This article originally served as the guest introduction for Issue 5 of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue

The contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, has developed a compositional system that—reduced to its sparest minimum—consists of the dynamic interplay of two musical lines in a field of silence.

The melody, which proceeds mainly in steps up and down the scale, might be compared to a child tentatively walking.  The second line underpins each note of the melody with a note from a harmonizing triad (the fundamental chord of western music) that is positioned as close as possible to the note of the melody, but always below.  You could imagine this accompaniment to be a mother with her hands outstretched to ensure her toddler doesn’t fall.[1]

This simple, but elegant musical metaphor can be helpful when we struggle to think of how religion can be a force for peace.   It invites us to ponder two fundamental contributions.  One, referring to the way we find ourselves concretely in the present, invites us to think of how religious actors can contribute their assets, skills, and comparative advantages to the emerging field of conflict transformation.  Viewed from a modern secular paradigm of peacemaking, these religious assets are seen as “instrumental” to resolving conflicts, even if the religious actors themselves retain their intrinsic religious motivations.  The other contribution is more foundational in religious terms, and refers quite directly to visions of peace, rooted in religious experience, which go beyond contemporary secular models of reality.  For many religious people, these two modes are complementary even if at times in tension.

Let me focus first on the second musical line noted above, the one that is “holding and taking care of us,” and let me call it the “Gift of Peace.”  As a religious believer and in my capacity as the Secretary General of Religions for Peace, I have grown ever more convinced that it is precisely religious communities’ respective experiences of Transcendent Mystery—the Holy; the Supremely True, Good, and Beautiful; the Supremely Merciful—that is at the heart of their capacities to build peace. To speak of these respective religious experiences requires sensitivity, solid principles, and care in our use of words, as I—like the religious leaders with whom I work—am firmly committed to respecting the genuine differences of belief that are present among our respective traditions.

Nevertheless, in place after place, I have seen people turn to their faith and find strength when everything seems at an impasse. Ordinary people in the midst of conflicts and gross injustices often show us that—despite their sufferings, despite injustices that cry out to be addressed—they are not separated from what might be termed by each of our religious traditions in its own way as the Gift of Peace.  Often, it is a dark night of affliction, gross injustices, or withering losses that—like an x-ray—disclose the hidden strengths of spiritualities. This is worth pondering deeply by each believer in the terms of his or her respective religious tradition.

And what a mysterious Gift: in Sierra Leone, I worked with Muslim and Christian amputees, victims whose limbs had been chopped off, but who also said they were willing to forgive. During the formal peace talks in Lomé, Togo, I spoke with a man who lost his beloved wife and daughter, his house, his job. His loved ones could not be returned to him.  Yet, he ended his story with the words:  “Thank God for peace. I forgive them all.”

To acknowledge that the living link with Transcendent Mystery remains in the midst of social brokenness is not a license to exonerate us from our moral responsibilities.  It does, however, help center our attention on what is uniquely religious.  It can invite each to open to his or her tradition’s most original religious experience of the Gift of Peace.  A Gift that is—however mysteriously—positive, holistic, harmonious, compassionate and a summons for justice.  The Gift of Peace is alluded to in various religious traditions by fecund words such as Shanti, the Pure Land, Shalom, the Kingdom of God, Dar el-Salam and others.

Today, in my own organization, Religions for Peace, religious leaders are working together from over 100 countries to transpose their basic symbols of peace into a public notion of “Shared Security” that tries to give modest public expression to what is shared among diverse religious communities’ visions of peace.  This notion of Shared Security recognizes the profound reciprocity of all of existence, its fundamental vulnerability and the moral imperative to care for the other.  Perhaps it can be understood as an invitation for collective creativity to forge a new public political paradigm resonant with the deepest shared wisdom of religious traditions.  Such religious creativity can extend contemporary secular discussions of peace by focusing on its positive, inter-related, and normative characteristics.  It is work for the long haul.

