Interfaith Partner's of South Carolina has produced a beautiful 18 Month Interfaith Calendar featuring information on each of 12 South Carolina religious groups and its important holidays, this calendar will be a great resource for: Teachers • Sunday Schools • Government Agencies • Local Businesses • Community Leaders • Law Enforcement • Nonprofits • Event Planners • and anyone who would like to learn more about the many faith groups in South Carolina!

​Created as both a fundraising project as well as an education tool this calendar has both great production values, as it was designed and layed out by a professional graphics designer, and is chock full of information and dates sacred to many faiths. It has been distributed to all 82 of SC's school districts so that our public schools can be mindful of all the holidays of importance to a wide number of religions.

​Dr. Barbara Fields, Executive Director of the AGNT (Association for Global New Thought) and who served as Program Director for the first modern Parliament of World Religions in 1993, had this to say about our calendar:

​"The entire project is so well executed; I have seen quite a few of these in my career in interreligious dialogue and this is one of the nicest. You should feel proud and so do, I hope, your colleagues on this council. It is clear that healing of religious-based wounds must begin with sharing and mutual understanding and the calendar achieves this in a wonderful way."

​Click on the image to visit IPSC's page in order to purchase this calendar.

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Toronto--acclaimed the most diverse city in the world by the United Nations and home to six million Canadians—has been chosen as the host city of the 7th Parliament of the World’s Religions, to be convened in November 2018. More than 10,000 people will participate in the 2018 Parliament, which will last for seven days and comprise more than 500 programs, workshops, and dialogues, alongside music, dance, art and photography exhibitions, and related events presented by the world’s religious communities and cultural institutions.

Since the historic 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, modern Parliaments have attracted participants from more than 200 diverse religious, indigenous, and secular beliefs and more than 80 nations to its international gatherings in Chicago (1993), Cape Town (1999), Barcelona (2004), Melbourne (2009), and Salt Lake City (2015). These Parliament events are the world’s oldest, largest, and most inclusive gatherings of the global interfaith movement. As one of the most international, multicultural, and religiously pluralistic cities in the world, Toronto provides a perfect venue for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. More than 140 languages are spoken every day, and at least 47% of Toronto’s population speak a native language other than French or English. Over half were born outside of Canada, representing more than 200 ethnic origins.

The exemplary effort of Canadians—and especially the people of Ontario—to welcome the stranger and immigrant, honor indigenous communities, and protect the earth with its public initiatives provides inspiration for other global cities that desire to build a better world. Parliament Site Selection Committee Chair Andras Corban Arthen says, “Toronto is a place where important conversations are taking place about reconciliation, environmental approaches, and the integration of immigrant populations. A vibrant and wide-reaching interfaith community was a determining factor in answering the question: Why Toronto? Why now?”

In a May 2 press conference and reception at the Toronto City Hall, Parliament of the World’s Religions Executive Director Dr. Larry Greenfield said the 2018 event is an “extraordinary opportunity for people of the globe to engage the crucial issues of our world, such as climate change, poverty, and violence."

Super Saver Registration is coming soon at ParliamentOfReligions.org, including rates exclusive to students and groups.

The above was taken from the Parliament of the World’s Religions press release.   I’ll be there! How about you? As I serve as an Ambassador of the Parliament of the World's Religions you will hear early and often the good news as it evolves.

On December 30th, 2016 IPSC, the Governors representative, and many fellow travelers joined in the Capitol Rotunda in Columbia, SC to launch January as Interfaith Harmony Month. My dear friend Andy and I traveled up for the event and there were throngs of people, including Gov. Haley's father Ajit Singh Randhawa and mother Raj Kaur Randhawa. The photo above is of Dr. Randhawa receiving a plaque of recognition on behalf of Gov. Haley who was out of town, and so this year her proclamation was read by her liaison Ms. Beth Webb. Behind them is a corner of my beloved C's Interfaith banner which was her birthday present to herself from the 2015 Parliament of the World's Religions. The little corner that you can see has the symbol of the Bahá'í Faith. This event spawned all sorts of Interfaith activities all across the state, several of which I participated in and there will be posts about them soon. The press loved the banner as the image highlights, and it was prominently displayed in a number of later events.

CommUnity Newsletter is a publication service of Unity of Hilton Head and serves seven Unity Church/Centers, five in South Carolina, one in Georgia and one in North Carolina. As the editor/designer of this publication I dedicate two pages of each issue to Interfaith news and commentary. I'll add them as they come out. Click on image to open each issue, these files are largish and may take a minute or so to open.​

On October 9th, 2016 Interfaith Partners of South Carolina presented “Peace in the Park” a festival/celebration at Saluda Shoals Park in Columbia, SC, a perfect venue for this event. As promised there was fun for all ages! Art, crafts, music, dance, entertainment, nature walks, and an art contest for young people! Ten different religions each had an activity area for crafts and games, the Commons area featured music and dance – both performing and participative, and many people enjoyed the nature trails with a local birder-naturalist, the afternoon topped it off with a giant spiral dance. Hundreds of people from many religious traditions came to celebrate peace, harmony, respect and dignity.

