THE Vision

Faith transforms.

Anyone who’s ever believed in anything will tell you that!

But faith isn’t as simple as it once was. Americans can no longer count on being born into a religious tradition and remaining a follower for a lifetime. While we may identify as a Christian nation, we are also the most spiritually diverse country on the planet! There are nearly 40 million of us who don’t believe in Christianity; the vast majority of whom don’t believe in any religion at all! With other countries looking to the United States as an example of democracy, it is our moral and civic duty to encourage this religious and spiritual diversity, no matter our personal beliefs.

Interfaith dialogue has become prevalent worldwide in the last half century—in part a response to continued global violence waged in the name of (someone’s) God, and in part a natural extension of the move, particularly in the West, toward multiculturalism and diversity. These dialogues hold out powerful possibilities for peaceful resolution, for tolerance, understanding, and acceptance of human differences.

But to include all Americans when our citizens are turning to ever-widening views of faith, we must open these conversations to many more belief systems than we ever have before—perhaps even those not considered religious.  (After all, even an atheist has faith that there is no God.) And we must change the focus of the conversations themselves, from respecting other traditions but staying at arm’s length, to embracing the similarities of our personal journeys.

There may be no other area of discourse today more important to creating a functional, sustainable, global society. We must finally reconcile all of the belief systems, without losing the ethical underpinnings that give them so much power for positive change.

Every day, countless people of faith around the world alter their lives by choosing to believe in something. The transformation story has been told by billions over thousands of years, and yet every personal story is different—beliefs range from sacred to secular, deities from Allah to Zeus, legends from prehistoric to popular.

So what does belief bring to the human journey?

How is it that the faithful are altered and what does it mean to believe? When does it happen, how does it feel, what does it look like, how long does it take? Does it work that way for everyone? What are the challenges and the milestones, the stumbling blocks—what makes it all worthwhile?

Why are the positive changes in believers so remarkably similar,

even when based on radically different truths?

The Friends of Faith Summit will bring these important conversations to the forefront, where they belong, by inviting twelve well-known people of faith, from twelve distinctly different belief systems, to look for answers to these questions through the lens of their own personal journeys.

We will begin in 2009 to extend invitations to the broadest cross-section of belief systems, including major and minor religions and their offshoots, and also the secular and spiritual belief systems so popular today. We will open the door to delegates who have walked incredibly dissimilar paths through faith, whose transformed lives have served humanity in varied ways.

Friends of Faith conversations will focus entirely on the personal experiences of our delegates, not on the institutional messages of any particular tradition. We will eliminate debate about the relative merits of belief, practice, politics, or dogma, and seek consensus on our delegates’ lifetimes of experience with their chosen traditions—ultimately identifying actions and ideas anyone, who believes in anything, can use to be personally transformed by faith.

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