As many Calgarians loosen their belts after a few too many helpings of turkey, the first syllable of our recent holiday is a not-so-subtle “Christ”-mas reminder that not everyone in our city is celebrating the same thing. This is familiar territory for Bill Phipps and Carolyn Pogue, a couple of Calgary trailblazers in promoting multi-faith.

Pogue’s new book, A World of Faith, is a teenager’s guide to world religions. Over nine chapters, she explores the goddess, aboriginal spirituality, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Seikhism and Baha’i, then wraps them together in a tidy, final chapter. “It’s a peace book,” she says. “It asks, ‘What do we have in common? How will we use our common stories, traditions and ideas to heal our planet?’”

For each chapter, Pogue interviewed a teenager practising one of the above faiths to see what day-to-day life is like in that tradition. Also, in every chapter, Pogue outlines how each faith has its own version of being green and the golden rules — do unto the Earth and unto others, as you would have them do unto you.

The book also includes a foreword by His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, who recently moderated the World Conference of Religions for Peace. “He’s a giant on the world stage for inter-faith,” says Pogue. “In the foreword, he says that the religious perspective can’t just be a pleasant afterthought. It’s got to be hooked into political dialogue.”

Phipps’s book, Cause for Hope: Humanity at the Crossroads, contains politics aplenty. “Whether you look at climate change, extreme militarism, the gap between rich and poor, the plundering of the Earth, humanity faces a crossroads,” he says. “Every society lives a narrative, and we’re living an old story, one of patriarchy, violence and an economy that depends on winners and losers. This old story is leading us over the abyss, and it can no longer sustain us.”

Underlying all the issues of politics, economy and ecology, Phipps proposes that humanity faces a spiritual crisis. “What are human beings for?” he asks. “How are we to relate to one another? How do we live as part of creation, and not masters over it?” While he outlines a bleak picture of the world, his titular cause for hope is that millions of organizations around the world, from river-keepers to micro-creditors, are putting aside their boundaries to work toward positive change.

“I believe that the spiritual traditions of the world have ancient wisdom that can contribute to addressing these issues,” says Phipps. “If the traditions can come out from behind all our dogma and arrogance, all that nonsense about ‘We are the only ones with the truth,’ and look at the traditions’ complementary social ethics, spiritual wisdom can help us write a new story. It’s possible for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, First Nations, Wiccas and all sorts of different traditions to sit down and act together.”

A World of Faith and Cause for Hope were published in October 2007, and are both available through CopperHouse Press.

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