The weather was perfect although hurricane Matthew had reached even this far inland on Friday and Saturday, there was not much damage in evidence and the mood was celebratory! I arrived late in the afternoon due to a speaking engagement earlier in the day. This year featured a youth art contest organized by Dr. Will Moreau Goins and his dedicated team. Dr. Goins is the current president of IPSC and has dedicated his life to preserving, presenting and performing Native American music traditions, beadwork and storytelling. He weaves the ancient past, mythology and the present with dramatic narratives and song. He was the 2008 Recipient for Native American Traditions in South Carolina’s Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Awards. The Peace in the Park art competition showcased some wonderful work from a very diverse sampling of young people.

Of great personal delight for me was the strong presence of the Sikh community. I knew almost nothing about them before attending the Parliament of the World’s Religions which my wife Chris and I participated in Salt Lake City, UT October of last year. The Sikhs fed more than 7,000 of us each day. They have done so for each of the modern Parliaments and 150 of them flew in from England to support the 2015 event. My talk at UUC Columbia was about the Parliament and I was pleased to tell a number of Sikhs about my experience with Langar (the name for ritually prepared meals served as an offering of service) and how one of my slides featured a picture of their Golden Temple at Amritsar where they feed more than 250,000 people three meals a day, every day of the year. A crowning experience of my visit to the “Peace in the Park” event was being honored with a Sikh turban to wear for the rest of the afternoon. Attached is a picture that one of them took of me.

IPSC has a long and rich tradition in South Carolina and had it’s beginnings in the 1970’s as a Christian/Jewish ecumenical initiative and was headed up by Dr. Carl Evans, University of South Carolina Professor Emeritus, he retired from the Department of Religious Studies in 2009 having been a member of the faculty since 1974. Dr. Evans is also past president of IPSC. Unity ministers Ed Kosak of Unity of Charleston and Rev. Peggy Konkel of Unity of Columbia are active in the IPSC as well. Click on Interfaith Partners of South Carolina if you would like to visit their website and to see the good work they sponsor and/or support.

Here is a link to Holli Emore's lovely celebration of the event: Peace in the Park. I love the song which she used as well, it is One by One by Michael Stillwater.
 

I received an email yesterday from Carl Evans, past president of IPSC, sharing a provocative and compelling article titled New Rooms in the Interfaith Movement by Eboo Patel, originally published in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Click on the green title to read the entire article. With a certain level of discomfort I recognized myself in a description of a Chicago pastor addressing an interfaith youth core conference that Mr. Patel had attended. “In his self-introduction, the pastor had succinctly articulated what I’ve come to call the three main rooms in the house of interfaith cooperation: liberal theology, progressive politics, and spiritual enrichment. Moreover, he proclaimed that those views weren’t just rooms in the house, but the front porch and the foundation as well… Finally, he noted his frustration that a particular type of Christian was always absent from such gatherings, saying: “There are too many conservative evangelicals who claim the mantle of my faith, who believe that Jesus is the only way, that Christians have the exclusive truth, and who focus their energy on trying to bring others to their view rather than expanding their own spiritual horizons”. A young, evangelical speaker that followed the pastor started with “My name is Nicholas Price, and I think you are talking about me.” He went on to say that “He’d majored in religious studies with a concentration in Islam, and he believed his faith called upon him to seek to convert Muslims and also to cooperate with them. While he was deeply committed to the former, he understood that this space was dedicated to the latter.”

This prompted Mr. Patel to consider more deeply the purpose of Interfaith work. “Is it to bring together theological liberals and political progressives of various religions to share how their different faiths brought them to similar worldviews?” He went on to consider “if this approach excludes, and potentially raises hostility toward, faith groups, then it ought to raise the question of just what it is we think we are doing in a movement called “interfaith.” … My experience during fifteen years in interfaith work is that this is pretty common. Evangelicals are on the outside and are frequently invoked as somewhere between the foil and the enemy.” According to a 2011 Pew Forum study on global Christianity 26.8% of the U.S. population are evangelical Christians. Our Interfaith enterprise will never succeed if we don’t manage to include them in our respectful consideration and in the conversation.

