Parliament of Worlds Religion 2009 Melbourne Australia

Author(s): Parliament of the World’s Religions
Publisher: USA Parliament of the Worlds Religions

Page 193

PROGRAM DE
Saturday, December 5, 2009
take up the Great Work of creating a sustaining ecological civilisation for future generations. Each person and each religion can contribute to this great transforming work. The panellists will explore Thomas Berry's legacy and show a brief video of his reflections on our critical moment.
Mary Evelyn Tucker is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Scholar at Yale University, where she has appointments in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Divinity School, and the Department of Religious Studies. Specialising in Asian religions and ecology, she has been a committee member of the Interfaith Partnership for the Environment at the United Nations Environment Program since 1986 and is a member of the Earth Charter International Council.
John Grim is currently a Senior Lecturer and Scholar at Yale University. He is Coordinator of the Forum on Religion and Ecology with Mary Evelyn Tucker, and series editor of World Religions and Ecology, from Harvard Divinity School's Center for the Study of World Religions. He has taught at Bucknell University and Sarah Lawrence College and is widely published on the subjects of religion and ecology.
Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He received his PhD in the History of Religions from Fordham University. A founding member of the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale University), Chris has published more than a dozen books on the religions of India, many with a focus on Hinduism and Ecology. He edits the journal 'Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology' (Brill).
Anne Marie Dalton is a professor of religion and culture at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada. She teaches and researches in the areas of religion and ecology, science and religion, and religion and development. She completed her doctoral thesis on the work of Thomas Berry. Anne Marie has participated in environmental, community-based projects in China, Vietnam and Mongolia. Her latest work deals with ecology and the practice of hope. She is also a member of the Canadian Forum on Religion and Ecology.
Neighbourhoods of Difference:
The Uniting Church in Australia and Interfaith Relations
Rev Glenda Blakefield
Rev Seforosa Carroll
Rev Tony Floyd
Rev Elenie Poulos
Rev Kerry Enright
Ms Isabel Thomas Dobson
Room 213
Panel Discussion
Migration to Australia has brought together people of different cultures and religions. For the Uniting Church, this has raised new challenges of how to live and express faith in both a multicultural and multireligious context. One challenge comes from the fact that church membership includes a range of people with different life experiences, cultural backgrounds, and perspectives. Our theme, 'neighbourhoods of difference', expresses the simple but integral message that 'loving the neighbour who is different is part of the Uniting Church's identity and mission. In extending its welcome and hospitality both within and beyond its church boundaries, the Uniting Church holds together and values 'neighbourhoods of difference in the Australian context and in our international relationships. A multimedia presentation and a panel of key Uniting Church leaders will explore this theme, demonstrating
how the Uniting Church learns, struggles, embraces and lives with diversity and difference.
9:30-11:00am INTRARELIGIOUS SESSION
Reverend Glenda Blakefield is the Associate General Secretary of the Uniting Church Australia's National Assembly. Among her responsibilities, she has oversight of the National Assembly Working Group on Relations with Other Faiths. She has been the Uniting Church representative on the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and has participated in the Asia-Pacific Regional Interfaith Dialogue in Cambodia as well as various other interfaith activities. Reverend Seforosa Carroll, a Fiji-born Rotuman, is the Convener of the Relations with Other Faiths Working Group. She represents the UCA on the National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews; is part of the Women's Interfaith Network; and has been involved in various interfaith consultations and projects. She has published a number of articles and was formerly a member of the Assembly Working Group on Doctrine. Sef has been a visiting lecturer at the United Theological College since 2000. Reverend Tony Floyd is the National Director of the Multicultural and Cross-cultural Ministry.
Reverend Tony Floyd is the National Director of the Multicultural and Cross-cultural Ministry.
Reverend Elenie Poulos is the National Director of Uniting Justice. Reverend Kerry Enright is the National Director of Uniting World. Rev Dr Kerry Enright is National Director of international relationships, including aid and development, for the Uniting Church in Australia. He is from New Zealand and is of Maori and settler descent. He originally trained in law and practised as a barrister and solicitor in Auckland. Kerry then studied theology in New Zealand and USA and became a parish minister in the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. Until taking up his present appointment he was for ten years Assembly Executive Secretary Iceolof that Church. With his family he came to Australia last year to take up his present role.
Ms Isabel Thomas Dobson is the Moderator of the Synod of Victoria and Tasmania of the Uniting Church in Australia, Australia's third largest Christian denomination formed in 1977 when the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Churches united. Isabel is a lay person with wide experience in the church at local, regional, state and national levels. She has been a teacher, political researcher, religious educator and presbytery minister. She is married with three young adult children.
How a Profound Spiritual Theology Can Overthrow Poverty
Shirley Paulson
Room 214
Lecture
Poverty affects every human being on earth, as well as the health of the earth itself. A spiritual solution to the persistent problem of poverty would lift the burden of insufficient resources that are only available to the privileged. Self-made, material resources are made on the premise of lack or insufficiency of resources, and competition for limited resources is unavoidable. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, describes how a shift in focus from the human and the self-made to the God-made image and likeness dissolves the psychological necessity to steal from others. The law of pecking orders ('never enough for everyone'] makes way for the spiritual law of equality ('abundance for everyone'). This program explores this spiritual reality in order to break through the limitations imposed by patriarchal consciousness. It will explore further the spiritual law of equity, and how it provides the means to break down habitual identifications of being either privileged or deprived, either superior or inferior, and either authoritarian or submissive.
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