We live in an age when DNA analysis is used in many high-profile court cases. I never imagined it could help solve a mystery within my own family.

This past winter my brother had his DNA analyzed. The analysis triggered a series of astonishing revelations about our family history.

My father, Harold George Wolfe (1897-1987), was a public school principal for most of his career. He always said he was of German ancestry. His father’s family emigrated from the Rhineland area in the northern part of France known as Alsace Loraine. Their journey to the United States occurred years before he was born. His family settled in Varysburg, New York where they attended the United Methodist Church.

It turns out my brother’s DNA reveals that our predominate line of ancestry on our father’s side of the family is not German but Ashkenazi, which is a European Jewish population that resided in the Rhineland. Based on an interview with my father that I recorded in 1977, as well as other memories of conversations, it appears he took steps to conceal his Jewish heritage.

Our last name, Wolfe, was originally spelled W-O-L-F. My dad claimed the addition of the “e” to the name resulted from a mistake on a copy of his birth certificate. He said he liked the addition of the “e” so he chose not to correct it. Now that I know my brother’s DNA analysis, I can’t help but question his explanation. Wolf without the “e” added is a common Jewish spelling, as is also the spelling W-O-L-F-F. Wolfe with the “e” is characteristically English, Irish or German.

This change in spelling occurred sometime between 1920 and 1930. We know this because my father’s name was spelled W-O-L-F on his military discharge papers from Paris Island where he served in the marines, and on his bachelor’s degree diploma from Cornell University in 1920. His Master’s degree diploma from the University of Rochester in 1930 listed his name as W-O-L-F-E. This addition of the “e” occurred at a time when there was rising anti-Semitism in Germany and the United States.

In addition, my brother Walter, who was born in Corry, Pennsylvania in 1937 at a time when Jews in Europe were being condemned to concentration camps, was not circumcised. Since it was customary back then to circumcise male babies regardless of their religious or ethnic background, we always wondered why my brother was left uncircumcised. We now believe it was due to my father’s continued efforts to hide our Jewish heritage.

My father’s mother was indeed German. This Jewish line of ancestry, now confirmed through DNA analysis, comes from my paternal grandfather’s side of the family.  Given that Dad lived through the anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 30s, we believe we have solved the mystery of why he rarely spoke about his family history.

Residing in the United States well before WWI, my father’s situation was not one of having to survive Nazi persecution. Yet, certainly part of the reason he concealed his Jewish heritage was to elude the scourge of anti-Semitism, as well as hate groups in the U.S. like the Ku Klux Klan. I suspect he was also trying to protect my brother should fascism ever reach the shores of America.

Knowing my father’s reputation as a supportive and well-respected school administrator, I believe his awareness of his Jewish roots sensitized him to the evils of discrimination. In his own private way as an educator, he combated ethnic prejudice by treating his students and faculty colleagues with fairness and equality.

This was his leadership style. I know this from teachers who served under him and spoke fondly of him as a school of administrator. His total rejection of his Jewish ancestry certainly went too far, but we can understand this denial given the rise of fascism in Europe.

In our country today, there are people who are reluctant to be open about their religion or their ancestry. Let us strive to create a world where no one will ever feel the need to conceal their ethnic or religious heritage.

George Wolfe is the Chair of the Muncie Interfaith Fellowship which is a cooperation circle in the United Religions Initiative. He is also a trained mediator and the Coordinator of Outreach Programs for the Ball State University Center for Peace and Conflict Studies.

False Narratives

 “The truth shall set you free” Jesus

“Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out.” Quran

“Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor tradition; nor rumor; nor what is in a scripture; nor surmise; nor axiom; nor specious reasoning; nor bias towards one’s beliefs; nor upon another’s seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, ‘The monk is our teacher.’ When you yourselves know: ‘These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,’ enter on and abide in them.” Buddhism

Sometimes in life we come across something that if we managed to understand and handle well, we could change our personal history and the future of the whole world!

False narratives fit into that category. They are game changers that if we understood how they are used to our detriment, the whole course of world history and our personal lives could fundamentally change. They are stories that we tell ourselves and others that trap us into the non real.

