Greetings!This is the first e-newsletter of Religions for Peace – USA (previously known as the United States Conference of Religions for Peace). In each issue, we hope to highlight for you a specific project or issue, demonstrating the work or interests of Religions for Peace – USA. For our initial issue, we want to highlight some of our projected work for 2004 and beyond:
• developing a national dialogue on matters relating to the role of religion in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs, with particular attention to the role of the U.S. as a global citizen,
• aiding the respectful return to the earth of the remains of over 110,000 culturally unidentifiable human remains and sacred objects of Native Americans, currently held in museums, universities, and government repositories,
• building interreligious councils in communities where they currently do not exist, providing technical assistance, consultation, and a guidebook,
• planning the development of a national interfaith directory and research tool,
• producing PSAs and other media that positively promote the value of our rich religious diversity in the U.S.,
• helping to introduce a new, theater-based dialogue model in coordination with Same Difference interfaith play project
Religions for Peace – USA is part of a global organization, Religions for Peace, with over 50 chapters and work in over 100 countries. In each issue we highlight some aspect of our common work for peace and justice.
Between 2002-03 UNICEF and The World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP) commissioned a study to document how faith-based organizations were supporting orphans and vulnerable children. The study took place in six countries (Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Uganda) who have a combined population of 85.2 million people. There are currently around 5.8m orphans in these countries, with close to half being due to AIDS. The study was able to dispel some myths about FBOs such as highlight some comparative advantages that they have in supporting OVC. A key advantage is the access and presence they have to communities that are some of the hardest hit in terms of the pandemic and orphan numbers. In addition, FBOs have the legitimacy, trust, and confidence of their communities, which is often a larger problem for external agencies. Additionally, the level of community participation is high which increases potential for sustainability and longevity of these projects. Another finding revealed that FBOs support children irrespective of faith, which dispels the myth that FBOS only support those children of their own faith.
Research teams in the six countries conducted interviews with 686 Faith-based organizations (FBOs), mostly congregations and Religious Coordinating Bodies (RCBs) that coordinate the religious activities carried out by congregations. Over 9,000 volunteers supported more than 150,000 OVC in these initiatives, mostly through community-based initiatives involving spiritual, material, educational and psychosocial support. Though many individual congregational initiatives supported under 100 children, the cumulative results are significant. The overall organizational capacity of local FBOs in terms of governance and financial accountability was on a par with many larger NGOs. Most FBO initiatives receive little or no external technical or financial support and of necessity rely on their own skills and material resources. One of the major recommendations of the study is that donors should support the operation of small grants funds through RCBs to support activities initiated by congregations.
With over 40 member religious communities and over 80 members on its three councils, Religions for Peace-USA, wishes to occasionally spotlight individual members or communities. This issue features the World Sikh Council - America Region, one of our newest members.
World Sikh Council – America Region (WSC-AR), founded in 1997, is the only representative and elected body of Gurdwaras (Sikh places of worship) and Sikh institutions in the US. Its current members include 28 Gurdwaras and 8 other Sikh organizations across 17 US states.
World Sikh Council – America Region works to promote Sikh interests at the national and international level focusing on issues of advocacy, education, and well-being of humankind.
In response to the French government’s recent proposal prohibiting “the wearing of signs or clothes which conspicuously display a pupil’s religious affiliation” in government schools of that country, the WSC-AR led a worldwide Sikh delegation to meet with French government officials in Paris on February 2 to 4, 2004, and presented a memorandum on behalf of 25 million Sikhs worldwide. The memorandum proclaimed “It is not only sad but ironical and extremely painful that the community which fought for the freedom of France wearing their turbans [in World War I and II], now has to fight for the freedom to wear the turban in France.”
The National Interfaith Committee of WSC-AR works with national interfaith and faith-based organizations to represent the Sikh perspective at the national level, and promotes interfaith dialogue within the Sikh community. The committee also serves as a clearinghouse of information about Sikh Americans and their religion.
For more information about WSC-AR, please visit www.worldsikhcouncil.org. Dr. Tarunjit Singh Butalia, Secretary General of World Sikh Council – America Region and the Chair of its National Interfaith Committee, can be reached at 614-210-0591, butalia.1@osu.edu.
In this section we feature interesting, replicable projects of our member religious communities or thought-provoking publications for our common mission. This month we feature two works by speakers at Religions for Peace – USA events in 2003.
Up and coming scholar John D. Carlson - who spoke on religious views on the death penalty at our forum in Washington D.C. last spring - edited along with Erik C. Owens, “The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics” (Georgetown Univ. Press, 2003). Essays from a field of experts, like Jean Bethke Elshtain, cover a range of topics: religion and armed intervention; human rights, political authority, and religious commitments; and weighing religious allegiance and political sovereignty. Collectively, the essays set out to “retrieve and survey the unique contributions that religious angles and perspectives bring to conversations about international politics and indeed how religious ideas and institutions, wittingly or not, shape international political life.”
Perhaps no one anywhere knows more about religious fundamentalisms than R. Scott Appleby, who spoke on religious intolerance at an RFP-USA sponsored forum in Columbia, South Carolina on religion in public schools. Joined with colleagues Garbriel A. Almond and Emmanuel Sivan, the three wrote “Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World” (University of Chicago, 2003). “Based on the Fundamentalism Project, a decade-long interdisciplinary public policy study of antimodernist, antisecularist militant religious movements on five continents and within seven world religious traditions, (the book) addresses three sets of questions,” according to the introduction. What are those questions? In effect, they are: 1) “What is the context and catalyst for the rise of fiercely anti-modernist, anti-secular movements?,” 2) “What characteristics do these movements share?,” and 3) “How global and fluid is the phenomenon?”
"In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, 'Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God's military agent on earth...? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?'"- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
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