But we live in the rapidly changing present, so let me return to the musical metaphor, shifting attention away from “the one who is holding us,” the Gift of Peace, to the toddler, to us as a fragile and collectively “battered” child trying to go forward.  This pole of the musical metaphor calls us to face squarely the extremely difficult concrete situations that confront us and the challenge of taking next steps.  It calls us to clarify for ourselves how religious people can contribute concretely to the emerging field of conflict transformation.

The fact that religious intolerance and extremism are real factors in some conflicts, including those in fragile states, makes it all the more important to identify genuine religious potentials for helping to transform conflict.   How, then, can religious people, contribute to the emerging field of conflict transformation?

While no two conflicts progress in the same way, there is an emerging method of multi-religious conflict transformation.  At its simplest, this method involves assisting religious communities to join in a multi-stakeholder dynamic analysis of a given conflict to identify the needed roles (education, advocacy, mediation, reconciliation) essential to the resolution of that conflict.  In a second step, religious communities inventory themselves to discover if they have assets—at least potential assets—to serve the roles identified as essential to resolving the conflict or a dynamic aspect of it.   In a third step, the potential religious assets are mobilized, equipped, and engaged in the needed conflict transformation roles.

The engagement of the method often takes place in a multi-religious context, which can align different communities around similar goals, capture the complementary strengths of such communities, and provide efficiencies in training and facilitate multi-stakeholder partnerships between the religious communities and other essential actors.  This is difficult, hard work, and it is typically chronically underfunded.  It can often work best when it is carefully aligned, and sometimes softly linked, with governmental and or United Nations peacemaking processes.

But what, then, are the assets that religious communities can bring to resolving conflicts?  The first class of religious assets might be called “spiritualities.”  People do find hope when there appear to be no grounds for ordinary hopes.  People do sacrifice themselves out of care for others. And people do forgive the unforgivable. Spiritual strengths, such as these are cultivated in each religious tradition in its own way. These spiritualities can provide the strength to engage in roles essential to conflict transformation such as countering messages of hate and calls for violence, and advancing reconciliation and healing among and between conflicted persons and communities.

Building on the power of spiritualities, there are the related moral heritages of each tradition that can provide to their believers a compass for dealing with the extremely complex situations encountered in conflicts.  Our moral heritages are not simply catalogs of “do's” and “don'ts,” although these are important. They are shapers of character and conscience and cultivators of virtue.

Think for example of the great Emir Abd el-Kader, who won the praise of fellow 19th-century luminaries as diverse as President Lincoln, Queen Victoria and Pope Pius IX. Abd el-Kader, you may recall, mounted military resistance against the bungled French occupation of Algeria in 1830. During the time that he led the resistance, he was known for his courage and tenacity, but equally for his exacting moral standards. He demanded, for example, that prisoners receive humane care— indeed, exactly the same rations as his own soldiers. He surrendered to French generals in 1847, lived under house arrest in France, and was exiled to Damascus in 1852. There he saved thousands of imperiled Christians. He had a moral compass, and struggled to use it consistently, most tellingly in his comportment with those with whom he differed. When he died in 1883, the New York Times hailed him as “one of the few great men of the century.”[2]

Finally, religious communities have unique social assets.  Hundreds of thousands of mosques, churches, synagogues, and temples dot the four corners of the earth. These local congregations are linked by districts, and organized on national and often regional and global levels. They constitute a tissue of connection that unites each congregation with the others associated within the same tradition. Every local congregation in the vast webs of religious networks is potentially a local center for advancing peace.

In short, we have spiritual, moral, and social assets that can be engaged in today’s emerging field of conflict transformation.  It is these assets that can concretely be harnessed for the needed roles of education, advocacy, mediation, and reconciliation essential to transforming conflicts.

In pragmatic terms, we can see the added value of multi-religious cooperation in situations that are extremely difficult for nation states or the United Nations to manage.  Increasingly we are forced to recognize the link between religion, conflict, and failed or fragile states.  One in four countries is defined as a “fragile state,” according to a Foreign Policy focus issue (August 2010).  Fragile states often cannot provide even the most basic of services for their citizens, including minimum security for their inhabitants.  These fragile states can too easily become breeding grounds for radicalization and a refuge for extremist groups, compounding the miseries of innocent civilians and multiplying instability.  The international community faces difficulties in addressing violent conflict in these places not least because it does not know with whom to engage to set things on the right track.  Religious communities provide an important entry point.  For example, even an extremely difficult situation such as Somalia makes clear that religious channels can remain open when diplomatic ones are blocked.

