Today (third Sunday in January)
is World Religion Day. Established in 1950 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the
Bahá'ís of the United States, World Religion Day has been
increasingly taken up in other countries - at first by national and local
Bahá'í communities in different parts of the world, although it has also become
an event widely recognised and keenly celebrated by people of other faiths
too. The purpose of World Religion Day is to:
- bring together people of various faith communities
- celebrate the unifying power of religion
- promote inter faith understanding
- encourage religious leaders and adherents to acknowledge the similarities between their faiths and work together for the common good.
In the United States, 16 January is National Religious Freedom Day, officially proclaimed each year by an annual statement by the President of the United States. I can't say whether it's more than just a happy accident that these two dates are observed so close together, but hopefully, there's a mutual reinforcement of the positive message of the unifying power of religion, that it can illumine hearts and minds with its own positive light.
While there's no celebration of World
Religion Day in Leicester today, the event at De Montfort University tomorrow
(Monday 21 January) has been scheduled to recognise and tag on to World
Religion Day. That’s definitely progress. When I've blogged about World Religion Day in previous years (see blog posts for 2010, 2011 and 2012) I've lamented the local neglect of what could be a very significant event for Leicester. DMU is holding the first public observance in Leicester of this annual
occasion that I know of (although it's being billed as Celebrating
Diversity on Campus: Religion or Belief Showcase to
help make it more specific to the university).
There’s a good collection of tweets about World
Religion Day, many of which show what's happening in other places around the
world. Just search #worldreligionday. Our American
friends may or may not know that today is also given over to a number of other "national days", including Buttercrunch Day, Cheese Lovers' Day, Penguin Awareness Day, Disc Jockey Day. There are clearly just too many of these days for the
calendar to accommodate, so some of them have to bunch up and share. Today is also Buzz Aldrin's birthday. Now that's more like it!
