2025 World Religion Day event focuses on theme of harmony

“All of our religious traditions hope for a humane community characterized by justice, peace, prosperity, and freedom from violence, exploitation and fear. As we reach across the boundaries of our traditions and find common ground with people of other faiths and work together for what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community, our hopes for just and peaceful communities will only be realized together or not at all.” 

Robert Pickering, a board member of the Minnesota Multifaith Network, read those words, written by St. Olaf professor of religion Anantanan Rambachan, the evening before 2025’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, as part of a World Religion Sunday celebration. Organized by the Interfaith Circle of Eden Prairie, this year’s event had a theme of “One Humanity: Many Paths to Harmony” and was hosted at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ west Bloomington location, where the Eden Prairie ward, or congregation, meets for worship.

World Religion Sunday, as described by Tricia Adkins of the Eden Prairie Baha’i Community at the event, was first celebrated by the Baha’is of the United States in 1950. The third Sunday of January observation, Adkins said, “aims to foster interfaith understanding and harmony by highlighting the spiritual principles shared among the world’s religions and promoting the idea of religion as a catalyst for unity and peace.” 

It has its origins, she said, in the Baha’i teaching that all major religions come from the same divine source, with the differences among religions attributed to the varying needs and capacities of the people they were intended to guide. The 2025 event was the third such annual World Religion Day gathering hosted by the Eden Prairie Interfaith Circle. 

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Increasing religious diversity, conflict recognized

Although the opening portion of both the 2024 and 2025 events included Eden Prairie resident Cheral Tsuchiya of the Twin Cities Buddhist Sangha striking the Buddhist Kansho, or calling bell, this year’s event featured a variety of different speakers addressing the updated theme of harmony, whether through prayer, personal reflections, music, or scriptural readings.

In his comments, Rabbi Harold J. Kravitz of the Minnesota Rabbinical Association acknowledged the disharmony that exists among people. “I suspect that all of us have heard people claim that it’s religion that is the source of much conflict. As painful as that is for us to confront, we cannot easily dismiss that claim, given the many examples that can be cited to support it,” Kravitz said. 

Citing his training in conflict resolution and the book “Between Eden and Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence, and Peacemaking” by Marc Gopin, Kravitz said he had come to understand that “the source of conflict in the world is not religion specifically. Rather, the source of conflict in the world is human beings.”

“Each of us can choose to escalate conflict or to de-escalate conflict,” Kravitz said. “Each of us can choose to lift ourselves in harmony of the kind tonight’s program seeks to foster, or we can make choices that contribute to the pain and the disharmony that may very well emanate from our faith.” He called on participants to “make the right choices” by showing sincere compassion for each other and deepening relationships beyond one day a year.

Kravitz’s comments were echoed in Rambachan’s words as read by Pickering. In remarks originally prepared for a November 2024 Harmony for Humanity event held in Lino Lakes, Rambachan noted the increasing religious diversity of both the U.S. and Minnesota, stating, “We will all live our lives, religious, social, and professional, in the context of religious diversity, and our children and grandchildren will do so even more than us.”

“We cannot overlook the fact that as we grow in religious diversity, we continue to struggle with the dangers of ignorance, fear, and hate that divide, alienate, and separate us from each other,” Rambachan’s statement continued, suggesting a twofold remedy that included knowing and learning about neighbors of other faiths, as well as building interreligious friendships. 

In addition to friendship strengthening communities and making it more difficult to perpetuate stereotypes, Rambachan’s words asked, “What is the meaning of knowledge if we never look into each other’s eyes and discover unity in our shared humanity?”

Hope people ‘more prepared to love our neighbor’

Rama Kisora Dasa of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) stated that peace is possible if people could look at and see each other as spiritual beings, “as living entities who are part of God.” This statement drew on a reference to Chapter 2, text 20, of the Bhagavad Gita, which references the soul as eternal. 

Dasa also spoke of similarities among ISKCON’s many names for God, including Hare, Krishna, and Rama, and the 99 names that express different attributes of God in the Islamic tradition. Earlier in the evening, Leslie Aktan, executive director of the Islamic Resource Group, and the group’s resident scholar, Tamim Saidi, had read from “The Opening” in the first chapter of the Quran in English and Arabic. This prayer for guidance, which Muslims recite several times a day, uses “Lord of the Worlds” and “Master of the Day of Judgment” among its names for God.

In closing remarks at the World Religion Sunday event, Melanie Keepman of Interfaith Circle noted that the evening’s presentations, which also included representatives from Eden Prairie’s Charis Ecumenical Catholic Community, the Minneapolis Society of Friends, Nativity Episcopal Church/Shir Tikvah Synagogue, and United Methodist Church/Interfaith Action of St. Paul, “is just a mere piece of all the different religions in the world.” 

Scott Hawkins, Minneapolis stake president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had opened the event by hoping that the presentations would serve as “a reminder to us that we are one humanity” and “that living together in harmony is not just an ideal but an achievable objective.” The hope, he said, was that people would “leave here more prepared to love our neighbor and more prepared to make a difference in our communities and in the world.”