In this special edition of the Journal of Inter-religious Dialogue, you are invited to ponder how religious assets need to be engaged to create an environment of trust in the Middle East and Sri Lanka, to be deployed in efforts to protect women in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to support youth with a healthy alternative to the callings of radical groups.  These, and the other fine examples in this edition, point to an ever fuller engagement of religious people in peacebuilding.

As more and more religious people around the world work together for peace—cooperating with one another as they work to marshal their spiritualities, moralities, and the living networks of their faith communities in concrete peacemaking roles—we can also take heart in the chord that arises out of silence and supports every tentative step forward.  People hear it and interpret it in different ways.  Yet, they find in their hearings comfort in the hardest of times, hope when nothing seems clear, and acceptance of one another as part of the Gift of Peace.

Dr. William F. Vendley

Secretary General
Religions for Peace

[2] See John W. Kiser, Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader (Monkfish Book Pub. Co, Rhinebeck, NY, 2008).

©Rick Nahmias/goldenstatesofgrace.com

©Rick Nahmias/goldenstatesofgrace.com

]]> http://irdialogue.org/articles/religious-photography-of-rick-nahmias/feed/ 0 http://irdialogue.org/articles/a-changing-encounter-a-response-to-the-photography-of-rick-nahmias-by-anna-deweese/ http://irdialogue.org/articles/a-changing-encounter-a-response-to-the-photography-of-rick-nahmias-by-anna-deweese/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 02:02:25 +0000 Editor http://irdialogue.org/?p=4076

© Rick Nahmias/goldenstatesofgrace.com

(C) Rick Nahmias/goldenstatesofgrace.com

"What's going on in this picture?"

This was the seductively simple question posed to me when asked to respond on the included image. This picture comes from a collection of images, published together in the work Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited by Rick Nahmias. I have not had the privilege of exploring the entirety of these images, the book, or to have viewed the project at an exhibition showing. This project tells the stories of 11 communities, and the ways in which they practice and live out their respective faiths. The common thread between the communities in this work is that they are groups on the margins of society. For various reasons, these groups have been cast aside, overlooked, or otherwise disregarded by the majority.

This image, “Yajahira With Her Altar”, represents a community of transgender sex workers who pray to La Santisima Muerta (Holy Death). This figure, like St. Jude, watches over those in risky professions, and these sex workers see Santisima Muerta as one who helps them avoid death on the streets by evoking her form, which is the symbolism of death. I found this image compelling for many reasons: the particular icon of Jesus Yajahira has on her altar; her posture as she sits and smokes; the look in her eyes as she stares at the icon; the composition of the photograph; the particular story of this woman, which I can only imagine; the power of her story and her beliefs that is invoked by this image.

What is going on here is a lot. The question is not simple, nor should it be.

Stories from the margins are often ignored or assumed as simplistic, and therefore not worth the attention of the rest of society. Yet my faith compels me to ask certain questions when faced with such images, stories or encounters: Whose voice is not being heard? Who is in need? How are they interpreting God’s message? Is my interpretation of that message making it impossible for me to see them, hear them, help them? Sitting with this image I think, how would I react to meeting someone with Yajahira’s story?  Would I react, or would I respond, after sitting with her, listening to her? Would I judge her, or otherwise compare myself to her? Would I think that my faith was in some way better of greater than hers, or less?

Nahmias’ work brings us into contact with stories of faith – stories of survival, stories of living, stories of the other, stories of our neighbors – and into contact with something greater than our selves.

As a person who has encountered a small piece of one of these stories, I am changed. And because I am changed, through this encounter, I must rethink my own faith.

