LOUISVILLE, Ky., Dec. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Teaching young people how to appreciate and engage in religious diversity is critical to achieving peace and security in the world, says the winner of the 2010 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

Eboo Patel, founder and executive director of Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago, won the prize for his 2007 autobiography, "Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation." He was selected from among 67 nominations worldwide.

Patel's group encourages young people of different religions to perform community service, explore common values and build bridges among diverse faiths. The organization is active at about 75 colleges.

"Religious extremists all over the world are harnessing adolescent angst for their own ends," said Susan Garrett, a religion professor who directs the award. "Patel urges us to take advantage of the short window of time in a young person's life to teach the universal values of cooperation, compassion and mercy."

Patel, born in India to a Muslim family, immigrated to Chicago as a child. As a teenager, he struggled with what he saw as a lack of religious pluralism in America. His experience led him to launch a movement to build interfaith cooperation by inspiring college students to champion the cause.

He formed Interfaith Youth Core in 1998.

Patel is a member of President Obama's Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and the Religious Advisory Committee of the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier this year, he won the Roosevelt Institute's Freedom of Worship Medal and U.S. News & World Report named him one of America's Best Leaders in 2009.

He holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an undergraduate.

Five Grawemeyer Awards are presented annually for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology, education and religion. The University of Louisville and Louisville Presbyterian Seminary jointly award the religion prize.

For more details, see www.grawemeyer.org.

SOURCE University of Louisville

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