Baltimore’s riots this week have highlighted the growing unrest and injustices across America. Many are being forced to rethink assumptions we've made about race, power, civility, and compassion. We seem to have forgotten concepts like fairness and justice as a nation. Without this moral compass to guide us, what’s left? As video after video surfaces of young black males being brutally treated by police, it makes us wonder if racial discrimination and police brutality can now be tolerated in...
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Players of Earth Week & Compassion as the Path to Justice and the American Dream
As we're getting ready for the inaugural Love This Place! Serve the Earth Week coopetition, from April 18 through April 26, we are excited to introduce some of the “players” that will be participating. This is an extremely diverse group including teams from Portugal, Peru, United Kingdom, Italy, and cities in the United States and Canada including Detroit, Michigan, Syracuse, New York and Seattle, Washington. Interfaith Works is the team in Syracuse, New York that participated in the February...
Love The Hell Out of Metro Detroit: From the Blame-Shame Game to the Compassion Games
In the early sixties, in the thick of the Civil Rights movement, at the Voters Rights office in Alabama, Andrew Young was about to step outside into the parking lot to meet members of the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Young, appointed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to head the voters rights effort, and has since gone on to become Mayor of Atlanta, US Congressman, and Ambassador to the United Nations, received a call thatthe KKK were coming and that he might want to carry a gun. As he headed out the door...
Solving Wicked Problems with the Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest
(Header Image: "New Pioneers" from Mark Hensen) At a time when religiously motivated violence seems to be more horrific and terrifying than ever, what would it take to transition our world to one of interfaith harmony and peace? It may seem pollyanna to wonder and idealistic to even ask if such a thing is possible. In a world permeated with intolerance and acts of hatred in the name of religion, how could we come to be in peace and harmony with one another? What would that take? A 21st century...
An Interfaith Pep Talk to Overcome the Impossible
A Rallying Call for World Interfaith Harmony It’s well-known that for untold eons, human beings have fought each other in the name of their God or gods. But there is more to this story… As historian and TED Prize Winner Karen Armstrong points out, wars are and have always been political and economic in nature, used to gain land, resources, and power. Why, then, do people tend to blame religion for wars? Armstrong writes that religious ideologies were often reshaped by political and economic...
3.7 Million March: An Urgent Call to Rally for Unity & Peace
Dear Friends and Allies of Compassion, The world is stirring. Every now and then an event occurs that shocks us, and with it appears an opening for something new to emerge. Right now, we are at such a moment. The 3.7 million people who marched in the streets of France - who locked arms with our world’s leaders - are what French officials are saying was the largest street demonstration in the country's history. And they weren't protesting the attacks... they were rallying for unity. "I'm fed up...
Interfaith League Brings Play and Wonder to World Interfaith Harmony Week
“In our broken world it is easy to become overwhelmed with grief and despair culminating in our inability to move forward. Each of us has been given a purpose in life, a reason for being. Each of us carries within a caring heart and a mind filled with ideas. The Compassion Games beckon us to rise above our heartache and work in community to make a difference in the world…. to laugh and to play and to know within the deepest part of our souls that we are good and contributing to something...
Silicon Valley Interreligious Council and Carry the Vision Bring the Compassion Games to Silicon Valley
We shall be a mighty kindness. - Rumi (and the Carry the Vision conference brochure) I was invited to introduce and help launch the Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest at the Carry the Vision 9th Community in Compassion Conference that took place in Silicon Valley on October 19th 2014. It was amazing! Carry the Vision Executive Director, Shelly Swan and her team took great care of me and all the participants who gathered that Sunday to “awaken the heart of compassion” the theme for the...
Compassionate Silicon Valley: The Heart of Innovation and the “Spiritual Element”
Silicon Valley is known as a hotbed of innovation. A fiercely competitive environment, it is a place in which discovering and promoting the next big thing is everything. Could it be that “compassion in action” is the next big thing? As it turns out, one of the most inspiring and effective teams in the 2014 Compassion Games: Survival of the Kindest is Compassionate Silicon Valley. To participate in this global “co-opetition” they have amassed a team that includes more than 20 affiliated...
Looking for compassionate solutions to gun violence
Submitted by What's Good 206 Why should you care about gun violence? "It has no race, no creed, no age barriers. If it hasn't affected you yet, it will if it continues." Stark words from one man interviewed in this array of community voices recorded at an anti-gun violence rally at Seattle's Martin Luther King Memorial Park. "It needs to be talked about among your family and friends," says a police officer. "We have to work to get the community out to say we've had enough of the gun violence...