Resources: Compassion

Today's Learning Link is to a podcast of the NPR show,  Talk of the Nation,  which is an interview about compassion, with Karen Armstrong.

Armstrong, winner of a TED award, is a religious historian who chose to use her TED award to further the awareness of the dire need for compassion in our world.   She asked TED "to help me create, launch, and propagate a Charter for Compassion that would be written by leading thinkers from a variety of major faiths and would restore compassion to the heart of religious and moral life. The charter would counter the voices of extremism, intolerance, and hatred. At a time when religions are widely assumed to be at loggerheads, it would also show that, despite our significant differences, on this we are all in agreement and that it is indeed possible for the religious to reach across the divide and work together for justice and peace."

In her words:  "One of the chief tasks of our time must surely be to build a global community in which all peoples can live together in mutual respect.........The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves.

Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

This interview, and her TED talk, are less a presentation of new ideas and more a recognition of the universal application and need for this basic tenet---- a call to action in our daily lives, and in the larger communities in which we live.

As a religious historian and author,  Armstrong naturally grounds her work in the language of religions (not one but all), although the discussion is applicable within a secular context, of course, as well.


More, here.