Patel Mentors helped mold Eboo Patel by giving shape to Patel's dreams and shedding light on the paths that the author might take to reach his goals. Working with mentors also gave Patel insight into diversity, and revealed worldviews previously hidden from everyday sight. Patel honors his mentors for their varied contributions to his intellectual and spiritual development. In Acts of Faith, Patel spends a great deal of time discussing his mentors because he also wants to show his readers that their success depends on the cultivation of deep and meaningful relationships with other people. Mentors are guides, teachers, and confidents. They can serve in the role of coach, by inspiring and cheerleading. Mentors can also offer constructive criticism when those in their tutelage need it the most.

Although Patel honors a plethora of people that inspired and motivated him to create the Interfaith Youth Core, he focuses on a select few who made a special impact on his character development. One of those mentors is Brother Wayne. "Brother Wayne Teasdale had two great hopes for me: that I would start an interfaith youth movement and that I would take mushrooms with him. He got one," (Patel 59). Perhaps more than any other mentor, Brother Wayne made a huge impact on Patel's personal path. At first, Patel was simply intrigued with the wacky Brother Wayne, who had a hippie New Age-infused brand of spirituality blending traditional Catholicism with Eastern mysticism. As their relationship deepened, Patel begun to realize that the qualities of interfaith fusion that Brother Wayne exemplified were the precise qualities he sought to manifest in his own life.

One of the reasons Brother Wayne became Patel's primary mentor was because Brother Wayne helped the young Patel develop a sense of personal identity. Prior to meeting Brother Wayne, Patel was inspired but lacked...

"I loved my work as a teacher, and I loved the people I was living with, but however I combined community, justice, and creativity, it did not add up to identity," (Patel 69). Patel continues to muse, "and that was one of the key reasons I was attracted to Brother Wayne. He might have had his head in the clouds, but he had a very clear sense of his role in the cosmos," (69). Brother Wayne therefore helped Eboo Patel discover and fulfill his role in the cosmos, which was to be a powerful and influential interfaith leader.
The learning process was challenging at times. Even though Patel describes Brother Wayne as being laid-back, there were times that Wayne challenged Patel's consciousness in ways that caused him to reflect on his sense of self, his culture, and his identity. One of the first challenges given to Patel was to come to terms with his Muslim heritage. In his youth, Patel eschewed the religion of his ancestors in order to embrace what he viewed as a more personally liberating and universal spiritual path. Patel loved Buddhism, especially of the Tibetan variety. He looked up to Brother Wayne because Wayne had met the Dalai Lama and worked closely with the Dalai Lama's brother. Brother Wayne meditated and had spent time in an ashram in India. Patel wanted to identify with Buddhism and to one day call himself a Buddhist. Yet at a conference one day, Brother Wayne introduced Eboo Patel as a "Muslim."

The word triggered a psychological reaction in Patel. Sure, he was a Muslim in the sense that his parents were Muslim, but Patel himself felt "adolescent discrimination against the familiar," and did not wish to be "boxed into the traditions of our birth," (70). From that point on, Patel learned how to integrate the tradition of his birth with every other tradition he would encounter on his path. Brother Wayne's designation of Patel as…