|
|
March 19, 2010
Fostering a united approach
New inter-religious centre picks rabbi as its first director.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
On Jan. 28, the Iona Pacific Inter-Religious Centre was officially launched at a gala celebration that included guests and speakers from First Nations, Muslim, Jewish, Christian and secular communities. At the centre’s helm: Rabbi Dr. Robert Daum.
“Iona Pacific is an inter-religious centre that seeks to build bridges between communities, scholars and leaders young and old, in order to address critical local and global issues,” Daum told the Independent. “We are fundamentally dialogical and inter-disciplinary – not only because we seek to bring together people to learn from and work with each other, but also because we are convinced that the most vexing issues that we face are far more complex than is generally acknowledged.”
About this approach, Daum said, “The centre was launched by the generous support of Vancouver School of Theology [VST], and its vision was shaped by its board of governors and by its faculty, led by its visionary principal and a historian, the Rev. Dr. Wendy Fletcher. Iona Pacific is directed by a rabbi, and its first intern is a talented young Ismaili Muslim youth leader and student of family studies, Aliya Hirji. Our community leadership advisory committee will consist of First Nations, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other leaders. Our university youth team is broadly multi-ethnic and inter-religious.
“Throughout the year, we will invite visiting scholars,” he said of some of the planned programming. “This July (12-16) we will welcome our first Iona Pacific visiting scholar, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Ocker, who will teach a course on A Meaningful Life: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Perspectives. That same week, we will welcome our first Iona Pacific visiting author,
Raheel Raza, an award-winning writer, filmmaker and interfaith advocate, who will offer Understanding Islam: Demystifying the Passion and Politics of Islam. [Recently], we featured a lecture on Jews and Judaism in Modern China, by a professor visiting from Shandong University in the People’s Republic of China.”
Iona Pacific has already provided a micro-credit grant for a sustainable winter food bank for an impoverished native band; supported the efforts of First United Church in the downtown eastside on the “Two Worlds” campaign, which addresses poverty and homelessness; explored ways to promote contextualized approaches to the environmental crisis; promoted an inter-religious student leadership initiative on the University of British Columbia campus (Iona Pacific Youth); and planned collaborative research and learning initiatives.
“We will have a post-doctoral fellow at our centre in the coming year,” added Daum. “We have access to VST’s 38-room hotel and apartment residence, which will enable us to welcome innovative visiting scholars, socially engaged artists-in-residence, community activists committed to dialogical approaches, and so on.
“We will sponsor courses in the winter academic term, including a course examining approaches in different religious traditions to ‘spirituality and suffering,’ and another examining ‘mindfulness’ in different traditions. We will promote inter-religious sensitivities in the health-care field, as well as other ways in which religion and healing intersect.
“We will work with leaders of First Nations and religious communities to promote leadership development among young people. Responsible leaders do not simply spring out of the earth, fully formed; leaders who can work across ethno-religious community lines do not drop out of the sky. Effective leadership must be encouraged.”
Daum explained that the “Iona Pacific model is predicated on the assumption that complex questions call for thoughtful, constructive, informed responses. Locally and internationally, others, too, are drawn to nuanced approaches to serious issues. These are the people we will invite to work with us.
“Oversimplification of serious issues is often counter-productive, whether these issues bear on health, the environment, conflict zones, scarce economic resources or poverty and homelessness,” he continued. “The best religious thought, in our judgment, is life-affirming and nuanced, and we aim to build an institutional context in which life-affirming, nuanced religious thinkers and community leaders can learn and work together constructively on concrete issues, informed by the best thinking of our respective traditions. We don’t have time to waste. The most vulnerable people in a society pay the price when leaders fail to invest in research, dialogue, relationship-building, reflection and pragmatic solutions.... Simplistic approaches exhaust us spiritually, they waste precious institutional resources and they corrode the social fabric within and between communities.”
Daum is the first director of the Iona Pacific Centre, concurrent with an appointment as associate professor of rabbinic literature and Jewish thought at VST. He retains ties to UBC, where he holds an appointment as a faculty associate in the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies, and where he also serves as a member of the Law and Society Advisory Board. Daum has also been appointed – starting May 23, for at least one year – as the rabbinic scholar-in-residence of Christ Church Cathedral.
“Like the centre itself, in my work, I am able to combine my commitments to research, to constructive social action and to the spiritual dimension of exploring what it means to be human, which, in my own personal life, of course, is grounded in my Judaism,” said Daum. “The Mishnah addresses the question of whether learning or taking action is more important; as a Jew, I believe in integrating learning and action.... What draws one to Iona Pacific is a common commitment to learning, working and reflecting with others in order to make a real difference in the lives of the most vulnerable. The problems we face demand that we draw on all the resources available to us, including the deep wisdom and historical memory of our respective religious traditions.”
For Iona, Daum would like to “find scholars, leaders, artists, activists, civic officials, business leaders, youth leaders and others of good will who want to make a difference in this world, who share our commitment to inter-religious, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary approaches to complex social problems.... My goal is to build an inter-religious centre that will model a constructive approach to issues that seem to elude our capacity to comprehend them, let alone to make a difference in addressing them.
“This work will take time,” he acknowledged, “but the problems we face are worsening, so the sooner we begin this work of building bridges across religious communities, institutions and domains of knowledge, the better. I hope that, years from now, the words ‘Iona Pacific’ will signify a thoughtful, consensus-based, constructive and effective inter-religious approach to critical social challenges.”
With regards to his own faith community, Daum said, “The problems that confront the Jewish community cannot be separated from the challenges that other communities face, even if the problems that each community faces manifest themselves very differently. Nor can the problems that we face as a broader society – systemic poverty, despair among First Nations youth, environmental degradation, simplistic and inflammatory narratives about complex geo-political conflicts, bigotry – be addressed meaningfully by haphazard alliances of people of good will. Each of these problems is also a Jewish problem.
“Iona Pacific is a place where the academy meets the city, where religious leaders can learn from and with each other, where youth leaders can discover how to balance a commitment to the continuity and vitality of their own religious cultures, on the one hand, along with a commitment to the common good.
“Vibrant multiculturalism must be fostered, otherwise all we have is diversity,” he stressed. “We live in a deeply troubled, interdependent world, and the most vulnerable individuals, families and communities face increasingly dire circumstances. In the eyes of many people, particularly our youth, religion can seem either irrelevant or the cause of the problems we face. Iona Pacific will promote research and learning about how religion can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.
“Particular congregations may flourish or dwindle, but religion is not going to go away. And what emerges as ‘religious’ may not make us happier or more secure. Scarcity and conflict in the years to come will strain the ties between communities. None of us dares leave to chance that these ties will be strong enough to weather the strains that will come, or to sustain the efforts required to address the local, national and global challenges that will require broad cooperation. Iona Pacific will build enduring bridges, develop trusting partnerships and foster appreciation for the complexity of religious and cultural differences, while also promoting our common humanity.
“The Mishnah teaches us that ‘Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.’ At Iona Pacific, one will be able to learn with innovative scholars and leaders across the religious and cultural spectrum, drawing on a 100,000-volume library, a state-of-the-art conference centre and hotel, a world-class faculty and a commitment to inter-religious collaboration.... Surely we are beginning to realize that we cannot remain isolated from each other, that religious extremism anywhere is dangerous everywhere, that humanity may not survive this century unless we turn towards each other.”
^TOP
|
|
