GOOD magazine posted a short interview with Karen Armstrong on the Charter. It is always great to see her thoughts on this idea that has grown into worldwide project to reinsert compassion into the religious conversation.

Like the commonality of the Golden Rule?
Yes.  This charter is not making any doctrinal claims or saying that all faiths should merge together into some kind of corporate religion, but [the Golden Rule] is something on which all faiths can agree. In a torn world, it is very good to find something that unites us.

For the last seven years, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric has involved phrases like “war of ideals” or “islamofascism.” How does compassion fit into that narrative?
What I’d like to see is the voices of compassion putting up a counter-narrative. A counter story to this aggression. Our modernity has been very intolerant. Yet, wherever I go in the world—whether it’s in the United States or in the Muslim world or in Europe—I find people are hungry for a more compassionate voice, both to religion and to politics. The charter was just an attempt, really, to bring compassion to the forefront of discussion and to issue some practical directives to how we can do better in the future.

We just recently closed the site to submissions and are now beginning the process of sorting through them for the Council of Sages to use in finalizing the document. It has been an amazing five weeks and we thank all of you who took part. There are still many ways to get involved, so register on charterforcompassion.org to keep up-to-date.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Karen Armstrong's Wish Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.