© Rick Nahmias/goldenstatesofgrace.com

Rick Nahmias is a photographer inimitably willing to come into relationship with his subjects, so willing that his own work and spirit is irrecovably changed by the making and sharing of his art.

Golden States of Grace: Prayers of the Disinherited reveals startling portraits of worshippers, their landscapes, and their objects of worship, along with written prayers, oral histories and academic essays.

Yet, turning through the pages is more than merely examining beautiful photographs. It became clear to me within a few minutes with the book that the book itself revealed a community, an outpouring of spirit, and an accumulation of grace.

I had the opportunity to speak to Nahmias about his work, and I asked him to begin by talking about the project. With the goal of “capturing community,” he begins with meeting the individual in person, in their community, and presents the project and his portfolio.  In a sense, he is courting them as a co-participant, co-creator in the project. Nahmias shares,  “I had no qualms in saying—I need to be invited into the most sacred areas of your life.” He describes this process as, “A certain partnership of trust.--.”

I have never heard an artist or writer discuss his subject in a way that connotes equality on the part of the subject—it struck me that Nahmias was in a way giving up part of a perceived power in a willingness to come into relationship with his subjects. Nahmias said, “After that, my goal is just to remain open to what happens.” He continued,

“I have learned no project of mine can begin with anything but a blank canvas - It may seem like a given, but it is with great excitement I greet that, and more than a tinge of sadness when something solid begins to form, because it is then that all the other possibilities about what that project ‘Can Be’ then melt away. Thus, as exciting as it is, there is always this ambivalence as I move forward - and forms and ideas become clearer. But that is part of the process and must happen.

Now, being well-acquainted with the labyrinth one must maneuver when taking on a large scale photo project, film, anything with multiple moving parts, I am always amazed that things come together in the end. I feel very lucky to be able to go on these journeys and have the trust there will be something at the end - though I really don't want to know what that is till I get there.”

It seems to the viewer that there is a twinship here--just as the artist is committed to portraying his subjects with honesty, he seems honest about the possibility of himself being changed or affected by the work.  Neither leaves the project unchanged; each is forever affected by the other.  By ceding control to “the possible,” the art that is made is a charged space.

Nahmias continued, “…trusting ‘the unknowing’ of the creative process is something you cannot do without.  It's the alchemy, the way art is made.

That said, there have been plenty of times during a three day shoot, that after day one I sense I have nothing worthwhile and begin to sweat and see doubts materialize, which if I let them could take down a whole project quite easily.  Again though, even the intense doubt which also comes along with every project I have done - or will ever do - is all part of the journey.”

To the reader/viewer, the authentic fruit from the journey is powerful—Nahmias himself was struck with how powerful the prayers written by the subjects, and his own growth along the way. He said, “One thing I was struck with—how articulate the subjects were, [they gave a] great deal of thoughtfulness to the prayers.”

The prayers—making a new American prayer book—reflect a true and previously untapped spirituality. The voices Nahmias amplifies come from the margins—the margins of society as well as the margins of religious communities. I was troubled by my own reactions to some of these voices, and asked Nahmias about including potentially difficult subjects. He said that it is important to include the struggles of our brothers and sisters,“…even if it’s a struggle that is distasteful.” He notes that “Everyone pictured in this book shares something that you and I share: a genuine spiritual quest.”

Perhaps one reason I feel uncomfortable is because it is easier to live and pray in a world where things are right and wrong, good or bad, black or white. Nahmias identifies this element in his work, noting, “There’s so many shades of gray in there—that I hope we can all see something of ourselves in their struggle. Allow ourselves to live in the grey.”

He posits that we seem to have lost track of our connection with people who don’t look like us, worship like us, act as children of God like us.  He said, “We all have something marginalized within us whether we want to face or access that. This is a complete body of work – each part, each community, is intregal to the whole. You can’t throw out the works you don’t like. You can’t remove [photographs of a halfway house] because you don’t like addicts. What [the work] says is—put your judgment in check…it’s only about understanding, that each of these people, like you or I, can and must come to a deep personal understanding about their connection to a higher power.”

