CENTER FOR INTERFAITH INQUIRY

Welcome, objectives and goals for the evening

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Dear Friends,

First of all, Thank you for your presence.  

In behalf of the Memnosyne Foundation and the Center for Interfaith Inquiry, we are pleased to furnish you with a summary of the evening’s “Lively Discussion”. 

We believed in each one of you to be the most relevant person to participate and pave the way for the Center for interfaith inquiry.  Your enthusiasm, support, and the ideas were very encouraging and Dr. Todd Collier, our director for Programs has summed up the essence of that in the report below.

A few of you had asked for an overview of the proceedings, here it is:

We begin the program in the name of the causer and sustainer of our existence, and to whom gratitude is expressed by many names. Welcome.

The very first thing we do when we meet is GREET.

Greetings is made up of three key components;

1. Acknowledging the other

2. Goodwill and a desire to connect

3. An effort to establish a relationship 

From a simple HI to a beautiful expressive Hamazor Hama Ashobed, the essence is the same; acknowledgement, goodwill and the desire to connect.  Through out the history of mankind, several forms of greetings have evolved, with the same essence.  I will share a few religious based greetings with you.

Interfaith Greetings:

• Bahai - Allahu Abhá; Blessing to you from the Glorious God

• Buddhist – Buddha Namo; I greet the enlightened in you

• Christian – Peace to you; peace to you is peace to me and every one around

• Hindu – Namaste; the goodness in me invokes the goodness in you

• Islamic – Salaam; may God surround you with peace and tranquility.

• Jain – Jai Jinendra; Learned one, I salute your freedom, Moksha or salvation.

• Jewish – Shalom; may God surround you with peace and tranquility.

• Sikh – Satsri Akaal

• Toltec – Union, Harmony and Conformity

• Zoroastrian – Hamazor Hama Asho Bed; I wish you blessings and peace.

Dear God, thank you for sustaining and bringing us together. We sincerely aspire to work for a peaceful kingdom of understanding and co-existence. 

Now, we can observe our own prayers in a minute of silence. “Silent Prayers”

 Goals for the evening:   

• To make our fellowship purposeful and enjoyable
• The express purpose of learning from you, through “lively discussions” the need for an interfaith campus for inquiry, the resources, the accommodative structure and how we get the information to the person on the street, in the school and the work place. All the work has to translate into practice.

• Judy Arkow has fabulous interfaith coffee house programs, Jerry Middents organizes Monthly Breakfast dialogues and Tatiana Andropov stands behind a rock solid, stable organization of our community. The Thanksgiving Square brings out great programs to bring people together.

• The Foundation for Pluralism and the World Muslim Congress organize workshops to learn the “essence of each religion” i.e., what religion means to the man on the street through the Radio shows, news letters, lectures seminars and workshops.
• We plan to bring all those programs and the ideas that "you" will share with us to night and on a continuing basis as we proceed further.

If we can learn to accept and respect the God given uniqueness of each one of the 7 billion of us, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge.

And lastly, we are looking for leaders such as yourselves who are already doing great things, we hope you can squeeze some more time out of the week and bring initiatives and programs to take us forward in creating a world of co-existence. We cannot have peace when others' don't, we cannot feel secure when other's aren't on an individual as well as global basis.

Friends, we at Memnosyne Foundation's center for interfaith inquiry  are committed to facilitate, encourage and support what ever you do and be a catalyst for every one’s growth; your individual growth as well as collective growth.  All of us will grow together.

MaryAnn Thompson-Frenk, Founder

Mary Ann’s vision, enthusiasm and commitment to work for a better world is simply inspiring.  Nothing happens in the world, unless some one takes the initiative to make it happen.

 About three years ago, I was invited to a conference on interfaith dialogue at Dallas Arboretum that brought together 40 spiritual leaders from Western, Eastern, Indigenous and New Age traditions. They discussed the spiritual and physical human experience, the commonality of beliefs, the environment, and how mankind can establish harmonious goals to progress in unity while respecting valuable differences. It was one of the most productive dialogues I have ever witnessed, and thank God, it is captured in a documentary called “many paths one source”, it is a powerful documentary discussing the topics heart to heart.

