To Repair the World…….

 On Tuesday, August 30^th St. Anthony’s held the last of three symposiums, “The Call to Serve: Faith Traditions Reaching Out to Those in Need,” conducted in celebration of the Foundation’s 60^th anniversary. The event featured three local leaders from San Francisco’s faith communities: Rita Semel, founding member of the United Religions Initiative, the San Francisco Interfaith Council, and the Interfaith Center at the Presidio; James A. Donahue, Professor of Ethics at the Graduate Theological Union; and Ameena Jandali, founding member of the Islamic Networks Group.

Each of the speakers was invited to address the topic of service to the poor and to illustrate how their own religious tradition understands the individual’s as well as the community’s responsibility to attend to the needs of the poor. Because we see discord and conflict more frequently than unity and cohesion, it is perhaps easy to forget that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all part of the Abrahamic tradition, all religions of the Book. In that common history there are shared values and beliefs about our responsibility to serve the poor.

Karl Robillard, Communications Manager and symposium attendee, said, “What struck me was that the core values communicated by each of the panelists were more similar than different. It should give us pause to consider why religion leads to extreme conflicts in our world. It was moving to see that at a fundamental level, as humans more unites us than divides us.”  

Despite the bombast and divisiveness we so frequently see from religious figures featured on television, the symposium revealed that this shared Call to Serve affords us a built-in opportunity for coming together from our various traditions and building connections based on common priorities and understandings of charity and justice. Whether it is our own hearts which compel us to serve (charity) or our understanding that to do so is to serve God (tzedakah or justice), when we answer the Call to Serve we do our part to repair the world.