Peace Process

The day I met the women of the Faith Club, I sat in my kitchen and read the newspaper over breakfast. The headlines were sadly familiar. Fifteen bystanders killed in Iraq. Attacks and counterattacks in Palestine. The one-year anniversary of subway bombings in London.

I looked out the window. It was a brilliant summer morning in New York City, where my wife and I were expecting the birth of our first child a few months later. Outside, the air hummed with street noise—honks, squeals, a medley of languages. I listened, and thought about the baby. What kind of world will greet it? I wondered. A world like my city, where people of all backgrounds live and strive together? Or one like the headlines, consumed by sectarian strife? I noticed a front-page photograph: Israeli armored personnel carriers streaming into the Gaza Strip. Jews, Muslims, Christians—the fighting seemed never ending. Where was the hope?

I stuffed a pen and notebook in my shoulder bag and boarded a crosstown bus to an elegant apartment building on New York's Upper East Side. A doorman escorted me to an elevator, which stopped at the second floor. I knocked at apartment 2A. Voices burbled inside, the door opened and there stood three women in dressy clothes, smiling nervously. One was blonde, with a vaguely patrician air. Another wore a halo of generous curls. The third, who introduced herself as Ranya Idliby, had long, straight light-brown hair and a gentle handshake. "Welcome to the Faith Club," she said. "Can I get you some coffee?"

I took a seat beside a table arranged with a plate of wafer-thin cookies and a vase of pink and orange roses. Ranya introduced her friends, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner—members of the Faith Club, a religious discussion group the three women had founded after September 11, 2001, when many Americans were asking urgent questions about faith. I had come to Ranya's apartment to write a story about the club, a seemingly straightforward assignment. But, as Ranya served me coffee in a polka-dotted cup and saucer, then settled herself beside her friends on a pair of small sofas, I wondered exactly how to proceed.

Ranya was a Muslim, the daughter of Palestinian parents who, as children, had fled their homes near the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem when the nation of Israel was founded. Priscilla was Jewish, a native New Englander who had lived in New York for decades. Suzanne, the blonde woman, was a lifelong Christian, raised in Kansas City. If the headlines I had read that morning were any guide, these women shouldn't even have been in the same room, much less best friends. But there they were, chatting and laughing as if their faiths had never disagreed. What exactly was going on here, I wondered? How had these three women achieved what the rest of the world could only wish for?