 Mary Ann has been inspired by this idea of sharing and growing together, “When she was thirteen years old, she experienced a dream in which she was creating places throughout the world where people from different cultures met to exchange their unique knowledge of the arts, sciences and spiritual practices. When she asked her father if such a thing could be possible, he said, 'I've made my fortune building stores around the world that helped fill my family's pocket. Now don't you think you can build something around the world that helps fill people's needs?’” Mary Ann shares. “During a visit to the ancient Mesoamerican pyramids of Xochicalco, I learned that leaders from many onetime warring tribes indeed built a city together to share their culture, spirituality, and to advance science. I was sure then - it could be done again.” Indeed, Mary Ann has made that happen in that symposium.

Mary Ann is committed to her statement "If we are to discover how we can benefit from living together in a compassionate world, we need to build bridges between experts of different fields as much as between cultures or religions,"  

Tonight, we are taking that important step towards facilitating, encouraging, and supporting and being a catalyst to each other in creating societies for peaceful co-existence. Mary Ann's Profile

 

Founder's Vision

While the current focus on globalization is on how it will affect the world economy, few are discussing how else it will continue to affect the global culture of humanity: It will affect the arts, the sciences, the spirituality, and the very ecology of our planet. Today we are at a point between countries and cultures where we will either bump into each other, walk over each other or instead we can choose to collaborate with each other consciously and evolve humanity. If we allow ourselves to evolve randomly, we will invite more misunderstanding, more war, and less innovation. But if we can choose to collaborate and become the conscious cultural creators of humanity's future, that future is limitless. The creation of the Memnosyne Foundation is intended to serve the world as a means for peaceful global collaboration in all areas of knowledge.

I recently had the privilege, thanks to Mike Ghouse, to meet with some of you and have come away all the more inspired by your passion, words, works and dedication towards making our city an even better place to live in for our families and those that come after us. It was due to their inspiration and to others like them that the following words came to me and I’d like to share these thoughts with you today:

We each hold within ourselves the power to take responsibility for our effect upon the world we share and therefore we each are empowered to help co-create tomorrow's culture today. Ignorance is no longer an excuse, it is a choice. Meeting others like yourselves who are fighting it by living lives that exemplify the best of humanity inspires me to work all the more towards making Memnosyne a vehicle to help lift you, and others like you who will follow in generations to come, up to the place where your actions and leadership will have an even greater impact. For it is no longer enough for us to worry about easing the symptoms of a disconnected humanity today, it is time that we plan towards leaving a greater means for the generations after us to begin healing the disconnection that fuels man's lack of recognition of our common humanity.

And you know what? This journey is going to continue to be challenging, even frustrating, but its also going to be fun, for what greater joy is there than to encourage, inspire, stimulate, and challenge ourselves towards becoming the humanity we wish our grandchildren to be? We are tomorrow's ancestors....let's paint our descendants a masterpiece: It will have dark shadows, but it will also reveal the light we've discovered in each other!

As an adopted child who has spent time in third world countries, I know what a privilege and honor for it is to be part of this great country and I recognize what incredible rights we have all been blessed with. I believe with great blessings come great responsibility and as US citizens we are among the wealthiest and most free in the world.

The question is what are we going to do with those blessings?

I recognize not only that, but also the great Texas spirit that has been handed down from the first pioneers and passed onto our city’s great entrepreneurs. We each have some of that fire in us, the kind of light that shouts out into the night and wants to accomplish new things yet imagined. I know that just like me, you are here because of generations of sacrifices, passion and through the support of those who have come before. Now I’m asking you to join us in this journey and dare to consciously create the kind of culture we want to leave for the next generations who follow us. Let’s dare to become the conscious cultural creators of the humanity we want to be a part of!
Stay Inspired!

Mike Ghouse

Shared his vision of the Interfaith Center and coordinated  the evening of discussion.

 

Dr. Phil Collins

Shared the vision and information about the Virtual Campus in disseminating the information to real folks.

 

Peggy Larney

Brings a perspective that most of us ought to consciously think and work on; it is based on the Native Americans tradition to think and shape the society for the next seven generations.

 

Dr. Todd Collier

Shared the Vision of the interfaith inquiry, a comprehensive paper about the Center for Interfaith inquiry, which is also appended below for your re-reading.

