Charter for Compassion Faith Newsletter, July 2014

Seven Pieces of Advice from Rumi

In generosity and helping others be like the river.

In compassion and grace be like the sun.

In concealing others' faults be like the night.

In anger and fury be like the dead.

In modesty and humility be like the soil.

In tolerance be like the ocean.

Either you appear as you are or be as you appear.

Charter Faith Conference Call, July 15

Our Faith Conference call will be on July 15. We hope anyone who is interested will join us. Our speaker will be Imam Mohamed Magid.

Calls are 90 minutes long, and you need to register for the call with Maestro Conference. We have the capacity to have up to 500 comfortably on the call.  Before you go to Maestro, you'll want to check to see what time the call will happen in your part of the world. Consult the World Clock—Time Converter. Start with Seattle at 6:00 AM and enter your city in the field and click on convert.

If you click on this link you'll be taken to Maestro where you'll be asked to register and given a pin access number.

Imam Magid currently serves as the President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). He is also active in both the interfaith and Islamic community. Imam Magid is the Imam of All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) Center in Sterling, Virginia. Under his direction, the Center has grown to be one of the largest Muslim community organizations in the Washington Metropolitan Area. He also occupies the Chairmanship of the Fairfax County Faith Communities in Action, and a Chaplin of George Mason University Campus Ministry. He is also the Vice Chairman of Muflehun, a think tank, which is focused on confronting violent extremist thought through research-driven preventative programs within a religious paradigm. Learn more about Imam Magid.

Learn to Speak the Language of Compassion

One of the blessings of this world is the diversity of nations that we can appreciate. Allah has gift-wrapped nations with different cultures, colors, cuisine, artistic flair and landscapes. One way to reap insights of a foreign land is through their languages. Each language represents a culture– their sayings, expressions and interesting quotes represent the differences between one community from the other. Yet between all diversity and differences, there is one language that can be mastered by everyone; the language of compassion.

Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong

Release date fall 2014. Countering the atheist claim that believers are by default violent fanatics and religion is the cause of all major wars, Karen Armstrong demonstrates that religious faith is not inherently violent. In fact, the world’s major religions have throughout their history displayed ambivalent attitudes towards aggression and warfare. At times they have allied themselves with states and empires for protection or to further their influence; at others they have tried to curb state oppression and aggression and worked for peace and justice.

Taking us on a journey from prehistoric times to the present, Karen Armstrong contrasts medieval crusaders and modern-day jihadists with the pacifism of the Buddha and Jesus’ vision of a just and peaceful society; moreover, she demonstrates that the underlying reasons – social, economic, political – for war and violence in our history often had very little to do with religion.

While human beings have a natural propensity for aggression, collective violence and warfare emerged at a certain point in history when the invention of agriculture created a society and a state based on the accumulation of wealth. For most of history our destructive potential could be contained but with the industrialised warfare and all-powerful state of the modern age, humanity is on the brink of destroying itself.

Vast in scope, impeccably researched and passionately argued, Fields of Blood is more than a corrective to the prevailing view that religion is to blame for most of the bloodshed throughout human history: it is a celebration of those religious ideas and movements that have opposed war and aggression and promoted peace and reconciliation.

The Charter for Compassion Initiates a Membership Challenge.  This is our first ever membership campaign. Up to now we've been able to build a database of supporters who have contacted us as individuals, signed up for newsletters, or signed the Charter and made contributions to the work of the Charter. We've relied on a few generous friends to help maintain our small staff and budget.  In the last year, however, we've grown over 200%, increasing our partners from 150 to 800 and our city initiatives from 60 to 230, but our staff size has remained the same.  At the same time, we have increased our on-line presence, the delivery of our newsletters, and weekly conference calls.    

Now we need your help to grow a movement that continues to gain momentum daily. We need to increase our staff, work to refine some of our on-line tool-kits, and begin to offer education programs and on-line courses.  If you've been with us during the last year, you have witnessed our growth, and many of you have benefited from our outreach. We have great plans for the next years, including establishing geographic hubs for the Charter’s work in several places in the world, supporting pilot projects of cities working across geographic boundaries, offering webinars on Compassion, and increasing our outreach to include the development of new sectors in the arts, social services, and restorative justice. Please join our membership challenge by giving at any level you can, and if you can't give, help us in other ways.  

The Tenzin Gyatso Institute, The Charter for Compassion, and Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) are delighted to announce "Compassion Week" in San Francisco from November 10 – 16, 2014. Learn more about the conference.