By creating a prayer book – and its companion multimedia exhibition which is now traveling - that includes these powerful calls to prayer for all of us (perhaps accentuating facets of God’s presence that we would otherwise miss), Nahmias gives us a way in. That is, I cannot resist entering that which draws me in, first by inviting my gaze, and then by inviting my voice, to share in prayer.

Late in the process of editing the book, having found himself drawn to particular phrases in the prayers, he began one last creative act. In ransom note style, or like a mosaic-maker, he literally cut up then positioned these resonant phrases on a table. Just as the writers of the prayers took their own time and spiritual energy to share their prayers, Nahmias allowed himself to enter a process of spiritual reflection and felt his way into creating the final prayer. The final prayer, which Nahmias calls “An American Prayer,” is made up completetly of the resonant phrases, the phrases from the prayers which acts as a connective tissue to the images, essays and stories throughout the book.

Within the book, Nahmias notes, “Images and prayers are contrasted and placed in their specific order for a specific reason of illustrating and broadening themes shared by different faiths and communities.” For the reader/viewer, paging through the book allows one to find images and text, to gaze or to pray, and to hear a circling of voices rise and fall.

Upon hearing Nahmias describe his willingness to enter into relationship with his subjects, the way he honors them by facilitating their own acts of co-creation, the way he reflected on the resonant phrases to create a new prayer---I noted that his actions sounded pastoral, and asked if he was religious. He demurred that he was not, and laughed when I said he sounded pastoral.  He said that he had not considered himself “religious,” but went on to describe the many experiences he has had, particularly in the creation (and now through delivering it through talks and presentations) of Golden States of Grace, which touched him and others, making him realize that something indeed religious was happening.

Nahmias talked about one of the strands of grace that ran through this project. He said, “I would say that grace comes through openness and compassion - it finds you and not the other way around - in that way, I feel incredibly lucky that the work turned out well, and from what I am told, reflects a number of themes I saw developing as I shot it.

My publisher, University of New Mexico Press, trusted me as the manuscript came together, and then as I guided the design and art direction in a very hands on way. They went along on this journey with me from the beginning – allowing us to adhere to the mantra-like three words that I planted in our heads at the start: reverent yet contemporary.”

Golden States of Grace closes with "An American Prayer;" the prayer begins with the line, "Take refuge, dear children, in the changes in your life."  It takes courage to be willing to enter a place of change, a place where one's values and hopes can be altered and change. When we hear the voice of another, and allow her experience to touch and change us, we are engaged in holy work--work truly gilded through with numinousness.

Too frequently in my religious life, I do what is commonplace and comfortable, allowing routine to numb me to the experiences and voices of my brothers and sisters. The images Nahmias reveals, and the voices he amplifies--through photograph and word, near icons of portrait and text--bring me to a close place of recognition and disequilibrium.  Gracefully, it is in such a place that prayer is most possible.

Professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im

Dr. Paola Bernardini is Russell Berrie Fellow in Interreligious Studies at the he John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue, St. Thomas Aquinas University (Angelicum), Rome.

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School, is an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights. Born in Sudan, he moved to the US when his teacher, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha, was put too death by the Regime of the Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiry. His most prominent publications include Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’ a (Harvard University Press, 2008); African Constitutionalism and the contingent role of Islam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Towards an Islamic Reformation: Civic Liberties, Human Rights and International Law (Syracuse University Press, 1990).

Click here to read Dr. Bernardini's interView with Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im on Shari'a, philosophy, and the contemporary world.

"He was never what one might today term a culture warrior, nor could he easily be labeled conservative or liberal," claims Eric Metaxas in one of many pungent lines from his groundbreaking new biography of Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet Bonhoeffer, has often been pigeonholed as a courageous radical, working secretly for the assassination of Adolf Hitler during World War II. At times this story of Bonhoeffer the assassin has become so prominent in popular memory as to occlude another important aspect of his life: his work to formulate a theology that both embraced Christ and defended the Jews as the chosen people of God.