• False narratives develop because we want to influence outcomes with our particular agenda.
• They are used to maintain power and dogma in religion and law.
•  False narratives are used to interpret the constitution, to deny marriage to gays, to uphold apartheid and racial prejudice, to justify guns, to elect politicians or pull them down, to justify terrorism or the war on terror.
•  On the personal level they are fantasies that make us think that we are living in the real world when we are not. We can interpret events in our lives such as divorce or being fired or rejected in love as a victim story that we tell over and over again to ourselves. What story are you telling yourself today?

Our core beliefs are so fundamental to our thinking that we just assume that they reflect reality. They become our identity. But they can also be false; stories we have believed, perhaps constructed by ourselves or others that have the same result; they bind us up. For instance we can take our own life and the lives of others in a car bomb – all for a false narrative erroneously based on a holy book.

Suicide car bombers are the result of false narratives.

Sometimes the police hear false narratives when they pull someone over for a traffic violation. I love the joke about a truck driver who was driving along on the freeway. A sign came up that read, “Low Bridge Ahead.” Before he knew it, the bridge was right ahead of him and he got stuck under the bridge. Cars were backed up for miles. Finally, a police car came up. The cop got out of his car and walked up to the truck driver, put his hands on his hips and said, “Got stuck, huh?”

The truck driver says, “No, I was delivering this bridge and ran out of gas.”

This past week we have seen a committee investigate the Ben Gazi affair. General Hayden gives us a clue as to why we embrace a false narrative. He says:

“I’ve been in these kinds of circumstances where if you’ve got a worldview, if you’ve got a narrative that you believe in, you try to make the facts presented to you fit the narrative,” Hayden said. “I fear there may have been some people in our government who kind of fell into that trap in the days after Benghazi, which is understandable and, frankly, forgivable, and then in the weeks after Benghazi, which is not understandable and is not forgivable.”

So what happens apparently is this. We start off with a narrative that we believe in and then try to fit the facts we receive into it. He says that that is understandable but after some time we get out of that mental trap into something else. The brain thinks about it, receives new information which does not fit with the original narrative and hopefully we open ourselves to the possibility that we could have been wrong.

But that doesn’t always happen.

Let’s face it, we stubbornly hold onto our corebeliefs. We laughingly say “Don’t confuse me with the facts!”

Like the delusional man who thought he was dead, but in reality he was very much alive. His false narrative became such a problem that his family finally paid for him to see a psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist spent many laborious sessions trying to convince the man he was still alive.
Nothing seemed to work.

Finally the doctor tried one last approach. He took out his medical books and proceeded to show the patient that dead men don’t bleed. After hours of tedious study, the patient seemed convinced that dead men don’t bleed.
“Do you now agree that dead men don’t bleed?” the doctor asked.
“Yes, I do,” the patient replied.

“Very well, then,” the doctor said.
He took out a needle and pricked the patient’s finger. Out came a trickle of blood.
The doctor asked, “What does that tell you?”

“Oh my goodness!” the patient exclaimed as he stared incredulously at his finger … “Dead men do bleed!!”

It is so much easier to believe in something false than it is to doubt it, isn’t it? Why is that? What are we afraid of? Perhaps losing our self? Or losing heaven? or losing a loved one?

For instance I know a great number of people who want to believe that the Bible is the ‘Word of God’. It doesn’t matter how many problems you may raise up to this thesis, they will go on believing it to be true because to them it is an article of faith. They think that God will be angry with them if they allow any form of doubt to enter their minds.

When the Protestants left Catholicism they needed an authority to replace the Pope. The Bible became the substitute infallible authority and that is when it suddenly became the ‘Word of God’. But then came along the scholars who saw through this stratagem and started higher criticism of the Bible restoring it to what it once used to be- a library of books of varying degrees of spiritual usefulness. But the false narrative persists…

It is easy to demonstrate that the Bible is actually a library of 66 books some of which contradict each other as to basic facts, but that doesn’t seem to matter to believers. It is easier to believe than doubt. It doesn’t matter that Jesus disagreed with Scripture and changed the ‘eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ law, these dear folks will argue that somehow it all works together as the Word of God. They say that God does not change God’s mind, but Jesus who they also believe in, is not stuck there. He rewrites Scripture where he believes it is wrong. How does he do this? He follows the law of love as an interpretive tool. Oh that his followers would do the same instead of spinning false narratives!

