High technology’s new digital tools are a blessing for faith communities and the interfaith movement everywhere. At the local level, e-mail, websites, databases, and social media are quickly displacing the time and expense of poster production, paper newsletters, fliers, and snail-mail. At the national and international levels, new powers have been vested for those who have been voiceless in the public square, a clear opportunity for NGOs and communities of faith and practice. They have been scrambling to respond: surveys suggest that approximately 250,000 of the 335,000 religious congregations in the U.S. have websites today.
Learning About Interfaith Every Which Way
As with so much mainstream media, stories about religious education usually shine a bright light on particular problems – science versus creationism in the classroom, lawsuits over textbooks, prayer in public schools, renting space to religious groups, upset atheists – so many problems, so many conflicts.
Making it Happen in an Interfaith World
The interfaith movement is full of high hope and good intentions. But as T.S. Eliot put it, “Between the idea… and the act falls the shadow.” After enthusiasm and inspiration die down, the heavy lifting (and real satisfaction) comes in actually embodying our visions, working seedtime to harvest, and sustaining our commitment over the long term. TIO’s stories this month are about interfaith activists with those qualities, people who “get it done” and “make it happen” in a variety of contexts.
Getting To Know You
Without shared service, interfaith dialogue achieves very little. This interfaith commonplace is good advice for anyone committed to a healthy interfaith future. Dozens of TIO articles this past year draw their power from collaborative efforts among those who were strangers and now active in a larger family.
Identifying Interfaith’s Collaborative Imperative
A year ago “Social Justice” was chosen as the theme for the May 2012 issue of TIO. That developed into “The Big Issues – Peace, the Earth, Economics, and…” As we gathered material for this vast, still imprecise, amorphous arena, new issues emerged, along with the confirmation, over and over, that the big issues facing humankind and our future are interwoven, even interdependent.
Hearing the Emerging Voices, Including Your Own
Dynamic grassroots interfaith activities depend on our hearing the ‘voice’ of everyone participating. This can seem tedious and unnecessary in communities which have depended on clergy, teachers, experts, and trustees to do most of the talking and make most of the decisions. Without participatory inclusion, though, do not expect any sustainable vitality to develop. This learning about inclusivity surfaces in a number of this month’s stories.
Bowled Over by Emerging Interfaith Voices
The cornucopia of interfaith resources coming online each day can be an embarrassment of riches. With so many saying so much, to whom do I turn? The plan for TIO’s March issue was to highlight exemplary “emerging voices” in the global interfaith community. Enough good material showed up to justify dedicating both March and April issues of TIO to important, largely unknown, voices emerging from interfaith sources.
The People Who Write for TIO
This posting marks TIO’s sixth issue. Half a year in seems a good time to catch a breath and see where we’ve come. More than 100 articles, news items, interfaith reports, and calendar events have gone to TIO subscribers and can now be found at www.theinterfaithobserver.org. In sum, this material underlines the assumption which motivated this venture in the first place – that those who embrace interfaith culture need to know more about each other, the manifold resources that are surfacing, and the ways healthy interfaith collaboration can contribute to peace, justice, and care for the Earth.
“Meaning” Brings Everyone to the Table
Human beings, gifted with consciousness, have no choice but to explain, at least to ourselves, what life means. Even “meaninglessness” qualifies as a definition of meaning, as when Shakespeare’s King Macbeth cries out that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Easy for the King to say. Prey to his own worst instincts and reduced to violent tyranny, Macbeth’s “nothing” comes between hearing that his partner in crime, Lady Macbeth, has committed suicide, and his own beheading.
TIO at the American Academy of Religions
For anyone interested in religion, the American Academy of Religion annual meetings are an embarrassment of riches. What was new in San Francisco this year as 10,000 scholars, students, publishers, and advocates gathered was the unprecedented presence of interfaith studies. Professor Diana Eck from Harvard’s Pluralism Project, who served as president of AAR 2005-06, helped legitimize interreligious studies academically. Five years later the progress is encouraging for anyone interested in bridge-building among religious, spiritual traditions. Interfaith workshops, panels, and receptions punctuated the all four days of meetings last month.
Looking Back at TIO’s First Year
Gratitude is the word underlining The Interfaith Observer’s first year. Dozens of people have gone out of their way since January 2011, when TIO was no more than a dream, to make TIO a unique publication systematically exploring a set of issues critical to humankind’s future.
TIO In 2012
The December 15 issue will explore all sorts of issues, a practice we’ll continue every other month in 2012 (February, April, June, August, October, and December). These ‘even’ month issues will continue to feature news and reports, interfaith opportunities, major events, and religious calendars.
Recovering Interfaith History, Recovering Ourselves
The sad wisdom claiming “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfill it” is much more interesting turned upside down: Those who remember the best of the past are freed to live into a better future. Choosing interfaith history as TIO’s second theme had to do with reclaiming remarkable stories, mostly unknown, of men and women building friendship among strangers centuries, even millennia ago.
Why We Need An Interfaith Observer
Interreligious demographics in neighborhoods around the world and on the internet have changed life for us all. This shift arrived without planning or foresight, raising dozens of questions and not offering easy answers. It can arrive with a jolt. When a son or daughter brings home a fiancé from a different religion, for example, brand new questions and feelings are fairly well guaranteed.