Special Needs & Requests

In reply to recent world events, we are organizing a nationwide/worldwide day on which people of different religious traditions can visit each other's gathering place and read similar passages related to peace from their different holy books. The specific form of this would be decided by participating groups so it might be as simple as having a priest or minister go to a mosque or synagogue to read a few passages from the Bible while the imam or rabbi reads similar passages from the Quran or Torah, respectively; later that day, the clergy could repeat this in a church. Or, a congregation may want to invite members of different traditions to visit their gathering place to read from the sacred texts together. The goal is to see the similarity across the different religions and to start healing the wounds inflicted by those falsely exaggerating the differences.

Also, we are setting up a website — http://www.sacredwordsforpeace.org — and Facebook page — SACRED WORDS FOR PEACE — that will have peace-related messages posted from the Bible, Quran, Torah, Buddhist scriptures (and perhaps others). We are hoping to have the messages from the sacred texts in various languages so people everywhere can see how similar they are across religions.

We are also planning a social networking activity using the same messages on the selected day. We will suggest that people go to the website, download the messages, and email them to others in their personal network. We will also be creating several tweet-sized messages that people could download and tweet to each other. One idea is to have the word PEACE in numerous languages in a single tweet.

We are asking like-minded organizations to endorse the event, to publicize it to their members, and to suggest peace-related passages from their sacred text, if the organization is religiously-oriented.

For more information, please contact:

Richard O’Neill, Ph.D.
SUNY Upstate Medical University,
Institute for Decision Excellence And Leadership
750 East Adams St.
Syracuse, N.Y. 13210
(315) 464-3120
oneillr@upstate.edu