Yes we can hold onto a narrative and try to fit the facts into it but when they don’t fit after reflection or new information, it is time to open ourselves to the truth. For truth has this singular defining characteristic. It sets us free, always. Are you bound up today over some dogma or doctrine? Are you recognizing that it is a false narrative, yet you still want to believe it?

Take courage! The truth shall set you free. However hard it is to face the truth, choose the freedom! It’s better!

But it is not only when we do religion that we get stuck in a false narrative. There are false narratives all over the place. Take the NRA interpretation of the constitution for instance. This powerful narrative makes us unable to get background checks no matter however horrible a school mass shooting may be, this narrative says that guns don’t kill people, people kill people and the way to be safe is to have more guns. We need armed guards in our schools etc. This is supposedly based on the second Amendment.

Robert Parry says:

So, when Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz lectures fellow senators on the Second Amendment, he doesn’t include the preamble, “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State.” He only reads the rest: “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Nor do the Tea Partiers note that, to Madison and the Framers, the term “bear Arms” meant to participate in a militia, not to have as many guns as you want.

He says; “The real history has gotten lost in a swamp of false narrative, the sort of ideological deceptions that have come to dominate the current American political scene and have given us an Orwellian present in which he “who controls the past” really does “control the future.”

In our personal lives we all have a tendency to tell ourselves stories. Stories are just fine if they are positive and truthful. But where so many of us go off the rails is when something bad happens to us and we begin to tell ourselves things like: “I will never be the same. I will never get over this. Nobody could ever love me. I am a failure. I will always be homeless. I’ll never get a job like the one I lost. I’m all washed up. I’m too old. These stories are part of the same phenomenon- false narratives.

Here are some common false narratives that we often believe in:

• We worship the false narrative that money and wealth will make us happy and take our meaning for life there. The result of that is this: We will never feel that we have enough.
• We worship the false narrative about our body and beauty and sexual attractiveness but after awhile we will always feel unattractive and as we age we will become increasingly discontent with our body.
• We worship the false narrative that power will give us control over the bad things that can happen to us. The result is that we think that we will need ever more power to numb our own fears. Ask Omar Kaddafi, Saddam Hussein or Assad. Or any control freak!
• We worship our minds and even when you get a PhD you will end up feeling like a fraud, afraid of being found out.

But false narratives are a curse that we can break open!

How do we do this as people of faith and trust in a Loving God?

Here are some false narrative busters;

• Ask questions. Who is telling the story? Why are they telling this story? Do they have an agenda? Is it in the interest of an institution’s survival? Beware!
  • What are the real facts? Does the story represent them accurately or is it manipulative?
  • Do your own research to get the facts as accurate as possible. As the Buddhists counsel rely on your own personal experience not on what others may tell you. Many a false narrative has been blown out of the water by one incontrovertible fact.
  • Check your own assumptions before making conclusions. Best rule? Never assume anything! Nothing like a false assumption to get you into trouble, especially with a false narrative.
  • Consistently choose the highest ideals; integrity, love, understanding, kindness, thoughtfulness and honesty. Never use a false narrative to score political or social points.
  • Refuse to manipulate others through false narratives or distortions
  •  Refuse to be manipulated yourself
  • Choose the way of peace not judgment

I want to close with a story which is amazing. It is about two stories told about exactly the same facts.

In 1968 the town of Cheyenne Oklahoma wanted to celebrate the centennial of the battle of Washita. It was a glorious victory according to the townspeople and the followers of the battle. They saw this as a celebration. But the townspeople also wanted the Cheyenne to participate.