The writer goes on to discuss the work of Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam and his theory of Social Capital. Putnam writes, “…social capital refers to social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance and trustworthiness.” Mr. Patel summarizes this notion with “Such networks have concrete value in a number of ways, ranging from networks in which people help others find jobs, to networks like neighborhood watch clubs, which reduce crime, thereby helping not only the people who participate directly, but also bystanders.” And further refines the discussion “Putnam’s crucial distinction is between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital. Bonding social capital brings people from like identities and perspectives together in tight networks, whereas bridging brings those from different identities and perspectives together. Putnam claims both are important, likening the first to sociological Super Glue and the second to sociological WD-40. He goes on to make this crucial point: “a society that has only bonding social capital will look like Belfast or Bosnia—segregated into mutually hostile camps. . . a pluralist democracy requires lots of bridging social capital. . .”

David Campbell, who shares similar perspectives with Putnam according to Patel, “writes about how religious divisions in America have changed over the course of the past few generations. The strongest divisions are no longer between people of different religions, but between people of different religious intensities. More theologically conservative evangelicals and Catholics, for example, are bonded in conservative politics. According to Putnam and Campbell, one fallout of this dynamic has been to drive a large group of people away from religion, period, explaining one of the reasons for the dramatic rise of what sociologists are calling the religious “nones.” Another fallout is that the theologically liberal, politically progressive, and spiritually expansive have needed to find spaces to gather and commiserate. One of those places has been in the interfaith movement. And so, interfaith work, as it is currently organized, has become a form of bonding social capital between people who have similar political, theological, and spiritual views.” I certainly am guilty of seeking and enjoying the “bonding” that takes place at the majority of Interfaith events I’ve participated in.

Patel observes that “… if the key divisions in American religious life are no longer among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, but between conservative religious believers of multiple traditions, on the one hand, and a combination of liberal believers and secularists, on the other, then the bonding social capital nature of the interfaith movement effectively serves to widen and deepen that polarization… The primary purpose and greatest value of interfaith work is as a form of bridging social capital—building relationships among religiously diverse people who have different political, theological, and spiritual perspectives. Effective interfaith work would promote the following perspective: We recognize the deep and different worldviews you bring to the table, and we believe that you can have powerful relationships anyway. Movements exist to solve particular problems. The problem that interfaith work should be seeking to solve is the polarization of people who orient around religion differently.”

Patel points to a growing segment of Evangelicals which I found hopeful “… what I’m calling the relational turn in evangelical thinking. The focus here is not just on encouraging people to have a personal relationship with Jesus—the heartbeat of evangelical theology and conversion activities—but is on Jesus as an exemplar who built relationships with people of all backgrounds with unconditional love. Increasingly, I’m hearing these mainline to moderately conservative evangelicals underscore that an important part of that unconditionality is that Jesus did not require people to believe as he did to love them, and he did not use his love for them as a bait-and-switch to get them to follow him. For the evangelicals I’m talking about, following Jesus means several things. One is having a personal relationship with him as Lord and Savior. The second is seeking converts to that path. The third is having relationships with people from a diversity of backgrounds in an unconditional way, as Jesus did, not as bait for conversion but as an expression of religiosity. As Bob Roberts says, “I love others not to convert them, I love them because I am converted.”

As for the title of this Blog post Interfaith work: The Easy Tasks versus the Hard Tasks, the easy tasks are the ones I’ve put the most effort into. Some of which are meeting and greeting the folks with whom I love sharing perspectives; the theologically liberal, politically progressive, and spiritually expansive people I’ve come to know through Interfaith work. Other easy, even pleasant tasks involve reading, going to the scriptural texts or peering into the art and iconography. Ironically, recalling that the name of the young evangelical was Nick, I have a dear friend named Nick who is deeply involved in his evangelical faith, and every other Saturday morning cooks (with a little help), for 50 to 70 men who are committed to mission work and the duty of conversion. I do love him and have made some fine connections with men in that group. I rarely attend though, in part because I’ll only go if I can arrive by five AM (and that is a time of day that is easier for me to stay up to than to get up for!) and spend time with this authentically spiritual man, but also because I find myself sometimes reacting strongly against the attitudes and beliefs of a majority of those who attend. As a member of the Unity faith I believe there is only One Presence and One Power in the universe and in my life – God the Good, evangelicals place great emphasis on “Satan” or “the Adversary” and see that Being as the source of evil. Our Unity understanding is that “evil” is human in origin and the product of error thinking, of a cramped and limited view of the world; the word “sin” originally was a term from archery and meant “to miss the mark”.

After a careful reading and heartfelt consideration of Mr. Patel’s article I can see that there is good, if hard, work for me to do on those Saturday mornings. But in compensation the breakfasts are amazing, Nick is a very fine cook, spares no expense, and most importantly, is liberal with that special seasoning called love. Eating at his table feeds the soul as well as the body.