The Lutheran Center for Faith, Values and Community encourages interfaith exploration, and Interfaith Fellow Viveka Hall-Holt ’22 furthers this goal through her interspiritual practices Instagram account. The account acts as a resource to students; each post includes a thoughtful caption that calls the reader to action: to take a break from their phone, bake a nice recipe or have a conversation about social justice, all with the goal of spiritual wellness. Plus, every post is headed by a beautiful photograph of nature, people or art.
Hall-Holt is one of three Interfaith Fellows — student employees of the Lutheran Center who meet weekly with the goal of furthering interfaith values on campus. The account is her individual project, an idea she came up with over the summer of 2020 while doing an interfaith internship in Toledo, Ohio. Her internship superiors encouraged her to pursue the project when she shared the idea.
Hall-Holt posts twice a week on the account. Each post describes a spiritual practice, but the theme or content of the posts differ depending on which day of the week they are posted. Monday posts are not specific to a single religious tradition.
“I try to intuit what kind of spiritual practice other students — and myself — need in the moment and write something to respond to that,” Hall-Holt said.
Thursday posts focus on a specific religious tradition. In the post from Thursday, Feb. 25, Hall-Holt shared the practice of prayer in the Hmong shaman and animist tradition. She converses with people who practice the traditions about which she writes and works with them to make the posts as accurate as possible.
“This process takes a lot of work,” Hall-Holt said. “But I am committed to it, because I think it is the only way to be truly honoring to many traditions.”
Hall-Holt created the account with the intent of caring for the spiritual part of the self in a pandemic-affected world, with every person on campus in mind.
Find the account at @interspiritualpractices on Instagram.
sivbo1@stolaf.edu
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