by Elizabeth Dabney Hochman

Take a moment to look back on your youth. Do you remember being 12 or 14? That awkward age on the cusp of adulthood, when you were neither a child nor yet an adult, but alternately identifying with both? Imagine your deepest held values and beliefs at that age; your fledgling sense of self and vulnerability. Did you have opportunities to share what mattered to you? To listen to voices different from your own and marvel at their unique worth and beauty? Flash forward a few years to your late teens and early twenties. How do you recall that sense of self now? Stronger? More settled? Perhaps a bit less open-minded than before?

We know that traits we develop as children become the basis of the adults we will become. If a child develops empathy, for example, early in life, we know they are more likely to be empathic later on. Conversely, what happens with negative traits? What about intolerance or its cousins, aggression and fear?

As supporters of interfaith work, we know that building greater understanding and dialogue among diverse groups is a crucial aspect in creating a more peaceful world. We know listening to each other and educating ourselves about our neighbors is central in our interdependent world. Although there are myriad ways for adults to enhance their inner development and pluralistic understanding, there are surprisingly few outlets for youth to develop these same skills, and fewer options still for young teens. How can we hope for a world with greater compassion and understanding without nurturing these qualities in youth?

KidSpirit, an organization I founded in 2007, is an online magazine and social networking community that empowers youth from all backgrounds and traditions to tackle life’s big questions in a spirit of openness. The magazine is a nonprofit, ad-free quarterly, written and edited by youth. It embodies a vibrant dialogue between an all-youth Editorial Board based in New York, and kids ages 11-16 around the world who send us their poetry, original essays and artwork for our quarterly themes. All youth, regardless of background or location can participate fully in this forum free.

Our complimentary group guides for teachers and mentors working with youth augment any curricula from religious education to creative writing and are available for download.

My hope in founding KidSpirit was to create a non-commercial platform for youth to share their beliefs, values and creativity and to support their development into becoming world citizens with strong inner grounding. Over the last five years, KidSpirit’s issues have had themes ranging from conflict-resolution and peacemakers and mourning rituals around the world, to moments of transcendence, analysis of materialism in culture and reflections on creativity and meaning (you can see an archive of all of our issues online by clicking here). Our young contributors span many parts of the world and they shine as brilliant examples of the honesty, joy and poignant questioning that so often characterizes the shift from childhood to adulthood.

Our all youth Editorial Board has read essays, poetry, journalistic articles and reviewed original artwork from kids from India and Great Britain to Ukraine and the United States, all based on open exchange on probing topics they choose. The cultural and religious dialogue has taken our editors and readers in unexpected directions that would have been almost unthinkable a generation ago.

In one recent meeting, we were fortunate to have a visit from a new young contributor from Afghanistan. This girl, just 15 years old, was in New York to give a speech about the extraordinary circumstances of her life, and was able to share in the editorial process. Nilab sat on the floor with a dozen or so teen editors, each scribbling on their own copy of an article in the process of being edited for publication. After a period of intense concentration, conversation erupted about the piece in question. The dialogue was vibrant but open and constructive, and as usual, the meeting concluded with cookies. Nilab’s fascination with the proceedings was palpable and she contributed much to our afternoon. It was incredible to witness her joy at the experience and the deep respect that her American peers felt for her.

Another ongoing relationship has come from a writer named Prerna who found KidSpirit from a web search while in her home city of Kolkata, India. Over the years, she has shared her views on Gandhi, written about the festival of Diwali and crafted a piece about meaning in life. Each of her submissions has been through a vibrant and interactive process with the editorial board, resulting in growth on all sides.

In many ways, KidSpirit is a reflection of our increasingly pluralistic world. It welcomes kids who identify themselves as belonging to a church, temple, or synagogue, as well as those who don’t. But most importantly, it offers an oasis for youth to pause while in the maelstrom of adolescence and to connect with each other respectfully on questions of meaning. To observe and facilitate that process is to be filled with wonder.

