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Ruth Broyde Sharone - TIO Correspondent

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Bill and Jean Lesher's Lifetime Interfaith Partnership

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Bill and Jean Lesher's Lifetime Interfaith Partnership

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

In the past 30 years of grassroots labor, I’ve occasionally encountered couples as devoted to interfaith activism as they are to one another. Such is the case of Jean and William Lesher, two people who live, breathe, and exemplify what it means to be in partnership and to share a lifelong commitment to the interfaith movement.

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Interfaith Activism – A Giant Awakening

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Interfaith Activism – A Giant Awakening

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

We are witnessing an awakening in the interfaith movement across the United States unlike anything we have seen since Civil Rights marches 50 years ago. This awakening seems to have surfaced as a direct result of the presidential election and in response to new policies and measures initiated by President Trump in his first 30 days in office.

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If There is No Bread, There is No Torah

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If There is No Bread, There is No Torah

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

In the adage “If there is no bread, there is no Torah,” Judaism recognizes that one needs to feed the body before you can feed the soul, because deep learning cannot occur on an empty stomach. The Jewish tradition also recognizes the power of food to enhance the body’s availability to be spiritually nourished.

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Joseph Prabhu's Anatomy of Wisdom

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Joseph Prabhu's Anatomy of Wisdom

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

“Wisdom includes action as well as knowledge,” maintains Joseph Prabhu, a professor of philosophy and religion for four decades, a passionate interfaith activist, and Mother Teresa’s first altar boy in India. “Action brings insight into dynamic motion,” Prabhu explains, “and insight without thoughtful action, to my mind, is seriously incomplete.”

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Obama's Final Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge

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Obama's Final Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

Eboo Patel’s question rang out in Elstad Auditorium on the final day of the Sixth Annual President’s Interfaith Community Service Campus Challenge, held this year in September at Gallaudet University in Washington DC. Founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core, and one of the principal architects of the Campus Challenge, Patel posed that key question to some 600 participants: students, professors, university presidents and interfaith activists

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An Instrument of Thy Peace

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An Instrument of Thy Peace

by Ruth Broyde Sharone

“I’m just an ordinary person,” says Patrick McCollum in all earnestness. But the 66-year-old former jewelry designer, leader in the Pagan community, interfaith minister, and now world peace-maker, has been at the epicenter of extraordinary events that continue to unfold as he is called to serve in the far-flung corners of the globe.

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Varanasi Now and Forever

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“There is hardly any city in the world that can claim greater antiquity, greater continuity, and greater popularity than Banaras (the British name for Varanasi). Banaras has been a holy city for at least 30 centuries. No city in India arouses the emotions of Hindus as much as Kasi does.” (Varanasi’s name in Hindu religious literature)

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Muslims for Progressive Values Takes on Wahhabism

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One day she woke up and said to herself, “Enough is enough.”

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Ret. Lt. Colonel Shareda Hosein: Not Your Average Army Officer

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What would propel an 18 year-old, 4’10” Muslim girl, born in Trinidad, the daughter of immigrants, to join the U.S. Army and serve for 35 years?

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In the Face of Proselytizing

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Messianic Judaism is a Biblically based movement of Jews who believe in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah of Israel. According to web statistics, from 2003 to 2007, the number of Messianic houses of worship in the United States grew from 150 to as many as 438, with over 100 in Israel and more worldwide. As of 2012, population estimates for the United States were between 175,000 and 250,000 members, for Israel, between 10,000 and 20,000 members, and an estimated total worldwide membership of 350,000.

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Spontaneous Interfaith Relationships

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For decades interfaith activists have been searching for “flint” to create the positive sparks needed for interfaith engagement and collaboration. In the beginning we would look for potential partners from different religious communities, speak to them separately, and then invite them into a wider circle for dialogue. We would lay the ground work and then praise the merits of their coming together, encouraging people to find a common language, to become comfortable with one another, share information about their religious practices, and “bond.” We wanted to create a non-threatening environment which we hoped would ultimately lead to a relationship of trust and then inspire more opportunities to engage the larger community. Sometimes it would take months to create that first encounter. Sometimes that first encounter would backfire because the individuals weren’t quite ready to go beyond their comfort zone.