The Cheyenne story was that this had been a deliberate attack on a peaceful village governed by a peace chief Black Kettle.

So when the townspeople approached the native Cheyenne,  they responded “Celebrate? Celebrate the destruction of a peaceful village where women and children were killed? No thank-you!”

But the townspeople persisted.

In that tribe there were Peace chiefs- chiefs who were dedicated to nonviolence, and conflict resolution.

Lawrence Hart was both a Cheyenne peace chief and a Mennonite Christian, trained in conflict resolution.

The Peace Chiefs wrestled with the question and finally came up with a resolution. The bones of one of the Cheyenne killed in that attack were on display in the local museum. The peace Chiefs said that if they could be released for burial that they would participate in the centennial activities.

The town agreed to the conditions.

On the day of the celebration the Grandsons of the 7^th Cavalry arrived from California. They called themselves the Grand Army of the Republic. Neither the town nor the Cheyenne knew they were coming. Dressed in authentic uniforms with real weapons they joined in on the mock attack on the village.

To Lawrence Hart the scene looked too real. Hatred for these men began to arise within him. His own children were in that village and would be shot down as rehearsed.

The attack was reenacted. Women and children were shot. Finally it was over and everyone returned to the museum. The Peace Chiefs were given a bronze coffin and they started to sing a Cheyenne song as a processional. It began to snow as it had so many years before. As they passed through the crowd a Cheyenne woman draped a very beautiful Pendleton blanket over the coffin. It was a gesture in keeping with the Cheyenne tradition.

Then to everyone’s dismay a command suddenly rang out. “Present arms!”

Lawrence heard the arms being handled. He didn’t want the Grandsons of the 7^th to be there, but they were. He looked at the commander. How dare he salute a victim of his forefather’s action?

Lawrence’s competing story was beating in his veins and thundering in his mind.

He knew however that he was not responding like a Peace Chief.

So how was he to react?

The next part of the ceremony was that the blanket would be given away by the Peace Chiefs to someone in the crowd who would be honored by the Cheyenne people.

The Peace Chiefs suddenly announced that they would be giving the blanket to the commanding officer of the Grand Army of the Republic, Grandsons of the 7^th cavalry. There was a gasp from the crowd.

The officer stepped forward drew his sword and saluted. As he replaced his sword, Lawrence placed the blanket over his shoulders.

One hundred years after the massacre of the Cheyenne by the 7^th Cavalry the power of their story of glory, was suddenly broken by a blanket- a gesture of conciliation. The scene that followed was hard to describe… People broke down and cried. Cheyenne, townspeople and the grandsons of the 7^th cried on one another’s shoulders. The spell of the false narrative was broken at last!

How do we break the spells of false narratives that have long been spun over us? How do we let go of being a victim- viewing reality through that filter?

Become a Peace Chief where you are.

Speak your truth.

Stand in your own dignity.

Demand to be heard in the interests of truth.

Claim what is rightfully yours.

Then when the opportunity comes, find your blanket. Put it on the shoulders of your enemies and weep with them!

(Deutsche Muslim-Liga Bonn e.V)

Bonn, Germany

Purpose: To promote a dialogue between all human beings with particular emphasis on members of the Abrahamic religions.

Description: The DMLB co-organizes different interfaith events, including several regular events including the Christian-Islamic Conference at Pentecost for approx. 80 people, including families and children (4 days, annually since 1988), the Jewish Christian Muslim Summer School at Ammerdown, UK (1 week, biannually since 1991), the Standing Conference of Jews Christians and Muslims in Europe (1 week, since 1972), the Peace Prayer at Namedy Castle at the festival “”Art in the Park”" and others. For furthering the aims of dialogue, peace and justice, the DMLB co-operates with various partner organizations. DMLB members participate as speakers in panels, lectures and other events at academies, religious communities, political foundations, among others. They also actively participate in a broad network of like-minded organizations, including connections through the URI Network. The DMLB CC has won the URI Bowes Award 2009 with its project “”Sharing the Ammerdown experience with URI CCs”". It invited and financially supported young leaders from Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Turkey and the UK to participate in the Jewish Christian Muslim Summer School at Ammerdown, UK, which takes place in July.