Elizabeth Dabney Hochman is the Founding Editor of KidSpirit Online and KidSpiritMagazine, a nonprofit web community and magazine that empowers teens to explore life’s big questions in a spirit of openness. A graduate of Princeton University, with a Masters in Music from the Mannes College of Music in New York City, she has over fifteen years’ experience as an opera singer. She and her husband live with their two daughters in Brooklyn, New York.

By Gadadhara Pandit Dasa
From Huffington Post

I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely tired of encountering this attitude. Most people who make such statements don’t have deep knowledge or set of experiences within their own tradition, what to speak of other people’s traditions. I am confident that if we made even a little bit of an endeavor to understand another’s faith, it could make all the difference in the world.

The first time I watched “Jesus of Nazareth” with a group of fellow Hindu monks, we all marveled at the life of Jesus and the seriousness of his teachings, and immediately we could find similar teachings from within the Hindu tradition. The video inspired me to read the Gospels, which surprised me even more. The mood of a practitioner described by Jesus is identical to descriptions in the Gita and the Bhagavat Purana.

“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you! In that way, you will be acting as true children of your Father in heaven. For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and the unjust alike” (Matthew 5:43-45)

Click here to read the full article

by Honna Eichler
from State of Formation

While interfaith dialogue attempts to increase understanding between groups of people from different traditions, too often the work itself occurs in silos. Barriers exist between people of different ethnic and cultural traditions, generations, socioeconomic classes, gender, and education backgrounds between the most open minded conversation partners.

Part of the work of State of Formation is to deconstruct silos and dismantle barriers to foster conversation where it once was challenged to survive. Over the past few months, State of Formation (SoF) staff have been in conversation with those at The Interfaith Observer (TIO) to produce an inter-generational conversation around meaning making within different religious and ethical traditions. With a shared writing objective, fifteen contributors from both organizations wrote about Meaning Making from their own backgrounds.

The Interfaith Observer is an electronic journal created to explore interreligious relations and the interfaith movement.  View supporting documents from The Interfaith Observer on Meaning Making by clicking the highlighted text.

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by Kile Jones
from State of Formation

A new journal is born!

“Religion” is one of the most difficult words to define.  People use the word all of the time but have a hard time flushing out its precise meaning.  Having spent time on issues surrounding defining “religion,” I felt it would be a good idea to start a new journal where “religion” can be analyzed, interpreted, and compared with other phenomena.  I figured it would be an accessible, academic, online forum for people to publish on issues surrounding “religion.”  Much likeState of Formation, Claremont Journal of Religion is meant to facilitate academic dialogue and encourage the enactment of deep pluralism.

Claremont Journal of Religion (CJR) is a student led, peer-reviewed, online journal that focuses on the ways “religion” can be understood in the contemporary world.  CJR is in relationship with the recently established Claremont Lincoln University,Claremont School of Theology, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont University Consortium, and The Society for Philosophy and Religion at Claremont (SPARC).  The goal of this journal is to provide a forum for emerging scholars, academics, graduate students, and lay-leaders to publish their latest work in the broad field of “religious studies.”

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by Ruby Russell
from ENI News

Three Catholic churches in the west German region of North-Rhine Westphalia that may have to close this month have received a show of solidarity from the local Muslim community.

Muhammed Al, chairman of the Merkez Mosque Association, wrote to Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, head of the Essen diocese, on behalf of local Muslims last fall about the three Catholic churches in the town of Duisberg.

“We emphasized our long years of cooperation with the parishes and the importance of the churches in the area. We said this should be seen not just from a financial perspective, but also a cultural and social perspective [including] for the sake of interfaith and cultural dialogue,” Al said in an interview.

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By Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass
From Huffington Post

We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to “cool down” and to “be moderate” will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.

In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious “community of communities,” we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our “co-laboratory” of interdependence: “Experience your neighbor’s faith, deepen your own.”

Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today’s world, religious people have to remap their reality to include — in tension and in gratitude — ‘the other.’ While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. ‘The other’ is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?