Bonhoeffer began threading together his theology of the Jews over the course of many years. But his beliefs came to a head during the events of Kristallnacht - the Night of Broken Glass - on November 9, 1938. Throughout Germany, Jewish shops lay razed in the start of a long path to the destruction of European Jewry. Bonhoeffer felt Kristallnacht personally, its devastation reverberating through his mind and his faith life. The next day, as he was reading the Psalms, he made a connection that permanently altered his conception of Judaism and anti-Semitism. As Metaxas elucidates,

Bonhoeffer was reading Psalm 75. This was the text he happened to be meditating upon. What he read startled him, and with his pencil he put a vertical line in the margin to mark it, with an exclamation point next to the line. He also underlined the second half of verse 8... "They have burned all of God's houses in the land"... Next to the verse he wrote 9.11.38. Bonhoeffer saw this as an example of God speaking to him, and to the Christians in Germany. God was telling him something through his Word that day, and as he meditated and prayed, Bonhoeffer realized that the synagogues that had been burned in Germany were God's own.

Kristallacht reshaped Bonhoeffer, pushing his theology to its logical ends. Bonhoeffer named the "sheer violence" of Kristallnacht a result of the "godless face" of Nazism. For Bonhoeffer, Christians were called to "share in God's suffering at the hands of a godless world." In 1938, God was suffering due to the destruction of God's chosen people. In his unfinished Ethics, Bonhoeffer wrote "An expulsion of the Jews from the west must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew."

Bonhoeffer's path to this decisive moment began years earlier with the anti-oppression theology he found and celebrated at Abyssinian Baptist Church during his year at Union Theological Seminary in 1930 and 1931. In 1933, just days after Hitler's installation as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer spoke so provocatively against the idolatry of the cult of the Führer that his radio station was cut off in the middle of his presentation. By 1935, he was prevented from teaching at the University of Berlin and declared a "pacifist and an enemy of the state".

As the Nazis continued to abuse the language of the Christian gospel in their party politics, many clergy and laity were led astray. It was in the context of profound misinformation and complacency that Bonhoeffer warned churches and Christians against a theology of "cheap grace" in his seminal work, The Cost of Discipleship. For Bonhoeffer, "we are not to simply bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself."

To help Bonhoeffer escape the draft in 1939, Union Theological Seminary offered him a position. However, he stayed only a few weeks, eventually writing to Reinhold Niebuhr, "Christians in Germany have the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that the Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that choice in security."

Bonhoeffer returned to Europe, joining a secret network of Germans in the German intelligence agency plotting the assassination of Hitler. They narrowly missed succeeding in their objective: Hitler was spared from an exploding briefcase by a large oak table. Hitler responded by executing almost five thousand individuals suspected of participating in the resistance. Although Bonhoeffer escaped that fate, he was arrested soon after, when the Gestapo found documents connecting him to a network of individuals helping German Jews escape to Switzerland as fake German intelligence agents. As the evidence connecting him to the assassination plots came to light, Bonhoeffer was condemned to execution.

Bonhoeffer was tortured and killed for his Christian theology and his willingness to sacrifice himself for the sake of the Jews, whom he understood to be God's people.

This article was originally published on the Tikkun Daily. John Shellito is a student at Union Theological Seminary, interested in how faith communities can resist oppression in economic, ecological, and social spheres. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2008 and is currently pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church. Joshua Stanton is co-Editor of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue and a Schusterman Rabbinical Fellow at Hebrew Union College.

One of the many images from www.yivoencyclopedia.org

From liturgy to ideology, Yiddish literature and the mass immigration to the United States, Eastern Europe birthed many of modern Jewry’s most important intellectual and social trends. Its impact on Jewish history is on par with that of Medieval Spain and al-Andalus, and even in some respects the period of the great Talmudic academies in Baghdad.

Yet  its incredible history and derivate lessons have been largely limited to books and those familiar with them. The People of the Book have long allowed their expansive history to be confined by the medium through which it was traditionally presented. This trend has become particularly stark in recent years, as the Internet has expanded the ways in which history and knowledge can be transmitted, as well as the audience with which it can be shared.