Ameena Jandali is a founding member of ING. She co-designs and develops ING’s educational presentations and cultural competency seminars. Ameena has delivered hundreds of presentations in schools, colleges, universities, churches, and other venues on Islam and related subjects. She has also appeared on many news outlets speaking on issues relating to American Muslims. She currently team teaches a class on Islam at San Francisco City College. Ameena received her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and B.A. in History from the University of Illinois.



ING is a non-profit organization whose mission is to counter prejudice and discrimination against American Muslims by teaching about their traditions and contributions in the context of America’s history and cultural diversity, while building relations between American Muslims and other groups. Founded in 1993, ING achieves its mission through education and community engagement. We work though regional volunteers and affiliated organizations across the country who provide thousands of presentations, training seminars and workshops, and panel discussions annually in schools, colleges and universities, law enforcement agencies, corporations, healthcare facilities, and community organizations as part of cultural diversity curricula and programs. Reaching hundreds of groups and tens of thousands of individuals a year at the grassroots level, ING is building bridges among people of all backgrounds.

ING operates four programs that promote intercultural understanding and mutual respect. The Islamic Speakers Bureau consists of speakers from the Islamic faith who supplement existing curriculum and cultural diversity programming relating to Islam and Muslims in public institutions.  The Interfaith Speakers Bureau program consists of speakers from the Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist and Hindu traditions who speak together on panels to increase religious and cultural literacy and mutual respect in a way that reflects religious pluralism. The Affiliate program initiates and supports regional Islamic and Interfaith Speakers Bureaus all across the country. The Bullying Prevention program works to prevent teasing, harassment and bullying of minority students through student led programs.

What is your Cooperation Circle or organization planning for September 21st?

Trail of Dreams World Peace Walkers, a URI Cooperation Circle,  is orchestrating walks all around the world and you are invited to join them with other URI Cooperation Circles, organizations, institutions, groups and individuals in this major global activity on the International Day of Peace.  

Honor the United Nations International Day of Peace in a collaborative, creative, active way:

• Mobilize your local organization with a global action
• Develop relationships with other groups by inviting their participation, broadening your outreach as an interfaith peace building organization
• Engage your interfaith community as community builders
• Be a part of a unifying effort with URI CC’s all around your region and the world
• Join in the Global Bell Ringing wherever you are at 12 noon

We will post the times and locations of the walks and other activities and create a world map- Footprints Around the World for Peace. Submit  your photos and videos of your event, viewers will be able to click on each location on the Footprints Around the World for Peace map and see events and activities posted. In some locations we will actually broadcast live.
Footprints Around the World for Peace honors bioregions by keeping events local and sharing globally. Through internet broadcasting, social media and other web based avenues, global sharing and weaving together of the events of the day can occur -unifying our passion for peace.

This is a great initiative to mobilize and activate communities around an experience of peaceful engagement.

4 Simple Steps
1. Organizations in each country/community to conduct a walk, dance, meditation, concert for peace as a part of Footprints Around the World for Peace, at 12 noon.


2. Ring your Peace Bell (everyone brings a bell) in celebration of the IDP followed by a brief interfaith prayer or ceremony and then walk for at least a mile. Some groups have indicated they want to do a longer walk and of course that is up to each group or organization.

3. Ring your Peace Bell at the end and conclude with an interfaith prayer.
* We encourage inclusivity/diversity of faith, culture and ethnicity, age, race,  physical/mental abilities, sexual orientation and gender in all levels of participation.

It is that simple. What makes the difference is that we show up for PEACE!

4. Take lots of photos and video and send them to the live broadcast.

The world celebrates the international Day of Peace on September 21, 2013. It is the goal of Trail of Dreams World Peace Walkers – United Religions Initiative Cooperation Circle in honor of United Nations International Day of Peace to affect the largest most inclusive initiative for peace on the International Day of Peace on September 21, 2013 @ 12 noon in every time zone around the world. Imagine a wave of intentional peace encompassing the world, like a wave gently washing over the planet to raise the consciousness of peace, a wave so strong it literally causes people to put down their weapons and hold the space for a possible future of peaceful coexistence.

