Facilitators needed!

Hi all,

We look forward to seeing you at the UNESCO Chair conference on October 21!

Please email Kara if you are able to facilitate discussion groups with high school students from 11 - 12pm on October 21 as part of the conference. Facilitators will need to be present throughout the morning in order to generate discussion about what the speakers present. We will have a discussion guide for you to work from and will be happy to provide a letter for professors explaining your absence from class.

Thank you!

Ninth Annual International Human Rights Conference on Religion
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
9:00 A.M.
Student Union Theatre

Conference overview:
Whereas religion has been one of the richest and most local of human activities that has fostered human solidarity beyond provincial grounding, it has also at times, in its exclusivist approach, been used to discriminate against other people. There has, therefore, been an uneasy fit between religious and human rights thinking and approach. Thus today, for example, the so called thesis on the clash of civilization is in fact a coded expression about possible conflicts between different religious traditions.

This conference is convened to probe into three related issues. The first is to assess how religion and human rights have symbiotically interacted in human history. The second is to examine why sometimes advocacy of freedom of worship has resulted in the restriction of cultural diversity or diversity of values. And the third is to share and recommend approaches that might lead to dialogue among religions, as well as reciprocal and reinforcing interaction between religion and human rights.

Speakers include: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, MJ Akbar, Zahid Bukhari, David Coppola, T. Jeremy Gunn, Rosalind Hackett and Madhu Kishwar

To register, please call 486.0647. For a conference schedule, please visit: www.unescochair.uconn.edu.