PAUL SARTISON
Multi-Faith Coordinator

This article is featured on behalf of the University of Saskatchewan Multi-Faith Chaplains Association.

In the last week we have all watched while news of a small religious community in Florida has captured the world’s attention.  

The plans of the Dove World Outreach Centre to burn copies of the Qur’an were met with surprise, outrage, condemnation and sometimes simply with the disbelieving laughter that arises when sheer absurdity rises up among us. 

Thankfully, the response of most has been to condemn the proposed burning of the Qur’an and the community planning to carry out the burning has rightly been identified as a fringe group that is certainly not representative of any mainstream religious tradition. What remains disturbing, though, is the ease with which hearsay and conjecture can be used to degrade a religious group, the utter disregard that some are willing to show for the things that others hold dear and the way in which it is so easy to spread fear and hatred in the name of free speech, freedom of the press, or even ­— oddly enough — freedom of religion.

As the new academic year gets underway, the Multi-Faith Chaplains Association would like to draw attention to the diversity of traditions that are represented and practiced on this campus. A remarkable variety of students gather in this place for what we would all identify as religious or spiritual purposes. The MFCA itself has representatives of Aboriginal, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions, and throughout any given week there are formal and informal gatherings of students and faculty from these traditions and many others who share common perspectives, common faith traditions or common ancestry. 

The Florida book burning threat seems predicated on the notion that “Western” society is for one kind of people and one kind of tradition.  What we have on this campus is an indication of another way of understanding what any society can be, a way that sees the possibility and the promise of living with the richness of the variety of religious and spiritual expressions in the world.  It seems appropriate that this place, a university, should embrace the universality of belief and practice represented in the larger community.  It enlarges our understanding of the world and its people. 

There is much for us all to learn over the course of this or any academic year.  We of the MFCA are grateful for the opportunity to work together in this universe of belief and in this university that seeks to expand the universe of knowledge, expression and wisdom. We encourage the university community and its members to continue to recognize the varieties of religious and spiritual expression among us not as a threat to unity or a problem to be solved but as an opportunity for growth and for the deepening of our own experience, for in the time that we spend together in this place, our own worlds and our own ways of understanding the world will be expanded and enriched while we work, study, learn and play together with the varieties of people around us.

For a continuation of discussion on this issue, please see Blair Woynarski’s article “Mosque and book-burning ignite protest.”