[The following is a guest editorial from David Dashifen Kees. David Dashifen Kees has been working with members of other religious and philosophical communities through both interfaith dialog and activism for almost ten years and considers interfaith work to be a calling. He’s the technical director for the Pagan Newswire Collective, a blogger at paganactivist.com, and he is on the executive committee for the International Pagan Coming Out Day. You can find his burgeoning blog at http://technowitch.org.]
In May 2012, a guest post here introduced me to the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy (note: the website for the FRD is currently undergoing a redesign and reorganization at the time of this writing). I was intrigued. As an employee at a major American public university, I’ve worked with many student interfaith leaders, some of whom have gone on to work with the Interfaith Youth Core. But, as a staff person, I was unable to partake fully in some of their activities. One way that I was able to get involved was as a Pagan representative to various panel discussions and similar events at the university and to assist the Pagan student’s association in similar capacities. Thus, it was with some excitement that I began to investigate the FRD. Here was an organization dedicated to the very activities that I found so fulfilling over the last decade and whose work was focused on facilitating them between its various chapters. I’ve been working with other Pagans as well as with John Morehead, the custodian of the FRD’s Evangelical chapter and an author of the above-linked guest post, to investigate the feasibility of a Pagan chapter. I’ve found that not only is it feasible, but that I’m ready to make it happen. Perhaps just as importantly, the FRD is excited to have us. It is an ideal organization for us to be involved with. It recognizes that a person’s deeply held beliefs are not likely to change. Further, these differences, when not understood, are what lead to resentment between different religious and non-religious communities rather than understanding. Thus, the foundation uses dialog–or as they term it, “honest contestation”–as a way to foster that understanding. This is something that I personally find very attractive about the FRD: it is not necessarily seeking common ground but, instead, works toward the understanding of difference. Common ground exists, to be sure, but it’s fairly bland and relatively easily found. Most ethical systems, religious or otherwise, frown on murder, for example. But a discussion on why murder is wrong is not very interesting specifically because we’re already standing on that ground–that’s why it’s common in the first place!