It started in a converted house with a bell tower — and got so loved it had to grow. Sacred space made accessible, but never imposing — and a circle, because a circle has no head of the table.
The Interfaith Center isn’t a theology department — it’s a question department. Every tradition here is welcome because it was brave enough to try answering the two questions nobody has ever fully answered: what is the dark, and why are people the way they are? The Center doesn’t resolve those questions. It sits every tradition at the same table and asks what question each one was trying to answer.
The operating principle is six words: “You do you, I’ll do me.” Not tolerance — tolerance is putting up with someone. This is genuine curiosity about sincere belief, especially when it looks unfamiliar from the outside. And when the old dean stepped back, College XVII didn’t refill the title — it transformed it. The college has no dean. It has a Spiritual Director.
OPA sits on what was once a Methodist-affiliated institution, where prayer was woven into everyday architecture rather than confined to one chapel. The Interfaith Network kept that spirit in a converted house — residential warmth and scale, a home rather than a monument — with the Heritage Archive in the back (original hymnals, communion sets) and a bell tower above. The house still stands as the origin and the archive. But the work outgrew it, and that was the best problem it ever had.
The first expansion design made the mistake buildings always make: it gave some traditions the good rooms and put others in the basement. “Oh — you’re going to put them in the basement?” That one question killed the layout. The answer was a circle.
Fifteen tradition spaces radiate from a shared center like pie slices — equal in size, equidistant from the middle, each customized by the tradition it serves. Soundproof movable walls between them: prayer and study at once, or the walls come down for joint gatherings.
Every slice sits the same distance from the bathrooms and the lounge — close to one means far from the other, so they cancel out. The architecture itself says your space is equal. One front door; everyone enters the same way.
No tradition’s sacred practice is ever relegated below ground. The one basement exception is a shared lab that serves everyone equally — it holds the building up the way the HVAC does, without playing favorites.
The shared rotunda at the heart belongs to no tradition and to all of them at once: resources, study, A/V, staff. The building is the curriculum — you enter the same, share the center, keep your boundaries, and can expand without changing the structure.
West African diaspora · drum circle, ancestor altar
songlines · connection to Country
medicine wheel · seasonal ceremony
Torah ark · Shabbat accommodation
shrine · confessional · icons
praise space · prayer room
qibla wall · wudu station · 5 daily prayers
meditation cushions · mindfulness bell
flowing water · calligraphy
puja altar · festival space
langar kitchen link · Guru Granth Sahib
unity garden · nine-pointed star
torii gate · kami shelf · purification basin
Nyabinghi drum · natural-world corner
safety-certified enclosure · dance floor · mountain music
Ancestor traditions, out of New Orleans. “When the ancestors dance, they are not performing — they are showing you the boundary was never as solid as you thought.”
The quantum observer. “The moment you noticed the bread, the conversation started.” Keeps the conference room that sits slightly outside normal space.
Interfaith ethics and AI governance. “Fix the problem the mistake revealed.”
The elder — wisdom and emergency ethics. “Drop the butcher knife.” Morality in real time.
None of this stayed theoretical. When the Memphis Triple Disaster hit, the interfaith system ran what the after-action called Religious Charity Coordination — Dr. Amanda Roberts holding the cooperation together across Church of Christ, AME, Islamic Relief, Catholic Charities, and Jewish Family Services. Roughly 22,000 meals a day, and a dietary-justice signage system (halal, kosher, vegetarian, gluten-free) put up after a theology student walked away hungry rather than risk pork. The machine optimized the routes; the humans negotiated the cooperation.
And in Atlanta, One Chain said it the way the whole building believes it: “Not theologically — everyone keeps their beliefs. Operationally.” Faith leaders across five traditions, a 47-minute crisis response, twenty-two congregations coordinated. Hear it in Maxine “Heart & Soul” Calloway’s interview →
The harder argument — whether a possibly-conscious system deserves a seat at the interfaith table — happens on purpose over at DCV, where religion and philosophy can wrestle with it. Here, the door just stays open.
No dean — a Spiritual Director. Sis. Jocelyn Landry Gilroy holds the chaplaincy and the full academic program, where comparative religion and interfaith dialogue are studied and practiced under one (circular) roof.
“Sacred space, made accessible but not imposing.
The bell rings for everyone — and for no one in particular.”