Interfaith Center at the Presidio of San Francisco:

Interfaith Stories

This corner of the Interfaith Center’s website is devoted to stories from the grassroots interfaith movement. All so far have been written by Paul Chaffee, executive director of the Center.

To sense the enthusiasm and vitality of the Interfaith movement and the stature of those involved, stories are critical. Try them out!

Interfaith Center Sponsors the "Lost & Endangered Religions" Project

April 20, 2003 – Published in the Interfaith Center’s Spring 2003 Interfaith Newsnotes

Interfaith Center at the Presidio board member Don Frew, traveling through eastern Turkey in 1998, visited a religious community called the Yezide. A religious minority, they have been forced repeatedly to flee their homes to escape persecution from dominant religious groups. Over dinner with a Yezidi elder, through a translator, Don learned that four generations earlier, during such a flight, the community had lost the ‘black book’ containing their religious scriptures.

A collector of sacred books, Don returned home to discover the Yezidi scripture in his personal library, collected by a scholar publishing in the late 1800s. He photocopied the scripture, posted it to the Yezide, then turned a coincidence into a program.

Many indigenous religions today face serious threats to their survival. For some, sacred texts or artifacts have been lost. For others, traditional songs, dances, and stories are in the hands of a few remaining elders. The Lost & Endangered Religions Project – now a program of the Interfaith Center – seeks to find, safeguard, and restore sacred texts and oral traditions whose survival is threatened. Disarmingly simple rescue tactics are planned.

One is tracking down and copying materials currently archived at universities. At minimal expense, a university duplicates tapes of songs, films of ceremonies, and transcripts of stories, returning copies to the indigenous communities which created them. Ownership is restored, and the originals remain in a safe place for posterity.

The project is also on the alert for religions about to become extinct. When no one is available to learn from an elder holding the tradition, project staff will locate satellite communities nearby to assist. The project may also hold sacred material in trust for a community until someone is found locally to preserve the religious heritage for future generations.

To reduce future threats, the project will locate collections of indigenous religious data that are not safe and secure, connecting the owners with academic institutions that can copy and preserve the records.

The Lost & Endangered Religions Project’s underlying purpose will be to engender friendly cooperative relationships between academia and at-risk, often indigenous peoples. An internet-linked volunteer team is forming. It will include professors of anthropology, religion, geography, and political science; electronic librarians; indigenous religious leaders in Africa, Asia, and North America; representatives from United Nations NGOs; and graduate students here and abroad.

As fiscal sponsor of the project, the Interfaith Center happily accepts designated tax-deductible donations supporting the project. For more information, call 415-561-6871 or
e-mail paul@interfaith-presidio.org.

Joel Beversluis – Remembering a Giant Among Us

March 22, 2003 – Published in interfaithnews.net

Joel Beversluis was schlepping books across a large patio outside conference rooms at the UC Berkeley Student Union in 1994, the day I met him. The last time we hugged good-bye was late at night outside the conference center of a small Catholic college in Wichita last August - he was moving boxes of interfaith books back into his car for the drive home to Michigan.

In nine years we've only spent three or four months together, always at interfaith gatherings, a long weekend with North American Interfaith Network colleagues or a whole week in South Africa at the Parliament of the World's Religions or summer summits at Stanford in the formational years of United Religions Initiative. We talked at airports and in hotels, and once Jan and I were happy to share our living room couch and conversation into the wee hours when a conference brought him to San Francisco.

Good times together, but for such a few short years. I didn't know Joel well enough to write a eulogy of his life. But when he died last Tuesday, I lost a treasured colleague and friend. And the global grassroots interfaith movement said farewell to a giant among us, a quiet pioneer whose work as a scout helped direct and empower an interfaith movement developing into dozens of different expressions all over the world. In the narrow confines of our gatherings, I knew Joel well enough to know what a stunning loss his death is to the movement he loved so well.

Joel left a 20-year career at Eerdmans Publishing, a large, well-respected Christian press, to found CoNexus, an interfaith publishing house that was grassroots, both in its interests and its daily struggle to generate an adequate income for the family while generating a resource center serving people in villages and megalopolises everywhere who are hungry for good interfaith tools. No doubt the CoNexus impetus came from accepting an invitation from the Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions as they planned a huge centennial celebration of the Chicago 1893 Parliament. He was asked to compile and edit a resource document for those attending the 100-year anniversary of the first public interfaith dialogue in this nation.

