Lived Experiences of Spiritual Empathy and Identity Negotiation in Interfaith Volunteering

Abstract

Interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism have become central to contemporary social research as global societies increasingly confront challenges of diversity and coexistence. Within this context, interfaith volunteering provides a unique avenue for exploring how young people experience and interpret spiritual and social encounters across religious boundaries. However, despite extensive discussions on interfaith engagement, few studies have captured the subjective and meaning-making dimensions of these encounters through phenomenological inquiry. Existing literature remains largely descriptive or quantitative, failing to reveal how participants internally construct empathy and spiritual awareness. This study addresses this research gap by employing an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to explore how young adults engaged in interfaith volunteering understand empathy, identity, and plural consciousness in multicultural urban contexts. Data were collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with twelve participants from diverse faith backgrounds and analyzed using hermeneutic and thematic interpretation. The findings reveal that interfaith volunteering serves as a transformative practice where participants experience spiritual empathy through shared service, negotiate religious identity within plural settings, and develop a plural spiritual consciousness rooted in compassion and relational understanding. This study’s novelty lies in demonstrating how interfaith volunteering becomes a lived process of spiritual formation that bridges personal faith and collective pluralism—an experiential contribution often overlooked in current interfaith research. By emphasizing experience-based spirituality as a foundation for sustainable pluralism, the study enriches phenomenological scholarship on interreligious coexistence and contributes a nuanced understanding of empathy and identity in diverse societies.