After a period of intensive planning and conceptualization, the Soetendorp Institute has launched the Faith and Leadership Seminar that is being supported by the municipality of The Hague.

15 young leaders aged 18 to 30 from diverse cultural and spiritual backgrounds participate in the course that includes ten sessions from September to December 2011.

The seminar aims to promote intercultural understanding by giving emerging leaders the chance to gain valuable new perspectives through interaction with peers from different cultures and religions.

The Charter for Compassion is a cooperative effort to restore not only compassionate thinking but, more importantly, compassionate action to the center of religious, moral and political life.

The Charter, crafted by people all over the world and drafted by a multi-faith, multi-national council of thinkers and leaders, seeks to change the conversation so that compassion becomes a key word in public and private discourse, making it clear that any ideology that breeds hatred or contempt ~ be it religious or secular ~ has failed the test of our time.

Rabbi Soetendorp participated in the Council of Conscience – the drafting council of the Charter and helped organize the Charter for Compassion launch in Amsterdam.

Watch the video of the Charter for Compassion here:

The Soetendorp Institute actively promotes the Charter for Compassion and invites everyone to make a lifelong commitment to live with compassion.

Since its inauguration in 2001, Rabbi Soetendorp has participated in the World Economic Forum's Community for West-Islam dialogue, a dynamic community of business, political, religious, media and opinion leaders engaged in dialogue to promote understanding across different segments of society in the West and Muslim world. 

It is a multistakeholder community that provides a unique platform to:
-  Act proactively as a global citizen in promoting harmony, mutual respect and shared values
-  Improve knowledge and understanding across cultures and civilizations
-  Gain new insights into the opinions of peers and global leaders involved in West–Islam   dialogue


The current work of the Faith Communities at the World Economic Forum has expanded beyond the focus on interfaith dialogue, embracing a broad agenda that explores the interactions between faith, religion, business, society and politics. The religious perspective is now integrated in a structured manner into the majority of the World Economic Forum's core work through the following workstreams:

Community of Global Religious Leaders
This influential global community engages leaders from the world's major religions in dialogue with each other and other stakeholders shaping the global agenda, such as political leaders, business leaders, Young Global Leaders and NGO leaders.

Global Agenda Council on Faith
The Global Agenda Council on Faith is a community of thought leaders and experts exploring the challenges that lie in the interactions between religion and society, religion and peacebuilding, and religion and business, and works on identifying the most efficient and actionable solutions to these challenges.

Faith Communities Annual Report
In 2008, the first in a series of annual publications focused on the state of dialogue between the Islamic and Western worlds. The 2009 report compiles editorials on the topic of “Values in the Post-Crisis Economy” from over 15 global Religious Leaders and faith organizations, and contains a unique public opinion poll on values which points to a trust deficit regarding values in the business world. In 2010, the report will continue to explore public opinion on the role of faith in global affairs.

Find more information here. 

 

Consider Forgiveness features interviews with leaders and scholars from the Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Watch Rabbi Awraham Soetendorp speak at the Fetzer Institute about the Holocaust, forgiveness as a moment of the heart and the difficulties of forgiving by clicking on the image below:

                                                                       


This project was filmed in Amritsar, India, at Sharing Wisdom: The Case of Love and Forgiveness, a meeting of the Elijah Interfaith Institute's board of religious leaders. One of the mandates to come from this meeting reads “We wish to call upon all our religions to offer their finest teachings as resources to guide humanity to safe harbor, and to identify the teachings they can jointly offer a suffering humanity.”

View the clips listed on the site to learn more about each faith's approach to forgiveness and how it relates to justice, love, compassion, retribution, revenge, and empathy.