Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation (2007) suggests that compassion became a dominant theme in human experience for the first time between 800 to 200 BCE, called the Axial Age by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Armstrong notes that over this 600-year period a religious revolution occurred in four different regions of the world: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian sub-continent; Confucianism and Taoism in China; monotheism in the Middle East; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In each case we discover ancient traditions calling followers to compassionate, ethical behavior.
Foundational Documents of the Interfaith Movement
It is no longer news that we live in a growing diversity on an ever-shrinking globe. Whether the subject is crime or economics, politics, entertainment, or almost everything else, strangers from different parts of the world are in dialogue, interacting personally and becoming ever better connected. Along with international communication, travel, and diversity in our neighborhoods comes the growing awareness that a thousand different flowers bloom in the same soil that grows ‘my’ faith, ‘our’ faith, or, we might say, ‘our faiths.’