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Thresholds

By Camilla Schick
From Common Ground News Service

London – Camilla Howalt, Mohamed Negm, and Orly Orbach’s art piece Thresholds is an inspiring reflection on the nature of faith in the contemporary world. Together the artists represented the three Abrahamic faiths through an abstract, dream-like triptych depicting the thresholds at the doorways of houses of worship as spaces of risk and uncertainty, requiring a prayer or a blessing before entering.

For the UK’s National Interfaith Week from 20-26 November, the Three Faiths Forum (3FF), one of the country’s leading interfaith organisations, invited the public to celebrate the artistic results of its experimental Urban Dialogues programme in London.

The art competition, now in its second year, fosters collaboration between artists of different belief backgrounds, enabling them to use their work as a means of promoting closer understanding and cooperation between communities.

This year’s competition brought together 34 artists of different beliefs to work and exhibit their paintings and installations, creating an interfaith dialogue which wouldn’t otherwise be experienced in single-faith art spaces.

3FF Director Stephen Shashoua says, “One of the aims of Urban Dialogues is to highlight the work of individual artists from our communities and create a space within the urban environment where we can speak about different faiths, beliefs and ideas, with this work creating stimulus for discussion.”

Thresholds is one of the winning collaborations that was displayed at the Red Gallery in East London’s Shoreditch area.

The artists visited religious spaces they confessed they might not have otherwise explored in more depth, including the East London Mosque, the Bevis Marks Synagogue and St Ethelburga’s Centre.

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by Paul Chaffee

Ray Downs taught a captivating confirmation class at International Church in Bangkok in 1957. But I was stunned at the end of the year when the pastor asked if we were ready to confirm our faith and join the church. I went straight to Dad, a Presbyterian missionary: “I’m just beginning to understand what you believe, and I haven’t any idea what the Buddhists all around us believe – and now I have to join?!” Dad said, “Not at all. No requirement.” The next day he put a thick tome surveying the world’s religions in my hands, a gift that helped shape my life.

More than half my career has been spent working on grassroots interfaith activities. So, at 65, retiring from the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, my motive question had long ago become, How can we do better at building healthy, vital relations between, among, and within the world’s many spiritual, religious, indigenous, and convictional communities who share a passion to heal a wounded world?

My dear spouse’s business acumen meant we could retire in San Francisco and I could become an ‘amateur,’ as in doing something for the love of it. Freed from agency responsibilities, I dove into the internet to better discern the scope of a burgeoning interreligious culture, grassroots and global. I’ve been stunned again, this time by the magnitude and diversity of people in countries everywhere spontaneously deciding to develop friendly relations with ‘the other,’ the stranger. Interfaith culture is emerging unplanned, largely self-funded, and proliferating like spring flowers on a hillside.

That discovery led back to a notion many of us ‘in the vineyard’ have talked about in recent years. We need to be better connected. We need a transpartisan arena where every group’s best interfaith efforts has a platform, a place to share stories, learnings, and connections, a place to begin collaborating around shared concerns.

How to do it? So far, very few financial resources support interfaith work. However, interfaith veterans everywhere repeat the same mantra – “The most valuable thing for me personally has been the amazing relationships I’ve enjoyed. So many, so close.”

Once upon a time I dreamed about writing a blog. But connecting the different parts of the interfaith world is infinitely bigger than any one-man-show. So I started inviting friends, seasoned interfaith veterans and young adult leaders, to contribute to a new venture. A core group accepted the responsibility of formal decision making, and the larger group has grown to 75.

The core group, armed with an anonymous $20,000 startup donation, came up with agreements about The Interfaith Observer, or TIO for short. We decided to be as lean as possible financially. The Interfaith Peace Project agreed to serve as fiscal sponsor during our time of formation. And a number of our advisors contributed their digital expertise to constructing a website and mass-e-mail capabilities. Here are some of the policies which guide us for now.

