The heart is good: Hope and the good among interfaith communities in New Zealand

This creative nonfiction piece reflects a snapshot of my experience studying the interfaith community in Auckland, New Zealand, from 2015 to 2016. My research was centered on a handful of interfaith organizations and groups who worked together from across different faiths to build a community of respect, education, and hope. Using the framework of the anthropology of the good (Robbins, 2013), I analyzed how their faith-informed moral perspectives shaped their work and determination to spread peace despite the many obstacles they faced. Their hopes and fears for the future informed their work in the present. Using a variety of ethnographic vignettes, I highlight the threads of “hope” and “the good” in my participants' experiences. As such, this piece reflects core themes of my research and worldviews of my participants, while also providing an avenue of exploring how we do fieldwork, how we decide what is “relevant,” and how we build relationships of trust with our participants. As an emerging anthropologist and postgraduate student, these elements were tightly bound in my mind and this piece demonstrates how, in moving through fieldwork and analysis, these different facets of research coalesce and help to mutually constitute our ethnographic work.