By TIO Staff
A New Observer Feature
This month TIO begins a monthly feature, “TIO in Canada,” edited by Terry Weller, who lives outside of Toronto and adds this to the responsibilities he already has as TIO’s assistant editor.
Each month in this section you’ll be able to go to Canadian Interfaith Events & Opportunities. This month you’ll find a dozen events and opportunities listed, rich offerings if you are anywhere close. Yes, Toronto is featured the most, but that’s because we need to hear from the rest of you – Montreal, Edmonton, Vancouver, and the rest of you, put us on your mailing lists!
Send your Canadian events and programs to info@theinterfaithobserver.org with Canada in the subject line; or directly to Terry, at tweller@openquest.ca. A simple e-mail and (if you can) a digital photo or two means interfaith activists across Canada will hear about you. TIO publishes on the 15th of each month, so get the notices you want promoted in by the first of the month.
Please send us your news items and feature stories as well, including links to digital media that cover your community.
Two Canadian stories are highlighted in TIO this month – a profile of the remarkable educational work at Scarboro Missions in Toronto, the other featuring John Cotter’s “Canadian Churches Speak Out on Northern Gateway Oil Sands Pipeline” in the Canadian Press, which you’ll find in this month’s Interfaith News aggregation. If you’ll send us local interfaith news stories, we include them in TIO in Canada.
At one level, featuring “TIO in Canada” each month is an attempt to facilitate calendars, networking, and relationships at the local level built into a larger, international publication. So how does an international publication promote locally? TIO in Canada will try to answer that question. If it works, it is conceivable that we will see “TIO in…” other countries as time goes on.
To make this work in Canada, Interfaith Unity News, edited by Terry for the last six years, is merging into TIO, and bringing along 1,286 subscribers, which more than doubles the 996 subscriptions TIO generated this past year. In the process we have become much more a North American publication, more capable now than before to build strong relations with the rest of the world’s interfaith communities.