Dear Friends,

Greetings of love and peace. In late August, ninety representatives of 21 Cooperation Circles from eleven countries gathered in Iguaçu Falls, Brazil for the Third URI Latin America regional assembly. The four-day assembly focused on healing, networking and building capacity for effective action to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing for the Earth and all living beings.

Dear Friends,

Greetings and peace from Iguaçu Falls, Brazil at the end of the first day of the Third URI Latin America regional assembly.  Ninety representatives of 21 Cooperation Circles from eleven countries shared a rich and engaging beginning to what promises to be a powerful, inspiring and empowering assembly.

After breakfast at our hotel, we boarded three buses and for a half-an-hour drive through the outskirts of this city of 300,000 inhabitants, to the biological reserve of Itaipu, the company that built and operates the world’s largest hydroelectric plant on the Parana River. In the mid-seventies, before construction on the power plant began, the population here was 15,000. As construction began, the population more than tripled in one year to 50,000 and within a few years had grown to over 200,000, with Itaipu employing more than 80,000.

Dear Friends,

Greetings of love and peace.

I’d like to share two events that reflect a great deal about this day at the Latin America Regional Assembly.

First, following breakfast I started a conversation with Isabel Ramos, an Indigenous woman from Cordoba, Argentina. We began talking during a walk and continued through the half-hour bus ride to our meeting site. During our conversation, Isabel shared her concerns about the challenges her family faced because her brother is a member of the local Anglican church and has been taught that his ancestral tradition is false and he must abandon it.

Not only has this created a great division within the family, it has disrupted their livelihood because their agricultural practices are based on honoring the Pachamana, Mother Earth, and these practices are part of what the brother now feels is forbidden by his Christian religion. People are hungry because of a religion, Isabel told me.

Is it possible, she asked, for two traditions – the Anglican and an Indigenous cosmovision – to co-exist? Does one have to destroy the other? I attempted to say, no, one doesn’t have to destroy the other; and, yes, it is possible for the two to co-exist, but that doesn’t mean a particular priest or bishop will believe that it is possible. And what a local bishop or priest believes will determine what is taught in a particular church.