• All writing and editing is volunteered.
• TIO is free to subscribers and encourages readers to reprint and utilize what they find useful. (We would be happy to know how you use it.)
• TIO strives to develop collaborative rather than competitive relationships.
• TIO aggregates the best stories and resources we can find as well as publishes new content. Expect dozens of links in each issue for deeper exploring.
• TIO is happy to join groups which share its concerns and has already built relationships with North American Interfaith Network and United Religions Initiative, whose purpose is “to promote enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, to end religiously motivated violence, and to create cultures of peace, justice, and healing for the Earth and all living beings.”
• TIO will address the interfaith universe subject by subject, starting, in September 2011, with ‘deepening interfaith dialogue.’ The next 12 issues address: history, institutions, celebration, making meaning (spirituality, theology, and…), young adults, women, indigenous traditions, the Earth, peacemaking, refreshment, funding, and, in September, 2012, education. (Current and back issues will be available at TIO’s homepage.)

In the recent words of Ebrahim Rasool, the religious world needs “to move beyond the ‘compare and contrast’ model of interfaith engagements, and build solidarity across our markers of difference to achieve shared goals that both signal the relevance of religion and faith as well as demonstrate its capacity to build coalitions, campaigns and unity in action around values and principles we hold in common.” (Claremont Lincoln University inauguration keynote, September 6, 2011) Amen.

The TIO Adviser/Contributor braintrust continues to grow. We began as a group of friends, near and far, creating a new kind of interfaith publication. We’re becoming a global network that we hope will be as fruitful as the publication we promote. Because we can’t afford to grow unmanageably, guidelines are being developed for joining TIO’s braintrust. As it grows larger, we’ll have subgroups focused on the themes TIO explores each month. As a virtual community develops, new possibilities will emerge.

In a world so dark with despair and violence, interfaith work is a candle casting hope far and wide. TIO hopes to reflect the light.

By Tara Bahrampour
From Washington Post

On a balmy November night, a busload of eighth-graders spilled out onto Massachusetts Avenue NW, the girls tentatively pulling on head scarves they had been instructed to bring.

“Does mine look normal?” one asked, cinching it tightly under her chin.

“Mine looks really ugly, doesn’t it?” said another, tugging at a billowy confection of material.

Suitably attired, more or less, they trooped into the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. Many of the students, who belong to an after-school Hebrew program at Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, had passed by the large mosque with the columns and minaret, but they had never gone inside, until now.

The youths are part of a cultural exchange between Beth El and AFS Intercultural Programs (formerly the American Field Service), which brings teenagers from all over the world to live with host families in the United States and sends American teens abroad.

For the program, in its fourth year, eight foreign students being hosted in the Washington area were teaching the Beth El students about Islam, the religion of four of the exchange students; Hinduism, the faith of two of the students, was added this year.

The students — from Indonesia, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Armenia, India and Germany — are here on State Department scholarships and had visited Beth El last monthto give a classroom presentation. Later in the month, the Beth El students joined them on field trips to a mosque and a Hindu temple.

Inside the mosque, the girls and boys removed their shoes and were separated in different rooms. Cucut Syati, 16, a student from Indonesia wearing a purple satin tunic, showed the girls the elaborate pre-prayer washing ritual — hands, mouth, nose, face, arm, head, ears and feet.

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Dr. Leo D. Lefebure

from Godspeed Institute for Spiritual Learning

In this program Carole Hallundbaek speaks with Dr. Leo D. Lefebure, Matteo Ricci, S.J. Professor of Theology at Georgetown University. A prolific writer and traveler of where religious paths cross, merge and support each other, he is the author of The Buddha and the Christ: Explorations in Buddhist-Christian Dialogue; Life Transformed: Meditations on the Christian Scriptures in Light of Buddhist Perspectives; The Path of Wisdom: A Christian Commentary on the Dhammapada; and Revelation, the Religions, and Violence, recipient of the Pax Christi U.S.A. 2001 Book Award. He has also served on the board of directors of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies; was a participant in the New York Buddhist-Catholic dialogue; an adviser to the Board of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue; and is currently on the Board of Trustees of the Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Click here to listen to the interview