Dirk Ficca at the Parliament of the World's Religions

basically it's about religious communities learning to get along with each other and then making their contribution to a better world uh there's more to religion than the sociological Dimensions or functions of a religion there's in what in the common parlament is there's added value that religion brings so we want both religious communities as communities that's very important to us it's not just religious leaders it's not just what I call The Usual Suspects the four Buddhists the two bahis the six Presbyterians that come to everything but we're really trying to work with communities as communities uh how do those communities get along with each other um and increasingly they're living next door to each other in major metropolitan areas around the world and when there's tension between Hindus and Muslims in India or Jews and Muslims and Palestine or Christians and Muslims in Indonesia or any kind of religion religious conflict somewhere in the world those communities in Delhi or Philadelphia also experience that tension and then what unique contribution does religion and spirituality have to make uh to the world I'll give you a quick example secular people in the environmental movement have been telling me recently that they failed that all the doomsday scenarios the mountain of statistics and scientific data about where we're headed is paralyzing people it's not moving people and unless we recover a sense of the sacredness of the Earth again uh we're not going to have the impetus to act on that and that's something that religion and spirit uality can bring so we're looking for those that added value that special something that religion can make a contribution to the world so this Parliament is uh about introducing religious communities to each other and then exploring what is that unique contribution religion and spirituality can make first of all I cannot think think of the ethical or the spiritual apart from the relational so part of the work of the parliament is actively relating people to each other so the first qualifier I always have on recontextualization is that it's not just on paper it must take place in the context of real human beings encountering each other and talking and experiencing the issues facing them uh I have enough Trust TR that if that is the context then the intellectual work or the ethical moral work that needs to be done will be done so the parliament is an effort to do both the relational work and the intellectual work and you get some people are just doing the relational work and then it gets thin uh it it doesn't take advantage of knowledge or or or wisdom either the depth throughout time or the new breadth that we have uh so relational must be informed by that or it's just it's abstract it's just on paper and it's like icus it just flies up and then it doesn't really uh it crashes to the ground so we're trying to hold both sides of that um I also have a great interest in mainstream religion because if I could if I could describe kind of three streams there's there's the mind set in every Community that's never going to be open to change that the cultural trappings that the original wisdom was passed on to cannot be separated so nothing is relativized then you have the the other side of the coin that loses touch with that original wisdom and just accommodates itself to the new context totally or too much let's take uh the role of women women you have you have a group of a mindset that's you know that wants a patriarchal society that sees the subjugation of women as part of the the Eternal Divine truth and it's going to be hard to Jackhammer that out you have another group that that uh that any traditional observance by women of their religion is cow Towing to Patriot Archy so the veil is only a prison rather than maybe a style of modesty that can be liberating or oppressive so you catch my drift there and I'm really 90% of the people on this planet are 60% fall into the middle range what we would call traditional religion uh and that's the group I want to work with that's the group I want to help recontextualize their tradition while hanging on to what is essential about it but I I want everybody to come and the Parliament tends to be associated with that group that's always open the second group but I'm really interested in pulling along the middle yeah because because in a certain in a certain sense no matter because when they start moving the world's going to change in the most fundamental way corre and you can you can say well you could have the you know the Leading Edge minority we going to move forward but but but unless the other 2third of the planet is is at least beginning to move forward you know it'll never be it'll never be enough I would say the middle third the the one- third in baseball they say you're going to lose 60 games you're going to win 60 games it's the the other 40 games that make the difference it's that middle group and that's the group we want to tip That's right The Cutting Edge those are never going to change how do we move that middle group