The ringing of bells is a major part of this day. Bells will ring at 12 noon in every time zone to begin each event and again at 1pm to conclude the event. 



According to the Center for Neuroacoustic Research,  ”Since ancient times, human beings have been using sound to enhance states of consciousness. The ancients imparted a sophisticated, intuitive knowledge of how the tuning of the bowls, bells, chanting etc. could create sound to expand consciousness, opening higher levels of brain function.” 

If this is true, and I believe it is, the gentle sounding of the bells will connect us through our hearts, allowing all within its range to feel the power of love and compassion and  — the inevitability of peace. The Interfaith Prayers will remind us as well, that there are many wells but only one river — the Divine by many names. We are one.

Contact Audri Scott Williams for more information 404-374-1162 and home phone is 334-691-3216.

    One of my most vivid memories of this came when I dreamed of organizing a local interfaith youth project to explore themes of intercultural understanding, service learning and dispelling misperceptions of the “other.” As I began working to make the dream a reality, I discovered another local youth group that had come into being for a similar purpose. Following 9/11, the fear and mistrust of Muslims that had flared up across the country was coming to the forefront as a very real issue that needed to be responded to. The United Youth Leadership Council, founded by youth members of a Masjid in East Oakland, decided to respond by organizing an intercultural, interfaith youth leadership project. We met at the Masjid and, realizing that our purposes were very much aligned, we discussed how we could work together.

    Organizing the two-day interfaith youth leadership program together was a beautiful learning experience for me. Through talking with the young wife of the Imam at the Masjid, I was able to get answers to questions I had about Islam and to overcome my own misconceptions. For a long time, I had followed the trend of mainstream society by assuming that women who wore the hijab were somehow being demeaned or oppressed. What I learned from Shahidah was that the opposite was actually the case. She explained to me that, by wearing the hijab, she felt freer than ever before because she knew that men were no longer objectifying her. When she spoke to men now, she could be sure she was an equal because she knew they were listening to her and seeing her for who she really was. She also explained to me how the Prophet Muhammad honored the women in his community, and how the conventions he set up were to better protect women from the abuse and degradation that were commonplace at that time. For more information dispelling myths about women in Islam.

    The other revelation that came from co-organizing the program was an experience of genuine hospitality. The Masjid, which had never before invited in people of other faiths, was now throwing wide its doors to host the entire event. The community’s open-hearted trust and sincere, warm welcome was a beautiful gift to all who participated, a living embodiment of the URI principle “We give and receive hospitality.”

    That experience fueled my passion to create new opportunities to build bridges between communities, and to ignite the leadership of young people within URI and throughout the interfaith movement. I am thrilled to see young people who participated in our fledgling youth leadership programs now serving as leaders of the URI Young Leaders Program, on regional teams, and on the URI Global Council.

    As a member of the URI North American Leadership Council, I am inspired to find ways to encourage and support youth leadership in our North American CCs, to convene conversations around best practices in youth engagement, and to work with all of you who are pioneering such practices in your Cooperation Circles.

    I am also inspired to see how we can push past our comfort zones to reach out to members of the community who have experienced discrimination or been the targets of hate speech. In the wise words of Reverend Desmond Tutu, “Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.” So, how can we become better neighbors, and welcome and work with those perceived as “other?” It is this question that gives life to another project I am currently working on – URI’s Talking Back to Hate Campaign – an initiative to counter hate speech, discrimination and bullying through education, advocacy and positive action. Look for more information about this initiative in our next newsletter and here.

Co-contact URI SF Peninsula Circle of Cooperation

After 14 years of review and research about religions in our URI SF Peninsula Circle of Cooperation we have experienced the following developments in U.S. Islam as well as in other religions.

