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| Fifth Edition 2004: Julius
Caesar was so impressed with Aristarchus' Alexandrian method of reckoning
the passage of time he discovered in Egypt that he imported the system
to Rome, just in time for Jesus to be born around 4-6 B.C. Jesus
was born before the Birth of Christ because in AD 527 the monk Dionysius
Exiguus appears to have been a few years off when he decided that the Annunciation
must have occurred on March 25 of the Roman year 754 (ab urbe condita)
in time for Christmas on December 25 of the year he decided to call AD
1. In other words, AD 1 was really AD 4, 5, or 6. In AD 1582 Pope
Gregory XIII reformed the ancient Julian calendar, and ten or eleven days
were lost in the process, at least in the West.
Ingrid Shafer January 2004 Fourth Edition 2003: Once again I am updating my Golden Rule calendars. I hope you will enjoy them throughout the coming year. Please note a special new calendar based on St. Francis "Canticle of the Sun" (I am using a medieval Italian text). Third Edition 2002: It's New Year's night -- about 2:30 a.m. the morning of 1 January 2002. Like last year I am updating my Golden Rule calendars. I hope you will enjoy them throughout the coming year. Ingrid Shafer
Second Edition 2001: It's New Year's night -- about 2:00 a.m. the morning of 1 January 2001. I've decided to update last year's calendars -- The Golden Rule is no less important today than it was a year ago. Most of the images are the same, though I may eventually add a few new calendars and change some of the existing images. I also invite you to enjoy my Christmas/New Year's card with a Flash movie at http://www.ecumene.org/noel2000/ . Ingrid Shafer
Original Introduction: As the new millennium approaches I remember the horrors ushered in by the frenzy of the Year A.D. 1000 – centuries of crusades, pogroms, witch hunts, wars, and slaughter, all in the name of one, Jesus of Nazareth -- Jeshua the Jew -- who had come as a messenger of divine love and grace. He reminded his disciples of the Golden Rule – as had Rabbi Hillel and Jewish Scripture long before Hillel, and told the world that to follow him, people had to practice love – to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, offer hospitality to strangers, clothe those in need of clothing, take care of the sick, and visit prisoners (Matthew 25: 35-36). In sum, Jesus calls us to love others as we love ourselves, and that is a way of life that can be practiced by every single human being on earth. As a Catholic who was born in Austria just before Word War II, I have a profound sense of sorrow and shame at the warp Christianity contributed to the woof of the lethal cloth of cultural antisemitism that was at least a necessary condition of the Holocaust. As an American, I have seen countless instances of religious fanaticism, ethnic hatred, and homophobia justified by appealing to supposedly Christian principles. As a human being, I know that all religions can be used to demonize others. However, the religions of the world also contain seeds of kindness and compassion, and those seeds must be carefully tended and allowed to take root, spread, and bear fruit in the field of human consciousness to help us build the earth. I have a dream that the next millennium will be a millennium of growing awareness that all of us on earth, no matter what our color of skin or our religion, are sisters and brothers, members of one human family called to support one another and take care of the earth and the biosphere. I also believe that the Internet can become a vehicle for such a transformation of consciousness. In this spirit I am offering a selection of calendars for the year 2000 that can be viewed on the web or printed out. The calendars contain images of moments of meaning I captured with my camcorder and imagination – images of human and animal faces, the wonders of nature and technology, the marvelous variety of cultural expressions, images of friends, family, passing strangers. The images were recorded in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. A few are original computer art. For each month I also cite a version of the Golden Rule from a different religious tradition (most of the passages can be found in Leonard Swidlers online article "Global Dialogue and Global Ethic" (http://astro.temple.edu/~dialogue/swdag_an.htm). If you know of other versions for religions I have not included, please, let me know. These calendars are offered on the web as a gift to humanity, but I retain the copyright to the images. You are free to make copies for others, and even place the calendars into your own website (though I would prefer a link to this site), but please, do not sell the calendars, copy them without this page, or use the images for commercial purposes. If you feel called to pay for the gift, send a contribution to an organization dedicated to educating the young, building bridges between cultures and persons, working for world peace, developing ecological responsibility, reducing the suffering of people and animals, or to one of the organizations with which I am associated -- the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church (http://arcc-catholic-rights.org/), the Global Dialogue Institute (http://astro.temple.edu/~dialogue/), or the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (http://www.usao.edu). I also want to thank the Zygon Center for Religions and Science (http://www.zygoncenter.org/) and the Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions (http://www.cpwr.org/) for inviting me to participate in the 1999 event in Cape Town, South Africa. It is there, during the last day of the Assembly, that the notion for creating this set of calendars first vaguely emerged in my consciouness. If you are using one of the calendars, please send me a note at ecumene@ecumene.org. Let us all work together to transform ours into a truly humane world where heart and head are balanced, with liberty, justice, respect for one another, kindness, compassion, a sense of wonder, and a chance for all to be happy and experience joy! Ingrid Shafer
Technical note: In
order to allow the calendar pages to print out correctly, I did not put
links to all the pages for the year into the page for every month.
You have to return to the index page (the page that looks just like this
when you first link to the calendar of your choice) and retrieve the appropriate
month either from the top or the bottom of the page. Usually, this is best
done by using the back-button in your browser. The calendars are formatted
for a Netscape browser. You may have to experiment with display and
print options, especially of you use another browser. If you have set your
browser to display text only, you will have to change the default in order
to view and print the images. Keep in mind that I am using the page
you are viewing now both as introductory page to the entire set of
calendars and separately, as top page for each of the calendars. While
the pages look alike, the URL will differ slightly, depending on the name
of the folder (directory) of the calendar of your choice.
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W. H. Auden |
Leonard Swidler |