October, 2004 - Editorial

In 1993, the first modern Parliament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago. It was the reborn dream of the 1893 World's Parliament, the ambitious extravaganza that brought some 400 religious figures (not all leaders, by any means) to the West a hundred years earlier. The first Parliament was, in a sense, a western dream. The event's mostly Christian organizers almost certainly hoped that religious voyagers from distant lands would arrive in Chicago's reborn “White City” and be transformed somehow. It wasn't to happen quite that way. When Soyen Shaku, Anagarika Dharmapala, Rajiv Gandhi, and Swami Vivekananda came to Chicago, they brought the ringing message of eastern spirituality and eastern inclusivism. The interreligious movement was born.

The Chicago centennial event in 1993 was a very different event. Nearly 8,000 persons came from all over the world. Not just leaders and teachers but adherents of almost every faith and many persons deeply committed to interreligious work. The great theme of the 1993 Parliament was to bring the most critical issues of our time (peace and violence, justice and human rights, and the imperiled Earth) to the attention of the world's religious and spiritual leaders and communities and to bring the wisdom of the great traditions to bear on those problems.

The Cape Town Parliament in 1999 (with some 7,500 participants) continued to develop those concerns, this time with a major effort to increase the participation of experts and activists from the secular world. All three of Insight's senior editors attended the Barcelona Parliament (which is said to have drawn 7,000+ attendees). We were delighted with the setting and much of the event in Barcelona. One thing troubled us, however. That was the real departure from that animating concern with critical issues that had shaped the first two modern Parliaments. Some will, of course, point to the pre-Parliament Assembly and its focus on the four areas of Water, Debt,

Religion and Violence, and Refugees. To be sure, these themes were engaged at that gathering on the inspiring grounds of the Benedictine monastery at Montserrat, outside of Barcelona. And, indeed, Parliament participants were invited to participate in facilitated discussions of these issues during the Parliament week. However, taken as a whole the event never brought together the dimensions of secular expertise and religious wisdom. Real religious and interreligious engagement with the critical issues facing the world today demands much more than took place either at Montserrat or at the Parliament. Most discussion of the critical issues remained at the level of personal commitment, quite laudable in itself but hardly enough to effect the dramatic changes in values, institutional structures, and largescale behavior patterns that are demanded by the range of critical issues facing us all in the early 21st century.

Many participants, veterans of the interreligious movement and attendees of all three of the modern Parliaments, pointed to the absence at Barcelona of any major engagement with the signature documents of the two prior Parliaments, Towards a Global Ethic (1993) and A Call to Our Guiding Institutions (1999). The Barcelona event produced no signature document. Instead, the list of personal commitments that emerged from the 2004 Parliament (and the Assembly that preceded it) recalled the American pamphlet Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth first published in 1990: interesting, inspiring, but perhaps systemically inconsequential. The world's guiding institutions (a term first widely used at the 1999 Parliament) - business, education, government, media, science, civil society and religion - shape our world in countless ways. But something is clearly missing. Imagine a world in which religious and spiritual communities regularly and creatively engage with other powerful and influential institutions to build a better future for all. Imagine a world in which the deepest wisdom and values of the great spiritual traditions touch the critical questions of the age, and in which religious communities are in deep and thoughtful dialogue with experts on all of those critical questions.

It can happen. For a time, the Parliament of the World's Religions seemed to have taken up that task. Barcelona 2004 suggested that the Parliament now intends to focus its energies more on inter- and intra-religious dialogue than on engagement with guiding institutions. That's well and good. One hopes, however, that the deep dialogue between religions and the other most influential institutions on the huge problems that face the 21st century will continue in some fashion. It's one of the most urgent needs of our age.

That said, it must also be pointed out that the modern interreligious movement owes a great deal to the three modern Parliaments, 1993, 1999, and 2004. The organizers are to be congratulated for their efforts to provide an ongoing source of energy and inspiration needed to sustain intrareligious communication and interreligious understanding and cooperation. A special section on the Barcelona Parliament opens this issue. It begins with a Parliament Mosaic containing brief reflections from several participants. That's followed by a summary report from the Chair of the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions, the organizing body. The section concludes with a report on one of the most delightful aspects of the Barcelona event, the daily meal (“langar”) provided by the Sikhs, which proved for many to be a deeply evocative direct experience of the richness of interreligious community and the power of service.

Jim Kenney, Alan Race, Seshagiri Rao