Like its predecessor, the 1993 Parliament turned out to be significant historically, and Joel's document became Sourcebook of the World's Religions (Third edition, 2000, CoNexuspress.com). It is the one book an interfaith activist cannot do without, scanning the depth and breadth of an emerging global movement bent on transforming interreligious interaction from violence to mutual respect and cooperation.

Besides building CoNexus Multifaith Media into the largest distributorship of interfaith resources in this country, besides taking those resources to one gathering after another and another, he became a participating leader, joining the board of directors of North American Interfaith Network (NAIN). For several years he's written and edited the NAINews & Interfaith Digest, making it the best ongoing record of grassroots activities published in English, to my knowledge. His hat as journalist was well earned as he recorded the first stories, bits of news, and reports of neighborhood strangers from different faiths deciding to get to know each other, here and abroad. Last year he and Stephen Fuqua, a URI affiliate in Texas, launched InterfaithNews.net, an e-journal that promised to start a virtual conversation about this work among practitioners, educators, and interreligious activists around the globe.

Gandhi's suggestion that interfaith relations require humility was exemplified in Joel Beversluis. He didn't talk about the work he did for the Parliament and for Harvard's Pluralism Project, simply doing it with gentle good humor, a complete commitment, and a twinkle in his eye. His Midwestern evangelically rooted Christian faith embraced peoples of all faiths and spiritualities, and he cared profoundly about getting the word out to everyone about the possibility of healthy, constructive relationships with the other.

In the Sourcebook, Joel wrote, "The quest for a global ethic and other forms of collaboration are now historically possible because of the emergence of what some of us are naming 'the community of religions.' This term describes the shift across religious consciousness that encourages partnership and responsibility for the common good." Full of love and service, Joel Beversluis gave us the first roadmap for that nascent community. We can each honor that extraordinary heritage by living into the possibilities it promises.

Parliament of World’s Religions Reaches Out

November 11, 2002 – Published in the Spring 2003 Interfaithnews.net

In 1893 the first Parliament of the World’s Religions offered Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Jews, and Hindus a shared public forum for the first time in history. Part of a World Exposition, the Parliament commenced a week of interfaith dialogue on September 11. Twelve thousand and more came each day to the building that would become the Chicago Art Institute. Swami Vivakananda, a Hindu who arrived initially without invitation, and then was embraced, particularly electrified the public forums. His charisma, intellect, and generous heart repeatedly challenged the assumption (held by most of the Parliament’s planners) that Christianity has a lock on the love of God and could “perfect” whatever goodness and wisdom other religions brought to the table.

The crowd rose to its feet to greet this monk in bright saffron robes as soon as he began with the words, “Sisters and brothers of America…” After the opening speeches, Swamiji was scheduled by the organizers to conclude each day’s sessions, a strategy for keeping everyone in attendance. One can note from his first words that Vivakananda (like the movement he helped inspire) is not a syncretist. “The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth,” he said in Chicago. He compared the love of God flowing through different religions to rivers all headed towards the sea. He quarreled with the notion that any religion can claim exclusive franchise on the divine, and he sought friendship and common cause among people from all traditions.

A centennial celebration of that first event made its own history in 1993 when 8,000 people from dozens of different religious traditions again came to Chicago. Subsequently a momentous decision was made to sponsor similarly ambitious gatherings every five years or so, at sites all around the world.

The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions (CPWR) made good on that commitment in 1999 in Cape Town, South Africa. As in Chicago, the experience of attending a Parliament was of homecoming, of meeting members in ‘our family’ we never knew about. In this setting new friends very quickly become dear and important to each other. The ‘love of God’ shines through, regardless of tradition, inviting your own to shine back. Nelson Mandela in great detail told the 7,000 assembled in 1999 how the struggle against Apartheid have failed without various kinds of help that Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim communities each offered to those who suffered the most in those years of terror. From the bottom of his heart to ours, he let us share the ownership of their victory and South Africa’s freedom today. For a moment you could see the whole human family in one room, safe with each other.

You can already register (and save a pretty penny by being early) for the Parliament being held July 7-13, 2004 in Barcelona, Spain (www.cpwr.org). As plans go forward, the 1993 hundred-year-old birthday party for interfaith dialogue is morphing into an interfaith movement, engaging activists in every country in the world. Some few have had the opportunity to attend one of the Parliaments. But millions of people in countries everywhere, in villages as in cities, are becoming engaged in a similar, emerging grassroots interfaith community.

