On a late spring afternoon in Columbus, Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia stands beneath the stone arches of Hitchcock Hall, the hum of student footsteps echoing across the quad. He is dressed casually—a blazer over a crisp shirt—yet carries an air of quiet authority. By day, he directs Ohio State’s Coal Combustion Products Program and teaches future engineers the art of transforming industrial by-products into building materials. By night, he is the Executive Director of Religions for Peace USA, orchestrating interfaith coalitions across the country. In both arenas, he is driven by the same conviction: that what divides us need not define us, and that the bridges we build—whether of concrete or of understanding—can outlast the forces that erode them.
Butalia’s journey to this dual vocation began in Punjab, India, amid stories of a family torn apart by the 1947 Partition. In 1989, he arrived in Columbus to pursue a doctorate in civil engineering at Ohio State, his head filled more with soil mechanics than scripture. Yet a chance encounter with a local Catholic priest prompted him to revisit the faith of his childhood. He recalls asking himself, “Do I even want to continue being religious?” and then, more profoundly, “What religious tradition should I be a part of?” It was advice that rooted him more deeply in Sikhism even as it opened his heart to other traditions.
In 2020, Butalia synthesized these twin strands of identity—engineer and believer—in his bilingual memoir My Journey Home: Going Back to Lehnda Punjab. The book, published in English and Shahmukhi Punjabi, traces his pilgrimage to the land his grandparents fled. He recounts how, standing before the shrine of a Sufi saint in Lahore, he felt the presence of those who had once fed pilgrims in langar kitchens centuries before. “There are angels that walk on the earth,” he writes of his grandmother’s stories, a line that became a refrain in his exploration of faith, memory, and belonging. The memoir earned national recognition in Pakistan and won the 2020 National Peace Award from the National Peace and Justice Council of Pakistan.
While his technical publications number over two hundred—ranging from concrete admixtures to the reclamation of abandoned mines—Butalia’s legacy in the interfaith sphere is equally substantial. He has served twelve years on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, lent his voice to the North American Interfaith Network, and co-founded the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations. He sits on the Advisory Committee of the Global Sikh Council and on the boards of Faith in Public Life, the National Museum of American Religions, the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio, and the Sikh Educational and Religious Foundation. His prior roles include advising the Journal of Interreligious Studies and serving on the boards of the National Religious Coalition Against Torture and the World Sikh Council–America Region.
Under Butalia’s stewardship, Religions for Peace USA has launched initiatives that transcend rhetoric. The Our Muslim Neighbor campaign partners with local organizations in Tennessee to counter bias and misinformation, drawing on collective-impact models to reshape public attitudes toward Islam in America. In the wake of 9/11, he co-sponsored the Unity Walks in New York and Washington, D.C.—processions that began at St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church and wound to the September 11th Museum, culminating in interfaith prayers for healing and solidarity. His global engagements include moderating a session at the World Council of Churches conference in Geneva (2005), organizing the first U.S. National Gathering of Religious Leaders in Chicago (2006), and representing Religions for Peace at World Assemblies in Kyoto (2006), Vienna (2013), and Lindau (2019).
At the heart of Butalia’s work is a philosophy steeped in Sikh principles: seva (selfless service) and sarbat da bhala (the welfare of all). In his June 2022 statement on the U.S. Supreme Court’s reproductive-rights ruling, he argued that “no religious tradition should impose its moral or ethical values on those of other religious beliefs” and that the state “should not be mandating how to govern the bodies of women.” He framed this as an interfaith imperative: a multi-religious society must respect the conscience of each individual, especially those on society’s margins. His invocation of sarbat da bhala—“may everyone prosper”—echoes daily in Sikh congregations and undergirds his call for universal justice.
Yet Butalia’s vision extends beyond policy and protest. In Central Ohio, he collaborates with congregations of every faith to host Interfaith Academies for clergy, bringing Catholic priests, Muslim imams, Jewish rabbis, Hindu pandits, and Sikh granthis into dialogue. These academies examine local challenges—immigration, racial tension, climate change—not as isolated crises but as shared moral tests. In charitable kitchens, participants serve meals side by side; in workshops, they learn to translate doctrine into community action; and in prayer vigils, they reaffirm that pluralism need not dilute devotion but can deepen it.
At the national level, Butalia envisions a forum where religious communities coalesce to advocate for refugees, protect religious minorities, and combat hate speech. He recently helped convene a National Interfaith Prayer Service for Protecting Democracy, where leaders urged civic participation as a sacred duty. Elsewhere, he has worked with the U.S. Institute of Peace, arguing that peacemaking transcends military spending and rests on interreligious solidarity—a refrain he reinforced in essays for Sight Magazine and Religion News Service.
In conversation, Butalia is disarmingly candid. He speaks of nights spent drafting grant proposals, mornings reviewing concrete slurry tests, and moments when he hesitated before sharing his Partition story. Yet the through-line is always clear: his work is not an abstraction but a lived commitment to the dignity of every soul. “We cannot control other people’s behavior,” he wrote in a Huffington Post essay, “but we can control how we treat them to begin with and how we react to them when things ‘go wrong.’”
Walking back across the campus lawn, he pauses before an ancient oak, its gnarled roots a testament to endurance. He admires how faith traditions—like trees—take root in specific soils yet stretch their branches toward the same sky. If he has learned anything, he says, it is that peace is not the absence of conflict but the art of mutual flourishing. In the classrooms of Ohio State and the sanctuaries of diverse faiths, Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia continues to cultivate that art, one conversation, one campaign, and one covenant at a time.
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First published in this link of The European Times.