Even as Jewish organizations have created websites, online forums, and online publications in response to the growing demand for online resources, Jewish education has remained largely offline. Even as the digitization of the Talmud has facilitated rabbinic scholarship, it has seemed taboo to suggest that Jewish history, philosophy, theology, and liturgy could be accessed through anything but a book or a knowledgeable person.

Just this past week, however, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research made significant headway in changing the notion that education for the People of the Book might somehow be confined to books alone. After extensive planning and preparation, the institute launched an online edition of the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. While it may not leave book learning totally behind (the print edition is being published by Yale University Press), it is set to alter the way that Jews learn about the heartland of Eastern European Jewry.

Most remarkable about the online edition of the encyclopedia is its breadth of content and use of media. In addition to traditional articles, it abounds with maps, pictures, posters, audio recordings, and even early videos, documenting the appearance and milieu of Jewish neighborhoods and villages. The result is a vivid portrayal of Jewish history in Eastern Europe, one that finally shows (rather than tells) why it has long been considered a crucial region for the transition to modern Judaism.

Complementing this content are two portals for educators and researchers, ensuring that the online edition not only proves enriching for the curious individual but also those seeking to transmit the information to the next generation or transform the way it is understood, through new and incisive interpretations.

Having carefully designed the website for general readers, educators, and researchers, it would seem that the YIVO Encyclopedia’s editor, Professor Gershon Hundert of McGill University, had in mind a much bigger goal: applying the lessons of Jewish adaptation from the past to the present. In fostering change in the most bookish of Jewish educational tools – the encyclopedia – he and his colleagues may well prompt a watershed of Jewish innovation online. The People of the Book may well be ready for a transition en masse to cyberspace.

Joshua Stanton is co-Editor of the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and a blogger for the Huffington Post and Tikkun Daily. He is also a Schusterman Rabbinical Fellow at Hebrew Union College.

This article was originally published on the On Faith blog, hosted by the Washington Post and Newsweek.

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to hear Professor Paul Knitter, probably the most important Christian theologian to construct and explore theologies of interfaith work, talk about how he got involved in this work. He recounted training in Rome during the Second Vatican Council when a Bishop handed the young student a document the Council would discuss the next day. It was the first time Professor Knitter laid eyes on Nostra Aetate.

Among the seminary faculty, students, religious leaders and interfaith activists in the room, there was a collective intake of breathe. Nostra Aetate was a new articulation of how the Catholic Church understood its relationship to other religions. It opened the way for Catholics to engage with people of other faiths in ways previously unimagined. To be there when the document itself was just a draft was to witness an important moment in the interfaith movement.

The conference we were gathered for, "Educating Jewish, Christian & Muslim Leaders for Service in a Multi-Religious World: The American Seminary Context,", felt like it might mark an important moment for the interfaith movement in its own right.

I've been to similar conferences in the past, but the breadth of this group impressed me. There were leading academics and theologians like Diana Eck and John Thatamanil , and pioneers in translating interfaith experience into seminary contexts like Nancy Kreimer of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. But there were also student leaders like Joshua Stanton, a rabbinical student and founder of The Journal of Inter Religious Dialogue and lead activists like Alex Kern of Boston's Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries.

I spoke on a panel about interfaith work in the classroom with several leading theologians who I've long admired, which was just a bit intimidating. What could my experience teaching IFYC's approach in seminary classrooms add to this conversation? The lines between academic and practitioner are often stark, and many seminarians I've worked with have struggled to find practical answers for the questions they face in their ministry in the world-religion type classes offered in their seminary education. Yet the questions and conversations I heard during our session revealed a generosity, eagerness and necessity from both "sides" to learn from one another. We need rich academic exploration and real on-the-ground experiences, and interfaith work must reach beyond classrooms and academic panels "to the pews."

Regular readers of this blog will know that IFYC rarely dabbles explicitly in theology, although there are surely theological implications for our work. Before the panel I had a chance to talk with Professor Knitter about the experience of teaching one of his books in a course I taught with Eboo Patel at the University of Chicago Divinity School this winter. It helped our students explore what particularly Christian responses could be to religious diversity and also helped them to press at the questions they felt hadn't been answered. Professor Knitter smiled. "These young people - they're writing the new theologies. They're the new theologians."

