Additional News Stories
Bay Area Iinterfaith Connect: Current Issue | Main Articles | Additional Articles
Ten sheikhs from Cairo visited the Interfaith Chapel for an hour and a half conversation with staff and board members from the San Francisco Interfaith Council and Interfaith Center at the Presidio on April 27. Our Muslim guests came to this country on a U.S. State Department-funded visit. These are engaged leaders in Cairo's community (academia, the press, television, business, engineering, and more) as well as spiritual leaders of particular Sufi communities. They are intent on learning how we deal with grassroots interfaith relationships. An expert translator traveling with them kept the conversation quick and alive.
Egypt, we learned, is religiously diverse, but much less so than the Bay Area – that Sunnis can be Sufis, not just Shias – that most Egyptian Muslims (70 percent) affirm the peaceful, heart-felt approach of Sufism – and that fundamentalist Muslims get a huge press though they represent but a tiny percentage of the population.
Our Egyptian visitors learned about the kind of relationships we enjoy between and among followers of the Abrahamic traditions, to say nothing of the joy that comes from the wider diversity that defines us.
In 1992 Rita Semel and an ad hoc group of interfaith activists proposed having a place in the new Presidio national park where interreligious dialogue could address the major issues of the day. This past April, along with our Egyptian visitors, the Chapel hosted interfaith conversations about… coordinating anti-poverty legislation; clergy as first responders to Veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan; the place of Earth-based religions in the larger culture; and coordinating Darfur efforts.
Rita, it turns out, participated in most of these conversations, getting to enjoy the fruit of 15 years of labor getting us here. Talk about creating the future!
The Interfaith Center’s annual Gathering of Blessings, scheduled for Sunday, October 7, starting at 4:00 pm, this year honors The San Francisco Foundation. The Foundation will receive a “Bay Area Interfaith Treasure” award acknowledging the remarkable achieve-ments of its FAITHS Program. The public is cordially invited to attend the reception at 4:00 pm and the celebration at 5:00 pm at the Main Post Interfaith Chapel in the Presidio.
In 1993, The San Francisco Foundation began the FAITHS Initiative, as it was called then, on the premise that congregations and other faith-based organizations should be among philanthropy’s strongest partners in the effort to build strong, healthy, and equitable communities. This marked a new understanding by philanthropy of the critical contribution faith-based programs make to strengthening communities.
By taking an inclusive, interfaith approach, The Foundation provided a model for promoting non-sectarian community service and civic engagement programs that include diverse traditions. “FAITHS has been a pioneering effort for the philanthropic community,” says Mrs. Rita Semel, founder of the San Francisco Interfaith Council. “Starting with The San Francisco Foundation, then partnering foundations joining in, FAITHS began supporting dozens and then hundreds of congregations and community organizations. That’s never happened before, and it makes a huge difference in Bay Area neighborhoods.”
For 14 years FAITHS has built an interfaith network of more than 600 congregations, faith-based agencies, and community organizations to address critical community issues in the Bay Area. FAITHS provides technical and financial assistance, educational briefings, and trainings for leaders in local faith communities from dozens of different traditions. FAITHS workshops and mini-grants focus on issues such as affordable housing, disaster preparedness, immigration reform, inter-group relations, job training, senior services, and youth development.
The first Gathering of Blessings was held Sunday, October 1, 1995, the day after the U.S. Sixth Army concluded its chaplaincy at the Presidio. The ceremony commemorated the transition from military to civilian stewardship of the Presidio’s Main Post Interfaith Chapel and since then has been an annual celebration of inter-religious activity in the Bay Area and beyond.
# # #
For more information, contact Paul Chaffee at 415-775-4635 or at paul@interfaith-presidio.org. Directions & maps to the Presidio’s Interfaith Chapel are at www.interfath-presidio.org.
August 2007
NAIN’s (North American Interfaith Network) 2007 Connect was nestled into Virginia’s rolling hills at Roslyn, an Episcopal retreat center outside of Richmond. The beautiful setting was punctuated by the historical markers dotting Virginia highways and country lanes, reminders that the freedoms we discussed as interfaith brothers and sisters were paid for in blood shed in these same hills.
The theme for the July 12-16 Connect was Religious Freedom. About 90 participated. A direct descendent of Thomas Jefferson showed up at the opening banquet in 18th century dress, and we heard Tom’s words, his story, with an emphasis on the idea of ‘religious freedom’ in the United States and the struggle to establish it.
Highlights this year included the langar, a blessed lunch that the greater Richmond Sikh community prepared and gave everyone – an interfaith concert at a beautiful Baptist church (including a welcome and blessing from its pastor) – and Charles Haynes’ superb keynote about teaching religious freedom in public schools.
A strong opening panel addressed “Current State of Religious Freedom, Nationally and Internationally.” Through the next several days, more than two dozen workshops unpacked religious freedom from all sorts of angles. A number of distinguished presenters were well received, including a young adult panel reflecting on Virginia Tech’s recent mass murder by asking “Where Was God in Times of Tragedy?” A group of four Muslims from different backgrounds and a Christian moderator offered a layered, complex set of insights into “Islam & Democracy,” the final plenary session.
Sharon Clayton, Midge Falconer, Lynn Johnston, and their team from the InterFaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington and Interfaith Council of Greater Richmond were the heroes, leaving those who attended informed, refreshed, and happy to have been with old friends and new.
Paul Chaffee