Dr. Sakena Yacoobi

Revolutionary peacemaker Dr. Sakena Yacoobi has granted an interview with the Council. Dr. Yacoobi is the founder and executive director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), which was established in 1995 in Afghanistan as the Taliban were closing schools for women and girls. AIL was founded to fight oppressive traditions that left women and girls uneducated and put their lives at risk. Today, AIL currently serves 350,000 women and children each year in and has provided education, training and health services to over 7.1 million Afghans since 1995.

Read more about Sakena’s inspiring work by clicking here.

Watch the inspiring documentary on Sakena’s work here

Join us at PeaceNext to submit your question to Dr. Yacoobi!

Benedictine nun, Sr. Joan Chittister, speaks on the urgency for interreligious dialogue, the status of women, and the need for religions to be self-critical.

“We are spiritual resources for one another,”  says Chittister.  Speaking of how she learns from other traditions while being firmly grounded in her own, she says, “Every one of those ideas is embedded in the Christian scriptures itself, as far as I’m concerned.  But when I see them emphasized, underlined, lived-out with a more startling awareness in others, then I’m brought back to the fulfillment of my own.”

From the Women of Faith and Spirit website:

“Recently, the authors of this proposal were among the thousands gathered at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, where we had a lived experience of the feminine rising. This Parliament was buzzing with feminine energy. Everywhere we went people were talking about Earth-based spirituality, the Sacred Feminine, feminine principles, women’s leadership and women’s issues. Little pink buttons with the question ‘What happens when women lead?’ showed up sprinkled liberally among the 4,000+ attendees and there was a full page of workshops listed under the Program Cluster ‘Women in Leadership.’

Since the Parliament, we have been engaged in an active inquiry about the current pattern of women’s spiritual leadership in the U.S. and Canada. We have been listening deeply as we hosted exploratory conversations, conducted interviews with diverse women leaders, and attended spiritual and women’s gatherings.”

Click here to learn more

“I first became aware of the work of the Elders when I heard about Jimmy Carter’s speech at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions on the ‘Religious Imperative for the Equality of Women and Girls’” writes Huffington Post writer Marianne Schnall.  “I was intrigued and wanted to find out more about the Elders’ work, particularly about their calls against the oppression of women and girls in the name of religion and tradition.”

In this article, Schnall interviews Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter And Mary Robinson on the issues about which they are most passionate.

Click here to read the full article

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof has followed up his recent column on President Carter’s Parliament speech.  Citing the president’s involvement with The Elders, Kristof echoes Carter’s plea for leaders to “change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions.”  The column, which addresses upfront the oppression of women in religious contexts, also provides powerful examples of religiously motivated advocacy and empowerment.

To read the full column, click here.

To see our video of President Carter’s speech, click here.

Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and respected columnist for the New York Times has just published a blog post discussing President Jimmy Carter’s speech to the 2009 Parliament of Religions.  Describing the speech as “magnificent,” Kristof reflects on the question of the capacity of religion to act as either an impediment or an aid to women’s rights around the world.

To read Kristof’s post, click here.

To see our video of President Carter’s speech, click here.

Australia’s newspaper The Age reports on Dr Sakena Yacoobi, one of tonight’s keynote speakers at the Opening Plenary of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions. As the article reports, Dr Yacoobi has been a tireless advocate of women’s rights and education ever since she secretly entered Afghanistan in 1995 and founded 80 schools despite the rule of the Taliban. Her Afghan Learning Institute has reached 6.8 million women to date.

To read the whole article, click here.

To read a biography of Dr Yacoobi, click here.

To learn about tonight’s plenary, click here.

The International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) has organized a Breakthrough summit in Melbourne 2-3 Dec. which will coincide with the opening of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, writes The Age newspaper. Among the summit’s presenters, Sister Joan Chittister, a major speaker at the Parliament, will argue that “if the faith communities brought their faith to bear on public policy we would change the world overnight,” and the article broadly discusses the role of faiths in addressing injustices. The Parliament welcomes the IWDA’s efforts, with Executive Director Dirk Ficca praising the summit as model parliaments present and future.

To read the full article, click here.