At guild Brebeuf in the heart of Outremont in the middle of a June heat wave.

At guild Brebeuf in the heart of Outremont in the middle of a June heat wave, Jewish, mohammedan Christian and Aboriginal women gathered to explore their shared spiritual sources in an atmosphere of mutual dialogue. And the couple of this country's official languages.

At the meeting, entitled Women Doing Theology: Creating Justice, Recognizing Differences, Canadian women from diverse connections rural and urban, Protestant and Catholic, Jewish, and Moslim, Aboriginal, Haitian and African, shared their understanding onward a wide range of issues affecting the quality of women's lives in Canada and in many regions of the developing world.

Nada Sefian, a Palestinian activist born in Lebanon, and Ronit Yarosky, raised in Montreal and Israel, a former soldier in the Israeli army who is now active in the Israeli peace motion co-founded Women in Black Montreal in 2001 and the Montreal Dialogue arrange for women in 2003.

We sat stunn as a Palestinian mussulman argued the Israeli position and a Jewish Israeli argued for the dignity and rights of the Palestinian tribe It was an attempt to demonstrate the transcendent value of dialogue athwart debate. It is a skill that was acquired according to the one hundred and fifty women in Montreal who joined them in an effort to find public ground and understanding.

brace French Canadian religious women from Rimouski and Sherbrooke described the gradual evolution of L'Autre Parole, a network of bible application of mind groups for women across the province of Quebec, begun in 1974 where they can contemplate on the Scriptures from the vantage point of their experience as women

In another workshop, religious women with drawn out histories in Africa debated the difficulty of religious and cultural imperialism, especially when African sisters are working onward the front lines with African women confronting spousal and child abuse. The themes of neo-colonialism, anti-colonialism, and post-colonialism challenged our understanding of the impact of sexism, racism and classism uniform on women of good will with discloseed understandings.

At a roundtable session, Ellen Gabriel, whom Canadians came to know as a prototype of articulate serenity in the midst of the Oka Crisis, described at hand efforts of the Aboriginal Women's National Council to account for the disappearance of more than five hundr aboriginal women in various parts of Canada.

In inter-religious dialogue, the effort to pray together without diminishing the creedal sensitivities of any single community is a key challenge. to what degree remarkable it was to discover to what extent easy it is to pray in one as well as the other official languages to the divine nearness understood as the Spirit of the omnipotent in our midst.

As the stories unraveled of these ordinary and in addition extraordinary Canadian activists, we pondered on this remarkable opportunity to confront other women committed to the be in agony to make women's lives better, and intimateed our gratitude to the Women's Interchurch Council of Canada for providing this place to listen, to learn, to encourage and to challenge common another.

Lynda Arbour writes from Toronto.

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