Render a single profile field

There's not a good way to do this as you described. One way would be to manage it via user updates - fetch user details, pull the profile field you want to display, and send back any changes through a user update. However, that wouldn't use any built in html rendering for the field.

I was able to do it by modifying the UserFields widget subfile multiple-fields.vm file and just passing in the xml data I define. My new file is called multiple-fields2.vm

#set($field = "Interests")
$data.Add($field, $core_v2_encoding.HtmlDecode($field))
$core_v2_widget.ExecuteFile('multiple-fields2.vm')

Here is the multiple-fields2.vm file in gist

gist.github.com/.../a09279612b308e45a085677e9af0272a