“This Is No Place for a Zero Sum Game”

For more than 100 years Hartford Seminary has been a pioneer in establishing interfaith engagement between Christians and Muslims, developing Abrahamic curricula and a Muslim chaplaincy program. Most recently the school has begun to include the study of Dharmic faith traditions. This interfaith commitment is a sign of the times, no doubt, but also reflects the worldview of the woman who has served as Hartford’s president for the past 15 years, Professor of Social Ethics Heidi Hadsell.

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Toward an Ecological Civilization

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The image of an aspen grove in Southern Utah called “Pando” became both a symbol and wake-up call for some 1,500 participants – including 130 from China – who attended an extraordinary ecological conference held at Pomona College in Claremont, California, June 4-7.

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The Sacred Power of Indigenous Women Threatened

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We were about to begin a workshop entitled “The Sacred Power of Women” at the Dialogo Multicultural Universal in Guadalajara, Mexico last month. I had been asked to facilitate a panel of four accomplished, powerful women. Laura, an American-Samoan Latter Day Saint, is a businesswoman and philanthropist. Yonina, an Argentinean writer and publisher, was a Hindu nun for nine years. Evelina is an Ecuadorian anthropologist, lawyer, and historian. And Patti, a local Indigenous leader of Irish-Mexican heritage, is a teacher and performer of sacred ritual dance.

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Pope Francis & Rabbi Skorka: Forging a Deeper Relationship

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There may come a moment in long-standing interfaith friendships when individuals deeply devoted to their religious traditions notice how the differences that separate them from their dialogue partner begin to recede or even dissolve. While recognizing that philosophical and religious differences still exist, they begin to experience a form of familiarity and kinship that supersedes religion, dogma, tradition, and history.

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Living the Gandhi Dream in Ahmedabad

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The Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, in the west Indian state of Gujarat, was a bold experiment initiated by Mahatma Gandhi to find a way to make the spiritual practical. How does one take spiritual principles, apply them genuinely to everyday life, and then convey those principles to the neediest of children, so that the next generation might grow up with an innate sense of what it means to “love all and serve all.”

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Science and Spirituality Join Forces for Water

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Two hundred participants – scientists, clergy, spiritual practitioners, artists, and concerned citizens – gathered for an all-day teach-in on Sunday, March 8, 2015 at Loyola Marymount University, exploring practical solutions to the global climate crisis and water shortage. Organized by the Southern California Parliament of the World’s Religions, “Seeds of Peace: Honoring Water, Source of Life” offered spiritual practice, sacred ritual, social action, and climate-based workshops, as well as a vibrant communal marketplace with 40 vendors all focused on the life-sustaining role of water.

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First All-Women Mosque in America Launched

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Gold and green balloons strained to be released and soar into the sky at midday on Friday, January 30, at the entrance to the Pico Union Synagogue in Los Angeles, one of the oldest synagogues in LA, now an interfaith and multicultural arts center that regularly hosts multiple religious communities. This house of worship, with its huge multicolored stained-glass Star of David, was about to become the weekly home of the first all-women’s mosque in America and the site of the first jummah prayer in LA led exclusively by women.

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Religion Inside Out: The Story of One Person Collaborating

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“Religion Inside Out” – that was the tag line the Rev. Dr. Gwynne Guibord, an Episcopal priest, attached to The Guibord Center (TGC), a unique non-profit organization. Less than four years old, it is making its mark on the interfaith landscape in Southern California and beyond.

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Laurie Zoloth Calls American Academy of Religion to Account

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In an impassioned, eloquent plea in San Diego last month, Laurie Zoloth, newly appointed 2014 president of the Academy of American Religion (AAR), called for a conscious “interruption” in our lives to take into account the dire climate crisis and to make substantial changes in our daily behavior.