May it be so: that the young people on the forefront of the interfaith movement today know themselves as the new theologians - and the academics, preachers and teachers - of faith in a diverse world. And may they know the rich legacy of work that comes before them.

Cassie Meyer is Director of Content at the Interfaith Youth Core. Cassie completed her Master's Degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where her work focused on social justice movements in American Christianity; she currently teaches a class with Eboo Patel at Chicago Theological Seminary on interfaith action in the world.  At U of C, she and a group of progressive religious students built an online forum to discuss faith and politics, and she is currently a member of the Community Renewal Society’s Associate Board.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll spread the message with its fires
Towards the planets with holocausts or killings
A poem that’ll talk about reality amongst the
Communities tortured and marginalized
A poem that’ll be against female mutilations
With sex violation and child abuse
A poem that’ll sail on the oceans, seas
And lakes.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll flow deep in the hearts of mankind
Imagination with persecution and murder
A poem that’ll transform many faces from sadness
To joy in the season of revolt
A poem that’ll fly above the moons, stars
And suns.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll bear the richness of solidarity
For the poor and needy groups
A poem that’ll climb the mountains with rocks
Against the tribal war and hatred
A prayer that’ll linger across the borders, horizons
And skies.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll never accept dictatorships
But the democracy to embrace the integrity and equality
A poem that’ll victoriously shine in the midst
Of darkness to steer the world for light
A poem that’ll challenge the axis of conflicts, hunger
And war.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll change the masses from
Racialism and imperialism to harmony that prevails
A poem that’ll face no fear from the leaders
Of the earth in the nuclear advancement
A poem that’ll heal the children, mothers
And fathers.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll sweep away the intimidation
And humiliation of racism
A poem that’ll stand by the justice
Towards the sufferers and victims on soil of
Terrorism and AIDS's stigma
A poem that’ll bring the new dawn
To the less fortunate, disabled
And the poor.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll resist the subjugation of
The innocent creation and nature burning
A poem that’ll uphold our dignity and rights
Against the imperialists' nightmare storms
A poem that’ll reign on the rivers, streams
And valleys.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll fight for my rights, your destiny
Against poverty and violence
A poem that’ll take its paths on the clouds
Of machinations with tribalism
To bring back reconciliation within the dust
Of bloodshed of massacre
A poem that’ll call for the struggle
Against the tyrants holding the oppressions
And discrimination against a culture
A poem that’ll condem the child trafficking, slavery
And child soldier.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll reflect on the lives
Living in despair with no hope for the future
A poem that’ll free the deprived peoples
From the rising massacre and destruction
A poem that’ll boldly demonstrate against
Military dominance of human dignity
A poem that’ll swiftly tread in the slums, towns
And cities.

I have a poem for peace to the world
A poem that’ll curse child labour,
And early marriage on the rise
A poem that’ll condem and break all arms, bullets
And bombs and create justice that prevails
A poem with the vision for the mission
Against inhumanity, impunity
And injustice.

Yes!
I have a poem for peace to the world

A poem!
Like Martin Luther King had
A Dream.

Walter Keyombe is a new powerful Kenyan performing poet and author on the global poetry scene and an international leading spoken word artist whose work has been published in various global online magazines of Canada, the United States, India, Germany, Amsterdam, and the United Kingdom.This includes the Enchating Verses, Stephen Gill Gazzette and many other journals. He is a peace envoy with United Religions Initiative, and an active member of World Poets Society. Also he is an acclaimed peace activist who recently hosted the First World Peace Poetry Festival Kenya 2009, which was held on 19th September last year at World Hope Center in Nairobi in honor of the UN International Day of Peace, which was graced by the International Pen Kenya Chapter President, Philo Ikonya, and Executive Vice President, Derek Janney, of World Hope. Currently, he is a volunteer cook at World Hope Academy in Nairobi, Kenya.