In the years since 9/11, Islam in the United States seems to be changing by evolving beyond the cultural limitations from its countries of origin.  This seems to be part of a more general re-examination of religion prompted by the events of 9/11 and it is affecting all religion in the United States.  The important effect of this trend is:

Religious competition and violence is beginning to be seen as arising from misunderstandings about divinity in all religions.

Two concrete examples of this serious questioning of religious violence related to Islam may help you identify this current trend as it relates to Islam.

On Reading the Koran TED talk by Lesley Hazleton an award winning author. This video on the internet clears several main popular misconceptions about Islam.

The Search for Truth about Islam (2013) by Presbyterian Rev. Ben Daniel.  An important, factual, solid voice against the tide of ignorance of Islamophobia.

Two additional works that question religious hostility as incompatible with real religion expand the current critique of religious violence to all religions.

Why did Jesus, Moses, The Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (2012) by Rev. Brian D. McLaren.  A deep investigation of the sociological source of hostility in Christianity and in all religion.

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010), by Karen Armstrong.  Important work that identified faulty interpretations of scriptures as the source of violence in religion.

The unexpected effect of 9/11 has been to force the questioning of hostility in all religion.  The trend shows no signs of abating.
URI should continue to publicize these works as much as possible since they provide the theoretical foundation of why violence is incompatible with Legitimate Religion.

5 Things YOU Can Do!

The United Religions Initiative, a global interfaith organization of which Euphrates is a member, recently asked its cooperation circles for best practices to confront Islamophobia, which has been on the rise since the Boston bombings. We shared our “5 Things You Can Do” from our website, which we hope will provide an impetus for action not only on this issue, but on any kind of change, local or global, to which you’re looking to contribute in your life.

Five Things You Can Do!

1.  Be one of the 5%!

Social change occurs when a critical mass of people in that society are behind it, according to Everett Rogers’ research at Stanford Research Institute. For a social change to be “embedded,” 5 percent of people must be behind it. The movement or idea becomes unstoppable when 20 percent of the populace is behind it. Anecdotally we’ve seen this to be true in the collective American shift behind every milestone of progress, from voting rights for women to civil rights legislation. When Americans change their minds, government follows.

Euphrates’ vision is to create a collective shift among at least 5 percent of Americans from a paradigm of international relations based on dominance and the exertion of power, to one that abides by the Golden Rule, that values the mutual dependence on the “Other” as the more effective means to survive and thrive.

2. Inform yourself–and then others.

Euphrates’ motto is Inform, Inspire, Transform. There’s a reason “Inform” is first in the line-up! Being informed helps us to distinguish between the ideology of Islamic extremists (who constitute .01 percent of the Muslim population) from the religious practices and faith of the over two billion Muslims in the world.

Get informed through our resources page, basic information, and country profiles. You can also watch any of our 40+ informative talks and videos on topics ranging from understanding terrorism to the power of faith-based diplomacy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and more. Or check out our joint press release with URI on our efforts to reach out to American Muslims in the Midwest.

For three more great ideas of what you can do visit the Euphrates Institute.

One cannot really understand a faith tradition without entering into some kind of experience of that tradition. A house of worship site visit allows for just such an experience. Inside the house of worship, one encounters the tradition’s unique culture – its music, its prayer, its beliefs, its practices, its foods, its rituals, its people. One of the benefits of such visits is that not only does one learn more about another faith tradition but one also learns about oneself and about one’s own religious tradition

Below is the link to this document which contains an abundance of tips on arranging visits to houses of worship. Please feel free to forward this link and announcement through your communities and networks for use in newsletters, bulletin boards, websites, mailing lists, list-serves, blogs, Facebook pages, twitter, etc. To view or download these guidelines free of charge, click here:

https://www.scarboromissions.ca/Interfaith_dialogue/group_visit_guidelines.php

Peace
Paul McKenna

Scarboro Missions Interfaith Dept.
2685 Kingston Rd.
Toronto, Ontario
Canada    M1M 1M4
tel.  416-261-7135  ext. 296
www.scarboromissions.ca

“God is too big to fit into one religion”         Bumper Sticker

And here is a link to the text of the lecture in case you might want to quote or follow along.