is much more about practice and about learning. Most importantly, from the time I was very little, any participation in Jewish practice was my choice.

Ideologically, nothing I’ve learned or been taught in college is in conflict with my understanding of Judaism, and I didn’t expect it to be. I took a Religious Studies class my first semester, and that was the opposite of a conflict. And I would have done more, but I think I prefer studying it in the religious context, and knowing that I don’t have to get that while I’m in college, because Torah study will be as large a part of my future participation in the Jewish community as religious services.”

Jordan Shaheen ’17

“I’m a big proponent of the war-room theory, which is that you fight all your battles in prayer, not in person. So I kind of get everything I need to get out in the morning in prayer, and then I know I’ve got something there that will get me through the day, until I recharge the next morning.

“I had a church back home that I still go to occasionally. I knew I wanted faith in my life and I wanted a relationship with God, but I’d never really figured out a way to do it. I struggled for years, always reading, always learning about it. There were times when I had atheistic tendencies, times when I wanted to be all-in but didn’t know how to be all-in. Here at school, I finally found a place in the church and was able to really blossom in that role. Now I’m looking at going to divinity school and getting a doctorate of theology and going into the ministry. The thing I love about the Presbyterian Church most is that most ministers have doctorates, so it’s more of an academic denomination, which I’ve come to really appreciate.

“I don’t go out evangelizing—I don’t talk about it at all unless people come to me with questions. It’s something that’s very important to me, and I’m more than happy to talk about it, but I think it’s one of those things where people have to come to you with questions, or else it’s not going to be a meaningful conversation. So I kind of keep to myself, but I think there are a lot more people here for whom religion is important than will say so. It’s kind of an underground group. I know that sounds funny, but there are a lot of people here who are very religious—and not just people who will admit they’re Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or whatever, but people to whom it’s very important but who don’t talk about it much. So you just have to find a way to reach out to those people and you’ll find a pretty cool community that you didn’t know was there.

“I’ve never found that my religion clashes with my work here. A lot of what I do in my major is investigating the early forms of Abrahamic texts, looking at the Socratic traditions and the pagan traditions and their influence or lack thereof on the blossoming of Abrahamic traditions throughout the Mediterranean. So a lot of the texts I get to read are foundational Christian texts, foundational Hebrew texts, foundational Islamic texts. And I get a really good sense of how that all plays together. Are there questions that arise, or inconsistencies that I notice and look into? Absolutely. But as Reverend Tharpe, who used to be the Protestant chaplain here, always says, ‘Any true Christian is agnostic three days a week.’ If you’re not questioning, you’re not learning and growing.”

Molly Keller ’19

“I was raised Catholic, baptized, had my first communion, and went to an Episcopalian school from age 3 through fifth grade. Then I transferred to a very liberal private school where my friends were mostly Jewish. But even when I was going to church and Sunday school and at Episcopalian school and being taught religious knowledge, I never felt that invested in it. I remember in fourth grade we had to draw a picture of God, and I was very stubborn, so my compromise with the teacher was drawing a church with little squiggly lines around the steeple to represent a spirit. That was at age 9.

“I didn’t really think about religion very much in high school. It just wasn’t very relevant to my life. But interestingly enough, since coming to college, unexpectedly, I’ve been exposed to a lot of things that have forced me to reconsider. I definitely am not a devout Christian now or anything like that, but for example, my ID1 class was Cult and Culture with Professor Jordan Kirk, and a lot of the questions we focused on were around the manifestation of a God. And I think one of the things that really changed things for me was—we were reading Stories from Jones­town, and there was a passage about how, for some people, God can just be a warm meal and a job or a roof over their heads.

“And so, shifting from God as this man up in the sky to thinking of it as a word that fills in for certain significances—that kind of changed things for me. And then, I’ve been in Religious Ethics class with Professor Oona Eisenstadt, so being exposed to that, and the way different people have their own Tao in their lives, has changed my thinking.

“Religious Ethics, as she presents it to us, is a class that deals with how to live a good life and how different religions and different thinkers grapple with that question. So actually, a lot of the philosophies that came out of that class—whether they be from religious texts or not—kind of helped me think about how I live my life and how I interact with others. I really liked the Bhagavad-Gita but I also really liked Emmanuel Levinas and the way he talked about our intrinsic obligation to the “Other.” And I think that you see that in religion, but it doesn’t necessarily have to go hand in hand. So there are bits and pieces of philosophy that I use to guide my moral and ethical life.

“Again, I’m not a devout anything, and I don’t know if I believe in a God or many gods, but I’m a little more open to the notion that there may be something out there worth believing in. I just haven’t totally figured out what. But I’m not necessarily looking for anything. When religion was a big part of my life, I just sort of took it as it was. Since it hasn’t been a part of my life, I haven’t felt that anything was missing. But I’m open to things that come my way.”

Vian Zada ’16

“I go up on the roof of Pomona Hall often. Being in this quiet place—surrounded by birds and looking up at the clouds—reminds me of creation. It’s a really nice way to clear my mind and remind myself of what matters to me. That’s what praying does for me. It’s really therapeutic because it dissolves whatever stresses I’m going through. It feels purifying. This may sound cheesy, but part of my faith is just looking at all the marvels around me. My love for life and science and how I see that every day just reinforces my wonder for a greater being.

“I grew up with strict but caring parents who tried to maintain the balance between their culture and sending their kids to American schools. I had a lot of rules at home. So being separated from my parents, it’s been interesting to see how, in my lifestyle, I go about following the tenets of my religion without my parents watching me. No one tells me to pray. My parents are never there when I’m at a party and abstain from drinking. Those are things I do for myself.

“I’m not able to pray five times a day, but I do think about God every day. I do fast, for a lot of other reasons besides the reasons that are given to me. I trust my own judgment, and I make my own decisions. It’s not like I look to the Quran as the only source of how to live my life. I’m in a religious studies class right now called Nourishing Life, and we look at a lot of ancient Chinese texts and a lot of Buddhist and Taoist primary sources, and I find myself agreeing with a lot of what I read. I just believe in taking what appeals to you from different religions and different ideas.

“In Islam there’s a lot of emphasis on being compassionate and respectful toward all others—toward life itself. I think I developed my sense of compassion going to Arabic school every Saturday and learning from my mom—just the Golden Rule, basically. I think all religions are beautiful. Religion in itself is, I think, a wonderful tool for helping one shape one’s moral compass.

“My religion also encourages education. Educating yourself is a duty that you’re supposed to carry throughout your whole life. It’s nice to know that I’m supposed to be here.”

—Photos by Carrie Rosema