Memnosyne Center for Interfaith Inquiry

Center for…

The Memnosyne Center for Interfaith Inquiry is a center, a neutral place at the heart of a network of faiths, a house of peace for many paths to meet together.  It will be home to an inclusive library of writings and sacred texts from all faiths who share life-preserving and life-enhancing values.  It is designed to welcome all faiths that share generally accepted values and practices that promote love of all being as the ultimate goal.

The Center is a place to which people come: for residence of some months or a year, for an evening's lecture with discussion afterward, for days of concentrated work with a continuing research group, for a special conference or community offering, or for consultation with a resident member or someone on the staff of the Center, or to the dedicated study of a single scholar, for example, the works of the Dalai Lama. Paths of thinkers, practitioners and scholars who might otherwise never meet will cross here. And at those crossings new ideas are conceived and old ideas newly examined.

The Center is a place from which people and ideas go out: to schools and universities, to faith communities, to places of public meetings or the political arena. Books or articles written in the interplay of thought which occurs here are often very different than they might otherwise have been, and these distinctions make a difference, in institutions of learning, congregation and the communities where we live. People who come here will thereafter be different than they might have been, and those differences make even more of a difference toward accomplishing peace in an increasingly violent world.

Interfaith…

The Center for Interfaith Inquiry is committed to life-preserving and life-enhancing values and is persistent in this commitment. At a time in human history where extremism seeks to reign and divide us, it is paramount for the intellectual and spiritual world to meet together to devote much needed time and energy to learning about shared religious values. The Center exists to foster the shared human values that unite us, not divide us.

 In the present situations of the world's religions and cultures, faith is called to seek understanding in a now desperate quest for human coexistence. True faith can and should contribute to the better self-understanding of all persons and communities while at the same time lower the tension between cultural and religious barriers in our lived worlds.

Interfaith study, particularly at the Center for Inquiry, is not done in a spiritual or cultural vacuum. There must and inevitably will be critical engagement with cultural and social developments, with the whole range of intellectual disciplines, and with the truth claims and practices of a multi-religious world.  True faith must result in life-giving practice.

…Inquiry

 Communities of faith have always sought answers through inspiration and reasoning through sacred texts and with each other.  If it is anything, a Center for Inquiry is about formulating the right questions in an often very parochial and closed-minded world.  In every time and place in human history faith communities have encountered intellectual and spiritual questions to which answers did not immediately come to mind.  There have been and always will be occasions for genuine inquiry.  The Center provides a safe and open place to ask such questions and reason through them together.

 An inquiring faith requires a courageous heart and mind.  In a rapidly changing world it therefore cannot be predicted what questions may be pursued at any given time.  The Center for Interfaith Inquiry is a place for new questions and new thoughts.  Its urgent questions may range from discovering an appropriate translation or interpretation of a sacred text, to the foreseeable impact of economic globalization, to the proper understanding or conceptual acknowledgment of the presence of the Divine, to sustainability issues crucial for all people.  Religion is often seen as the reason for world conflict.  The Center is in principle committed to working toward solutions and seeks to promote religious inquiry and collaboration by whatever means possible as together we seek practical answers to the inter-ethnic and inter-religious conflicts at large in the world.

 Vital to the Center's work are the resident members and participants who come from around the world. Not only is the Center for Interfaith Inquiry a unique institution, it is centrally located in the U.S. to serve its purpose. Centered in Dallas, Texas, members will have close and full access to no other interfaith library and center of its kind.  It will be a neutral place dedicated to fostering peaceful co-existence through intellectual inquiry, study, dialogue, breaking bread, fellowship, and practical application as together we seek to heal a wounded world.

http://memnosynefoundation.com/

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Summary of discussions

Your enthusiasm, support, and the ideas were very encouraging and Dr. Todd Collier, our director for Programs has captured the essence of the discussion very well.

Shaping Tomorrow Together

What kind of world will we leave our children?  Informed by the past, how will we consciously create our future?  With a preponderance of behavior that only considers today’s pleasures and the rollout of the latest toys, how do we shift our focus to creating a healthy future history in a multi-religious multi-cultural world?   When spirituality is being overshadowed by fear, fear and intolerance of the other, how do we not merely tolerate the other, but see them as interesting?  Who cares?  When turf consciousness is the overwhelming manner of conduct, how can we maintain our own individuality, yet at the same time, create a future coexistence that is both sustainable and nonviolent? 

