Outward Growth of the URI - A Letter from Dave Randle
February 11th, 2007
Dave Randle, founder of the Utah URI CC and the Global Healing MCC, recently sent a letter (below) to the URI contacts mailing list suggesting that now is the time to bring URI’s outward growth back into focus. He also gives a great example of taking interfaith beyond the traditional dialogue and into the classroom, adding to an emerging model of direct interfaith education.
Once a week I teach an applied ethics course at the college.
The session las week was on religious ethics and the text for the course gave an overview of about 1/2 dozen major religions.
I decided to take the opportunity of this class to feature URI so rather than limiting my overview to the text book, I provided and overview of all the religious traditions listed with URI.
In the presentation I showed short videos in the course, 1) showing common connections with many faith traditions, 2) a short Carl Sagan Cosmos video challenging the world to go beyond one national, ethnic or religious way of thinking, and 3) the URI video from the Global Assembly in 2002.
During the discussion I was struck by three points that came out of this class.
1. How little most students knew about any religious tradition including their own and how many traditions that students have never heard of. Here is seems URI has a tremendous opportunity to teach and share.
2. The excitement that people in the class had for URI concept was very strong. I wonder if we who have been involved with URI for sometime now may undervalue the power that the concept of URI has for people hearing about it for the first time.
3. The question that several students asked as to why the media has not shared stories about URI. One student said that with a concept this powerful and a movement so international, they could not understand how not one person in the class had ever heard of URI before. Perhaps more attention needs to be paid by all of us in URI to marketing and PR of the URI to others.
Be Well
Dave