ABOUT ISDnA

• Vision
• Partners
• Brother Wayne
• History of ISDnA
• ISDnA Organizer Group
• Religious Understanding

InterSpiritual Dialogue founded by Brother Wayne and Friends in 2002

InterSpiritual Dialogue ("ISD", subsumed by ISDnA in 2005) was the original association founded in 2002 under the tutelage of Brother Wayne Teasdale, author of The Mystic Heart: Finding a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions, and through which Brother Wayne elucidated his vision of interspirituality and interspiritual dialogue.

With Bro. Wayne and a core group of New Yorkers, InterSpiritual Dialogue was organized in the New York area with the aid of the National Service Conference of the American Ethical Union, an accredited NGO at the United Nations. As UN Department of Public Information accreditation requires, InterSpiritual Dialogue was incorporated in New York, and now works closely with the Spiritual-, Values- and Earth Values- Caucus's at the UN, and the Committee on Spirituality and Global Affairs, providing, along with its new One Spirit Learnin Alliance education program, among many other activities, an "InterSpiritual Ceremony for Peace" on many of the the UN's annual International Days of Peace.

During the period 2002-2004, Brother Wayne visited and counseled the New York-based group, which then expanded to form its "New York Circles" and the eventual co-founding of New York City's Coalition for OneVoice. ISD's informal associations on four continents assembled a farflung trans-traditional group of spiritual writers, teachers, and leaders as "Friends" (formerly the "Counselors") of the ongoing project who are now the "Friends of ISDnA". Participants in the various ISD associations joined in Barcelona (with Gorakh Hayashi, Theatre Group Dzieci and others) to present a program on InterSpiritual Dialogue at the 2004 Parliament of the World's Religions. At that time Brother Wayne was too ill to attend.

Following the 2004 World Parliament, and particularly after Brother Wayne's transition, ISD began working closely with Gorakh Hayashi, and others of Common Ground and among Brother Wayne's many friends worldwide, to further Brother Wayne's vision of an international association to promote interspirituality and interspiritual dialogue expressed in The Mystic Heart. A group of ISD participants from two continents, at the invitation of the founders of The Crossings retreat center in Austin, Texas, Ken and Joyce Beck, attended the 2005 Austin Common Ground event and established InterSpiritual Dialogue in Action (ISDnA). Oscar Miro-Quesada, a founding Counselor and ISD and celebrated Andean shamanic teacher and ceremonialist, provided ceremony for the event and many of Wayne's friends and associates, including Fr. Thomas Keating, Gorakh Hayashi, Kurt Johnson, Joan Borysenko and Betty Sue Flowers facilitated parts of the tribute event.

After 2005 ISDnA nurtured circles in New York City, Chicago and elsewhere and initiated it virtual color newsletter Infinite Sensitivity edited by Ruth Frye of Zurich, Switzerland. It continued its yearly activities across its numerous locations up through Common Ground 2007 and the founding of the New York based education program in cooperation with the OneSpirit Learning Alliance and Interfaith Seminary.