RELIGIOUS LEADERS should work together to offer practical help to those in
poverty rather than "repeating slogans about the costs and evils of
globalisation", the Archbishop of Canterbury said last week.
In a speech to the "Building Bridges" conference in Sarajevo - a dialogue
for Christian and Muslim scholars - Dr Williams said that this would be
"assisting people to exercise the creative responsibility which is God's gift
and purpose for human beings".
In his speech, entitled "Christianity, Islam and the Challenge of Poverty",
Dr Williams said that it was "impossible to deny that Christian and Muslims
have a common agenda". He said that both faiths "have at their heart the living
image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's
purpose is for humanity".
Although he said that, historically and theologically, the two faiths
offered very different solutions, both had "a necessarily critical stance
towards a society that has no means of limiting rivalry and acquisition".
Dr Williams said that there was nothing wrong with religious leaders'
objecting to aspects of the current global-trade regime, as it was "a standing
outrage that 'free trade' is commended to economically vulnerable nations by
other nations who persist in protectionism".
But he said that religious believers should be among those who seek to
"encourage the kind of enterprise that creates wealth in the form of employment"
.
Dr Williams said that one of the most distinctive contributions made by
religious communties was the active encouragement of local credit schemes.
"Whether in the shape of the Anglican 'Five Talents' initiative in Africa,
or the Grameen banks of Muhammed Yunus in South Asia, there is a way of
furthering economic maturity that belongs, most obviously, with religious
conviction, simply because it assumes that a dependable local community, bound
by trust and common commitment, is an ideal unit in which economic empowerment
can take place."
He concluded by warning that religious and ethnic rivalry was in danger of
obscuring a common commitment to address poverty. He said that, although the
faith commitments of Muslims and Christians were different, "we do share a
world, one which is scarred by all the varieties of poverty I have sketched."
The Archbishop of Canterbury was one of a number of religious leaders who
gave papers at the three-day conference, which offered both public and private
sessions.
Speaking at the reception to mark the end of the Christian-Muslim dialogue,
Dr Williams said that in the part of Europe where the conference was being held
"every community lives under heavy burdens, and one of those burdens is a
history, a past of both guilt and suffering."
But he said that forgiveness and reconciliation "are the ways in which we
bear each other's burdens, so that we do not deny, or run away from, our
history, but together make something new from it".
www.archbishopofcanterbury.org