Interfaith Forum Disbands Due To Low Participation By Members

The Harvard-Radcliffe Interfaith Forum (HRIF), a five-year-old student group which organized discussions and other events involving members of various religious groups, dissolved last week due to a decline in student interest and overlapping programs offered by other groups.

Former HRIF chair Josh Edelman '00 announced the dissolution in a January 31 e-mail sent to the organization's membership of about 50 students.

Although HRIF had sponsored several popular campus events, including the Interfaith Day of Service and the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Memorial Service, Edelman said a low level of participation by members recently made it impossible to justify continuing the group.

"It has become simply too difficult for me to think of the HRIF as a place where meaningful interfaith dialogue can go on, when there simply aren't enough people in the room to start talking," Edelman wrote in the e-mail message.

In an interview with The Crimson yesterday, Edelman refused to estimate the specific level of participation this year, but said it had been significantly lower than last year. Edelman added that an abundance of more established campus religious groups with similar interfaith offerings played a large role in discouraging participation in HRIF's programs, which were mainly lunchtime discussions on interfaith issues.

"Campus religious groups...have far more developed interfaith and interethnic outreach programs than before," Edelman said. "It seems that those sorts of forums...are more what Harvard students are interested in going to."