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Written by Bill Tammeus
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Saturday, 06 September 2008 18:00 |
Last year's first Festival of Faiths in Kansas City was a great success in many ways, even though I served as moderator of the main event, a dialogue between a Muslim and a Jew.
And this year's second annual festival is shaping up to offer lots of good things to participants. I hope you will consider getting to several of the scheduled sessions and events. One difference this year is that the keynote speaker will follow all the November events. Jon Meacham of Newsweek will be in Kansas City in January.
Programs on this year's list of events start Nov. 7 and run through Nov. 23 -- then jump to Jon's appearance in January. Check out the list and lock some of the events in on your calendar before other things crowd out your ability to go.
It's important to reiterate that the purpose of such interfaith opportunities as this festival is not (certainly not primarily) to offer the chance to convert someone from one religion to another and it's not to meld all the different religions into one innocuous worldwide faith that essentially stands for not much beyond being kind to one another.
Rather, interfaith dialogue and relationships are to help us know more about other religions and for adherents of those religions to know more about our own. The goal is to reduce ignorance because ignorance leads to prejudice, which can lead even to violence.
If we look each other in the eye and acknowledge both our differences and our commonality, it's a lot harder to want to kill each other -- or, at minimum, vote others out of town.
So make your plans now for this year's festival. And if you readers from other cities don't have something similar going on there, get busy and start it.
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