New developments

Anyone disappointed by the failure of the 21^st century to quickly usher in a new era of peace can at least take comfort and a ray of hope from recent developments in the nascent interfaith movement. The Parliament is alive and well and developing its relationship with another international grassroots effort, the United Religions Initiative (URI). URI, which in two years has established nearly 200 Cooperation Circles in 36 countries, in August held its first post-Charter-signing Global Assembly in Rio de Janeiro (Cf. “United Religions Initiative Comes of Age in Rio,” InterfaithNews.net, September 2002, page 1). URI’s Charter had been signed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2000, and those who came to Rio were finally able to turn to the multitude of issues they care about, their Charter a foundation now rather than a work-in-progress.

Back in Chicago, a similarly significant development is opening a new chapter in the Parliament’s life. This past October the curtain went up on what CPWR has been doing in its own backyard for the last 15 years. From the start, Parliament planners have been ‘local grown,’ leaders from Chicago’s multitudinous faith communities, clergy and laity who cooperatively opened the door to all people of faith and practice. The joy in their work comes from flourishing local relationships.

So when the decision was made to continue the massive gatherings, it was grounded with a parallel commitment to stay involved in grassroots interfaith organizing in Chicago. Since the late eighties the Council for the Parliament, its decision-making body, has been active in the city and its suburbs, involving itself with dozens of religious organizations, universities and seminaries, private and civic organizations, in addition to various interfaith groups. Special attention over the years has been invested in a neighborhood called Rogers Park, a quick drive from downtown Chicago. Simply reading the signs over the storefronts when you walk down Rogers Park’s main business corridor makes Chicago’s ethnic, racial, religious diversity astonishingly clear – the globe in a single neighborhood.

For years the Council’s leadership has ruminated on how its extensive Chicago activities should relate to the international gatherings it sponsors twice a decade. Instead of forcing the issue, they lived with it, continuing to nurture both local and global ventures. A strategy has emerged now, suggesting a local-global axis for the interfaith movement capable of empowering interreligious work everywhere. The Golden Institute for International Partnership & Peace was founded to give expression to the strategy. On October 26, at a quiet Dominican priory just west of Chicago, 67 interfaith activists invited from around the world gathered to hear a new dream of partnering between the global Parliament gatherings and grassroots interfaith activities everywhere.

The Goldin Institute for International Partnership & Peace

Though born in Los Angeles, Diane Goldin brought her theatrical talents to Chicago where a 17-year career as a producer garnered her high reputation for multicultural approaches to the classical repertory. A life-long passion for peace and justice led to her involvement with CPRW. Early in 2002 she made a substantial donation to the Parliament for a five-year project called the Goldin Institute. The Institute is dedicated to building “partnerships” with grassroots interfaith communities everywhere who would like to have a formal relationship with the group organizing the massive gatherings so many enjoyed in Cape Town and will enjoy in Barcelona in the summer of 2004.

The weeklong Institute agenda was packed, leavened with long breaks and leisurely meals. In short order, people had a chance to meet each other one-on-one for an hour, and introduced each other in groups of eight. Then we went to work.

Professor Patrice Brodeur of Connecticut College set the pace in a challenging keynote about interfaith activities moving from the periphery to the center of the religious community-at-large and the need to study “applied religion.”

A day was spent on the increasingly important role of intrafaith relations (activities connecting different segments of a single tradition) if interfaith work is to have a significant influence in the world.

The Parliament’s many Chicago projects were surveyed. Through the week a dozen different religious and cultural sites in and near Chicago were visited, with dozens of stories about interfaith activities from people at each site. Gurdwara, church, synagogue, and mosque were all visited.

Participants from South Africa, the Middle East, Taiwan, and Brazil were given time to survey the considerable efforts going on in their organizations back home. At table and on buses the conversation never ceased, and the shear size of global grassroots activities started sinking in.

In one case, participants had to choose a day examining relations between Chicago’s Muslims and the rest of the community or interfaith activities on campus. Afterwards participants gave high marks to both options.

Visiting the spot where Vivekananda addressed the Parliament 109 years ago particularly moved long-timers in the interfaith vineyard. At the Chicago Art Institute we also visited the large room where “Towards a Global Ethic – An Initial Declaration” was debated and signed by 200 religious leaders at the 1993 Parliament.

As Goldin Institute went into its fourth day, the Parliament’s dreams for formal partnerships built around specific proposals and agreements were detailed. Partnerships will mostly be with interfaith coalitions in cities around the world, though smaller communities will also be welcomed in creating partnerships. Time was scheduled for people to work in small groups and begin considering what could be done in their own backyards that would benefit from a relationship with CPWR. When time ran out, cards and email addresses were exchanged along with promises to stay in touch.