Author: CRT Admin

These are not the happiest of times for the United States of America or for our world, for that matter.  There are two wars underway between rival peoples with unhappy historic memories of each other.  Many say that the post-World War II international order is not what it once was.

Already several years ago now, a friend of the Caux Round Table said to me: “Everyone knows that we are living at the end of an age.  They don’t know what the next age will bring or how they will need to adjust.  So, everyone just does today what they did yesterday.”

In such circumstances, as the tides of time shift their flow, discernment is needed more than ever – discernment of what is happening, discernment of what is fundamental, discernment of what is eternal and discernment of the truth.

As important as discernment is having the courage to act on the truth.

With these moral parameters in mind, our board selected reporter Liz Collin of Alpha News to receive the 2023 Dayton Award for her documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis.

Her work in that documentary provides discernment of disturbing facts and conditions in our new America.  Bringing before the public a different perspective on a tragic event was an act of civic courage.

You may watch the event here.

Many thanks to Loren Swanson, one of our regular participants, for recording it.

Last week, Pope Francis visited Indonesia, home to the world’s largest community of Muslim faithful.  There, the Istiqlal Mosque is connected by a tunnel to the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption – a marvelously apt metaphor for the respect shown to Christians by the Prophet Muhammad in his covenants and the respect for Muslims shown by Pope Francis in the “Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” and his encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.

I attach here a copy of the Pope’s remarks on his visit to the Mosque and the Cathedral.

At this time of war in Gaza and Ukraine and with dark clouds of aggrandizement gathering over the South China Sea, may we all learn to open our hearts and minds to others, as the Pope and the Prophet have requested of us.

I have been invited to speak on moral capitalism at a conference in Jinju, Korea.  The organizers sent to me a short paper on the important role of Jinju and its cultural heritage in leading the remarkable economic development of the South Korean people over the last 60 years.  Something was different in the regional culture of Jinju, related, as you can learn, to the thinking of Jo Shik, who lived and taught in the 1500s.

Now, a very important lesson taught us by the Korean peoples, north and south, needs to be taken to heart: why has South Korea been so successful and the North not at all?

One answer is governance.  Capitalism can’t work its benefits under political conditions of rent extraction (government as landlord) and moral, political and cultural oppressions.

Here is stunning evidence of the difference made by political and cultural systems on the quality of human living:

The darkness in North Korea is more than not having electricity.

Learning about the philosophy of Jo Shik may give us a clue as to the origins of South Korean excellence.  Morality might, after all, make a difference in the quality of our living in community.

Halim Rane, our colleague in the study of the covenants given by the Prophet Muhammad to respect and protect Christians and Jews – examples of principled leadership for peaceful coexistence – has recently published a new article, “Human Security and Peaceful Coexistence in Islam: Analysis of Covenants in the Qur’an and Sunnah,” written with impressive scholarly precision and offering us unusual insights concerning the textual traditions of Islam.

I urge you to read Halim’s thoughts and conclusions at your earliest convenience.

This article, to me, is one of the most important contributions yet made by a member of our small study group of volunteers who have examined and discussed the covenants of the Prophet for 4 years now.

In particular, Halim points to less noticed textual interdependencies providing excellent guidance on how best to read Surah 9 of the Qur’an on management of inter-faith and inter-communal relations under conditions of tension and disagreement at the time of the Prophet and the revelations of the Qur’an.

To me, Halim’s scholarship provides good reasons to believe in the contemporary importance of the covenants of the Prophet and related texts in the Qur’an and the Hadith, not to mention the Sunnah of the Prophet himself, for making practical and effective peaceful co-existence within the Abrahamic traditions.