Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The Goal

The Goal


Film and the Internet are powerful media, whether for good or ill. Many religious and cultural scholars have said that the worldwide web will have the same positive effect on human interaction that the Gutenberg printing press had in the fifteenth century. It has already opened unprecedented channels between once-divided peoples, and reduced and challenged the power of propaganda on all sides.


Children of Abraham will change and improve the quality of inter-faith and inter-cultural dialogue. It will illuminate the sources of our troubled past; dissolve misperceptions of contemporary East/West relations; and pave the way for a peaceful future, maintained by perpetual dialogue on its website.


Thus, the film will comprise one version of our story, and the website will become a second and ever-changing version, a perpetual gathering place and a kind of guided “YouTube” experience. Young people worldwide will contribute their interpretations of Todenhöfer’s message. Chat-rooms will enable new forms of interaction and collaboration. Mosques, churches, schools, synagogues, and companies from Vancouver to the Hindu Kush can talk with each other here. The dialogue becomes multi-dimensional and continual, a living embodiment of our common hope. Finally, we are all children of Abraham.


All three of the Abrahamic traditions are seeking freedom of belief, social justice through empathy with “the other,” and a code of personal responsibility. It is when one monotheistic tradition tries to impose itself upon another, when it becomes “supremacist,” that we degrade each other’s beliefs and put them in service to mere political ends.


Children of Abraham seeks to harmonize those three voices, once and for all. It is designed to transcend borders, to encourage young people to think for themselves, to talk to each other in new and exciting ways, and to remake the world in their image.

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