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June 13, 2018
Please join us and our guest, Dena Merriam, for a show on My Journey Through Time, A Spiritual Memoir of LIFE, DEATH, and REBIRTH.
Dena began working in the interfaith movement in the late 1990s, when she served as vice-chair of the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, held at the United Nations in New York. She subsequently convened a meeting of women religious and spiritual leaders at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, and from that gathering founded the Global Peace Initiative of Women (GPIW: www.gpiw.org) in 2002, an organization chaired by a multi-faith group of women spiritual leaders. The mission of this organization is to enable women to facilitate healing and reconciliation in areas of conflict and post-conflict, and to bring spiritual resources to help address critical global problems.
Since its founding, GPIW has been working on programs in Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Cambodia. GPIW also developed—in partnership with the United Nations—a global leadership program for young community leaders. GPIW’s work in the area of peacebuilding has expanded to include fostering new models of development, inclusive and sustainable, and to changing attitudes toward the environment, thereby regaining the sense of awe, respect and reverence for earth and her life systems.
Through her work in the interfaith world, Dena found that women and the Eastern religious traditions were very much under-represented at international inter-religious gatherings. She came to believe that the voices of these constituents are essential for greater world balance and for creating a new dynamic that will enable us to successfully address many of the global challenges we now face. Her work at GPIW has been devoted to creating a global platform for women religious and spiritual leaders, and to engaging the Hindu and Buddhist leadership more actively on the world stage.
To learn more visit GPIW.org.
