I am almost certainly not training future religion scholars. But if I can encourage young adults to question facile statements they hear in mass media like "Islam hates us," to be kind to strangers, or to avoid anti-Semitic "jokes" in their daily lives, I consider my time well spent.

“Almost every major religion in the world has a sentence, a commandment that is a version of, ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you,’” Reza Aslan says.