Crossing lines of culture, faith:

Tell your story & make media matter

Sunday, 11 November 2007

 

    For over 700 years in Spain, Muslims, Jews and Christians had a vibrant, creative, shared society.
     They lit the flames that ignited the European Renaissance.

     In 2007, suddenly we are remembering these victorious stories from Andalusia.
     Stories of cooperative cultures are returning to inspire us to new heights of collaboration for this generation, as described earlier:

                http://traubman.igc.org/messages/535.htm
 
     Why tell these human success stories?
     Because Story is the real power of this 21st Century.
     Stories change people and their relationships.

 

"People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell."

-         Elie Wiesel

 

     Your own success stories have the power to affect 10s of millions of people.
     Citizens around Earth are waiting out there to see images of how people and relationships change.
     Changed relationships as described in over 500 success stories at:

                http://traubman.igc.org/messages.htm

     Real power today is with Story and of new uses of Internet.
     It was explained well at CROSSING THE FAITH LINE.
     In October, 2007, the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) -- http://ifyc.org/events/conference -- gathered over 500 young adults and others to engage in new, bold ways in Chicago.
     VIEW and HEAR the inspiring, instructional 78-minute video -- a gifted panel about Story and making Media matter and relevant.


                http://blip.tv/file/471205/
    
     "Post the proof" -- wherever you are, tell your story of what you're doing in your life -- was the instruction to all of us who have a stories of change to pass on, including on the Internet.

 

"Post the proof that brotherhood is not so wild a dream that

those who profit from postponing it pretend."   

                - Norman Corwin

~   ~  ~    ~   ~  ~    ~   ~  ~    ~   ~  ~    ~   ~  ~   
    "Post this," someone suggested.
     In 2007, a compelling, related new publication is available.

                        The DREAM of the POEM:

 Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492

                   Translated and edited by Peter Cole

Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2007, 576 pp.

             http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8349.html

 

     Peter Cole's 20-year endeavor has discovered and preserved works that could have been lost forever.
     Perhaps some of the greatest Hebrew writings since the Biblical scriptures.
     Created in the centuries of Al Andalus and Muslim governance.
    
     There is more meaning.
     The title -- The DREAM of the POEM -- is drawn from the contemporary writing of Mahmoud Darwish.
     He is considered the Palestinian national poet,
    The writing of Darwish opens the book: 

 

Andalus ... might be here or there, or anywhere ... a meeting

  place of strangers in the project of building human culture ...

   It is not only that there was a Jewish-Muslim coexistence,

           but that the fates of the two people were similar ...

                  Al-Andalus for me is the realization of

                            the dream of the poem.”

In a region mired in conflict, Coles dedication to the literature of the Levant offers a unique and inspiring view of the cultural, religious, and linguistic interactions that were and are possible among the peoples of the Middle East.
        - The MacArthur Foundation

"Were devoted to bringing these voices into the world they come from a place of light and vision that is endangered in the current matrix of Israel and PalestineIts important that a sense of hopefulness be grounded in things, in texts, so that theres physical evidence of what were talking about, not simply hope.
        - Peter Cole