Humans of St. Norbert:
“I was in Jordan under a Fulbright during my research for my Ph.D. dissertation at Notre Dame. I worked with a group called RIIFS, it’s The Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies, and they were founded by the former crown prince of Jordan, Prince Hassan bin Talal. So he came in twice to our building and I got an email one day that said, ‘Hey, do you want to come meet the prince?’ We were in this room and a bunch of his staff members were there. We just sat and we had tea and talked about the Fulbright Program and my research. He was a really nice guy!

“That organization also partnered with the Vatican to have this big interfaith dialogue conference in Amman and they invited me to be a fly on the wall. It was really neat! There were a bunch of Muslims and Christians brought in to have a discussion about human rights. What made it interesting was you had one Christian point of view which was all Catholic, all from the Vatican. But for the Muslim point of view, they flew in Muslims from all over the Islamic world. And so the best part for me was just listening to their conversations and how they agreed and disagreed on certain perspectives on the sources of human rights. It was almost more of an inter-Muslim debate than it was a Christian-Muslim debate.

“I think Jordan is really underrated as a tourist destination. You have Petra and Wadi Rum, which is a desert and one of my favorite places in the entire world. You can go camp in the desert and see the entire Milky Way at night!” – Andrew O’Connor, assistant professor of theology and religious studies