At the Memnosyne Foundation’s first public forum for the Center for Interfaith Inquiry these and other questions were raised as fifty people gathered and contemplated “a small universe” that is presently being shaped by the ideas of the interfaith communities of Dallas, Texas.  It was decidedly agreed upon that Dallas, being centrally located in the United States, has truly a monumental opportunity to create an architectural and symbolic place of beauty, a gathering place with the sole purpose of uniting humanity as it actively collaborates to transform its behaviors, practices, and its thinking about the future of civilization and the environment. 

As it happens, faith and spirituality are at the center of this historic collaborative effort to transform our thinking about how we live together.  But we also learned something very valuable from our indigenous friends that night.  The question is not, “what kind of world will we leave our children?”, but rather, “what kind of world will we leave our children’s great grandchildren?”  We can’t just think ten to twenty years out.  We need to be thinking seven generations out to truly initiate lasting transforming change.  Our decisions today should effect seven generations. 

The problems are real.  The real issues that face us every day and everywhere are poverty, lack of resources, war, housing, jobs, food, clean water, religious and cultural persecution, social and economic injustice in South Dallas and in many areas of the world.  All of which is fueled by fear by religious extremists, economic power brokers, and political bullying.  Religion is blamed for many of the problems, but rather than continuing on the path of blame, the religious and spiritual are leading the path toward solutions. 

Fear is a cultural issue.  Be it religious, political, economic, what is needed is a safe place in the world to learn about and engage in dialogue and practical service with other cultures – a place of inquiry to raise issues, to ask hard questions, and to work on real problems together.  This is not merely an academic exercise, but a place where thinkers and practitioners of all faiths can reason together and practice their spirituality to solve real problems.  Practice leads to insight.  Collaborative hands-on service creates peaceful coexistence.  The Center is a place for service. 

How do we multiply the effectiveness of shaping tomorrow together?  There were several avenues offered that are already at work in the artistic and educational community.  There is the Tolerance Players, a play designed to reach out to those who may have no interest; there is the Frisco Multi-Faith Initiative, there are marketers, artists, trainers, game designers; the Foundation for Pluralism; Peacemakers, Inc. and the International Women’s Peace Conference; the Multi-Faith Academy with workshops designed to reach out to school children, teachers and hospitals.  All of which are designed to make people feel safe and respected.  The Center for Interfaith Inquiry would be a home and a resource for such efforts. 

The Center will be a destination place where children can take field trips and come away inspired; where teachers can acquire tools to reach out to younger generations; where individuals can inquire who have never been involved in interfaith work or study; where scholars can have a chance to publish outside the confines of the university; where methodologies can be taught on how to deal practically with social, economic and political injustices; where religious leaders can be brought out of their conflicted communities for honest communication; where the “evangelical” or even the religious extremist can safely encounter their supposed enemies.   

The Center is a place of reconciliation.  It is a safe place where even the youngest of children can ask questions and learn to actively engage and receive other cultures.  It is an international community on a micro scale that will have global influence.  It is a place not to concentrate on the past, but on the future.  No one is asked to give up who they are, or to sacrifice their individuality, but to add to it.  None of this will make sense unless we admit with John Donne, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” 

Finally, there is the question of funding this effort.  There is a unique culture of its own in Dallas, signified by the almost universal saying, “Bigger than Dallas.”  If Dallas is to create a symbolic space as significant as the Washington Monument, a place that will be home to a small universe of transforming thoughts and practices, then it is going to take a healthy environment of competition to interest investors.  The question of “who cares?” has to appeal to the competitive nature of businesses and philanthropists who seek to put Dallas on the global map.   

As we seek to shape tomorrow together, Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and a world of spiritual and indigenous leaders all must use the innate competitive nature of their followers for the common good.  As people of faith and supporters of the Center for Interfaith Inquiry we must initiate and respond to approaches for conversation and common action with movements, organizations, businesses, educational, cultural, and civic communities that give promise of assistance toward accomplishing this mission of unity in the world. 

Thank you all for an inspiring evening.  May the causer of our existence be praised and appreciated!

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1. Center for Interfaith Exploration Library
2. Center for Health And Medicine
3. Center For Green Technology
4. Center for Visual, Performing, Musical, Literary and Culinary Arts
5. Center for Spirituality     
6. Center for Indigenous Cultural Preservation
7. Center for Global and Local Community Outreach/Administration

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