Comments on the World Conference on Religions for Peace

September 30, 2008

WCRP (the World Conference on Religions for Peace, known more commonly as Religions for Peace) is the world's largest interfaith organization, and it is increasingly engaged in mobilizing religious communities in support of the Millennium Development Goals. Thus during what has become an annual stocktaking of progress towards the MDGs that is integrally part of the annual United Nations General Assembly meetings, WCRP organized a series of events to advance the cause. The centerpiece was a half day meeting on September 24, aimed to bring together government leaders and representatives from the UN agencies with religious leaders. A declaration that stressed the moral imperatives of honoring the pledges that all world nations and governments have undertaken through the 2000 Millennium Declaration was circulated after the meeting.

The event aimed very high, but sadly was rather caught in the frenzy of the extraordinary number of events that today surround the annual General Assembly meetings, with attention inevitably diverted by today's financial crisis. The meetings nonetheless highlighted the growing focus within many religious communities on both the moral and practical dimensions of the MDG framework and challenge. The meeting was characterized by moving reminders of the "brutal reality" of global poverty with repeated focus on the moral dimensions of the effort to end it. A theme woven throughout was the reminder to governments to honor their pledges. All the speakers stressed the potential force and energy of religious communities and leaders (who meet their followers weekly or even daily) to bring action.

About the Author

Katherine Marshall

Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, leads the center’s work on religion and global development. She is also a professor of the practice of development, conflict, and religion in the Walsh School of Foreign Service, teaching diverse courses on the ethics of development work and mentoring students at many levels. She helped to create and now serves as the executive director of the World Faiths Development Dialogue, an NGO that works to enhance bridges between different sectors and institutions. In September 2022, she was appointed as a member of the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Marshall has five decades of experience on a variety of development issues in Africa, Latin America, East Asia, and the Middle East, particularly those facing the world’s poorest countries. She was a World Bank officer from 1971 to 2006, and she led the World Bank’s faith and ethics initiative between 2000 and 2006. Marshall is a member of the Working Group on Child Rights and Family Values and the Working Group on Displaced Persons and Hospitality to the Stranger, both part of the Culture of Encounter Project.