An unexpected interfaith marriage

[rug]

“Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk”
by J. Dana Trent
(Fresh Air Books

Oct. 09, 2013 @ 11:14 AM
Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan

CHAPEL HILL — J. Dana Trent and Fred Eaker spent their honeymoon in India, but the sights they saw were unique to the interfaith couple. Trent, an ordained Baptist minister, and Eaker, a Hindu who spent five years as a monk, honeymooned at an ashram outside New Delhi. An ashram, Trent explains in her memoir, is a Hindu temple, monastery and residential community that usually accommodates pilgrims, including them. Their India honeymoon is described in detail in the first chapter of “Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk,” including the lack of, shall we say, expected romance.

Trent read an excerpt last week at her church, Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, as she launched the book along with Eaker. They shared their interfaith marriage in an interview with The Herald-Sun in early 2011, and over the past year, Trent has been writing her memoir. There’s plenty of humor as well as the seriousness that comes when two people of two different faiths who love each other need to work out the details of daily life and living their faiths.

The Rev. Stephanie Ford, minister of Christian formation at Binkley, said at the book launch that interfaith families have a lot to contribute, including at Binkley. Interfaith marriage, Ford said, is about “learning to support another person on a faith journey.”

When Trent, a graduate of Duke Divinity School, and Eaker set out to make their interfaith marriage work, the self-described theology nerds went to a book store and searched for books on interfaith marriage. Most were Christian and Jewish or Christian and Muslim, but they did not find any books on Christian and Hindu marriages. So Trent wrote her own.

http://www.heraldsun.com/lifestyles/faith/x909262764/An-unexpected-interfaith-marriage

[MADem]

1. Hey, why not? Opposites attract, so the song says!

This part is a bit hilarious, though:

Trent and Eaker met on the dating website eHarmony, where she checked off all the world religions, as long as the match wasn’t atheist or agnostic. Their merging of faiths was also a merging of lifestyles. Eaker is a minimalist, so they compromise. He said that in his eHarmony survey, he was open to pretty much anyone.

You know those eHarmony ads, how the people in them look almost creepily like mirror images of one another? I wonder if those two fit that bill!