Sister Joan Chittister, one member of the Council of Conscience, recently published an article in the National Catholic Reporter on her experience in Switzerland. Read the piece for an inside look at the process of writing the Charter for Compassion.

Compassion, the Council said, is not pity since pity assumes superiority. Compassion is not an idea, it is an action that lifts the burden of the other because the other is of us. It is the determination to end the suffering of the other by spending oneself to do it. Compassion is fundamental to every faith and more urgently needed now more than ever. When whole people can be held hostage to robotized weapons of war and the kinds of “religious commitment” that makes the slaughter of innocents a holy act, compassion is needed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Karen Armstrong's Wish Blog, TEDPrize Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.