SOUL FOOD:

At some point, B. Jill Carroll’s heart had grown hard. She can’t pin down a place or a moment, but she also abandoned what was most important to her.

It’s a condition she associates with being American, with being an academic. A cynical American. A jaded academic. Suspicious.

That is how she came to describe herself, though it took a journey to Turkey to make her see it.

Carroll is a professor in religious studies at Rice University in Houston, and executive director of its Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.

For nearly two decades she has taught in the humanities, she says, “from Plato to NATO,” not only Western thought but also Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Indian philosophers, Japanese poets and Chinese poets.

At the Boniuk Center, she devotes herself to its mission “to understand and facilitate the conditions that lead to sustained peaceful coexistence among people of different religions.”

It was at Rice where a young Turkish man from the Institute for Interfaith Dialog in Houston approached her about traveling to Turkey as a guest of the organization, as a member of an interfaith dialogue trip.

So three years ago, along with about 20 others — clergy, community leaders, professors and institute representatives — she visited Turkey for the first time.

At a talk she gave in Irvine last month, she told her audience, “I can safely say, without exaggeration, that I am a different person because I went.”

Hers is a story I’ve become familiar with. Two years ago Peggy Price, former minister for the Huntington Beach Church of Religious Science, made a similar trip to Turkey by invitation from the Tolerance Foundation, a small community center and mosque for Turkish Muslims, which was then in Huntington Beach on Beach Boulevard.

Later, the Tolerance Foundation merged with Global Cultural Connections (now the Pacifica Institute) in Irvine, and Price introduced me to Yalcin Aslan, a young Turkish man who volunteers there. Earlier this year, I too traveled to Turkey with a group of 12 — clergy, professors and some spouses, including mine.

Five volunteers from the Pacifica Institute — four men, including Aslan, and one woman — traveled with us as our guides. We traveled to Izmir (the former Smyrna), Anatolya, Ephesus, Cappadocia, Konya — the onetime home of renowned 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi — and, of course, Istanbul, the former Constantinople.

We also visited schools, including the university where Aslan and his wife graduated, business associations, the Journalists and Authors foundation, a television station and the Turkish daily newspaper, Zaman.

We shared meals with teachers and principals, with businessmen and women, with husbands and wives and daughters and sons. We were received as warmly as family, as respectfully as dignitaries.

Several weeks after I returned home, a friend mentioned a godchild of a family member had traveled to Turkey through an organization called the Rumi Forum in Washington, D.C. Was it, he wondered, anything like the trip I had made?

As I traveled in Turkey, one of us in the group would ask from time to time, “Why do they do this?” Why do these volunteers from the United States and in Turkey spend so much time, money and energy to offer us this experience?

It’s a question Carroll had. “I was very suspicious of it” in the beginning, she said when she spoke in Irvine.

Look, she’d tell the people she met, “I’m a cynical American. A jaded academic.” She thought, “You guys can’t be this good.”

She’d ask, “Are you brainwashed? What’s the catch?” But there was no catch, she realized over time.

“There’s just commitment,” she says. “There’s just virtue. There’s honesty. There’s love. There’s a willingness to take a risk and reach out and connect with people. And there’s no agenda, at least not a negative agenda.”

The commitment is to the vision of a contemporary Islamic thinker named Fethullah Gülen. He is the honorary president of the Rumi Forum, of the Interfaith Dialog Center in New Jersey and the Niagara Foundation in Chicago.

The teachings of Gülen are at the heart of the Pacifica Institute, the Institute for Interfaith Dialogue and countless other organizations that promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue. He is the inspiration of their volunteers and of the founders of schools and many other associations and institutions.

Of her experience with the Gülen community both here and in Turkey, Carroll says, “It’s almost like the blood has starting flowing in my heart again. I feel a softening in myself. I feel a kind of return to what’s important when I really didn’t know I had left it.”

She has written a book, “A Dialogue of Civilizations,” that constructs conversations between Gülen and other thinkers: Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Confucius, Plato and Jean-Paul Sartre. At 100 pages the book, says Atilla Kahveci, interfaith dialogue coordinator for the Pacifica Institute, is “readable in the sense that it is talking about so difficult topic and you can understand something.”

Carroll is not one who thinks that religions, or philosophies for that matter, when boiled down to their essentials are all the same. “Religions are not the same,” she says. “We can’t ignore the significant differences.”

But, she asks, what are we going to do? Are we going to “just kill everybody we don’t agree with?”

Carroll doesn’t embrace the idea that a clash as described in Samuel Huntington’s book, “A Clash of Civilizations,” is inevitable. As she sees it, the work of the Gülen community is an antidote for that.

The challenge, she believes, for this era — an era that has given us the capability to destroy all life while it has also interconnected us in ways never before seen on Earth — is to figure out how to live with our differences.

Her book means to chart a middle path. Yet ultimately, she says, the dialogue she has illustrated in her book will have to take place “in the pages of our hearts and the details of our lives.”

Each of us needs to learn how to live with those who do not think like us, who do not believe like us — and never will. How to do that is Carroll’s obsession.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].