The twentieth century was the century of the exile, a time of tremendous world migration and upheaval. In the West, this upheaval has contributed to an increasing multicultural, multiethnic and multifaith complexity that is both exciting and somewhat baffling. People of different religions, cultures, ethnicities and nationalities live, work, vote and play side by side, and yet still lack a vocabulary with which to communicate in a spirit of mutual understanding and respect.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and what has followed in their wake, are a dramatic and tragic illustration of just how little mutual understanding there is in our world. In their search for explanations, many in the West have pointed to religion as the root cause of the hatred and fanaticism that motivated the terrorist attacks, seeking comfort in our Western structures and laws that claim to be secular and pluralistic. Such laws, the argument goes, allow us to come together by keeping our differences out of public debate, and are thus a way of accommodating our increasing religious, ethnic and cultural diversity.

Still others argue the attacks had nothing to do with religion, motivated rather by a deep cultural and political hatred of American imperialism around the globe. The relative merits of these arguments aside, what both imply is that religion can be cleanly separated out of civic society and left to find its own way on its own terms. This is never more obvious than in the unstintingly "secular" Western media. Religious practice and belief are "covered" somewhere on a back page or in a weekend afternoon show, isolated from the rest of the news like quaint, sometimes saccharine, perhaps fascinating, often terrifying, museum pieces.

As with any relationship between a minority and a majority group, the minority tends to understand the majority better than the other way around. The "religious" often have little difficulty understanding the pervasive phenomenon of secularism, while "secularists" seem to lack a clear understanding of what religion is about. In the so-called secular West today, practising believers live a kind of uneasy exile as they find themselves forced to leave their personal faith and spiritual beliefs at the office door.

In this majority-minority relationship, however, it is the "religious" (many of them in the closet, admittedly) who are actually in the majority. In 2000, according to prominent sociologist Reginald Bibby, 83 percent of Canadians associated themselves with a religious denomination and 81 percent attested to a belief in God.

While weekly attendance at religious services has dropped since World War II, spiritual and religious movements - both traditional and relatively unfamiliar - are on the rise in the West. There is a growing sense that the institutions and approaches we have trusted to advance human welfare - such as economic development and "value-free" science - prove inadequate when they exclude a spiritual dimension.

Just what is secularism anyway? With its own complex series of moral assumptions and ethical values, it is far from being the antithesis of religious belief and might even be termed another stance (or perhaps stances) of belief in itself. If we really want to achieve mutual understanding and respect in our societies, we need to move beyond outdated models of secular-spiritual opposition. We need greater understanding and communication between the many differing positions of belief and unbelief.

Voices Across Boundaries hopes to contribute to this journey by providing a venue in which people representing diverse traditions and beliefs can share their insights into social, cultural, ethical and spiritual questions. Voices treats public matters and current events from a perspective of faith, and matters of faith and religion in an accessible way.

Voices publishes a variety of materials, including essays, art, fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. The centrepiece of each issue is a theme section, approaching the theme through experience, reflection, analysis and creative expression. The magazine also contains nontheme articles on various topics, book reviews, arts coverage and criticism, and a variety of features.

Voices is published by Across Boundaries Multifaith Institute, a charitable educational organization whose goal is to increase knowledge and understanding of religious faith traditions, their history, practices and place in the contemporary world. Participants in the Institute's activities represent a variety of traditions and, while hoping to reach some common understanding, seek neither to blur the boundaries between traditions nor to convert any of these traditions to a single vision. Rather, the Institute's intention is to encourage communication and cooperation across these boundaries - across faith traditions, across cultures, across spaces, across the traditional divide between the religious and secular realms.

In its inaugural issue, Voices tackles the theme "Killing for our beliefs." History has provided countless examples of people willing to die for their religious, cultural or political beliefs. They are often turned into martyrs, heroes, icons by their peoples. While we may admire the courage and faith it takes to face death in this way, it also raises questions. At what point does this singleness of purpose become terrifying as well as commendable? If dying for one's beliefs is mysterious, killing in the name of Truth, God, Justice or some other ideal is perhaps even harder to understand.

The question of whether such killing can ever be justifiable, and if so on what grounds, seems more urgent than ever given current events. To the horror of most of the world, Osama bin Laden considered it right to kill 3,000 people in New York and Washington in the name of his beliefs. George W. Bush responded by unleashing lethal military force in the name of his beliefs, first in Afghanistan and subsequently in Iraq. Bush and his supporters regard this response as a just and appropriate way of dealing with terrorism; many others disagree. How do we judge?

Voices explores some of the questions raised by killing for one's beliefs. The quest for purity is a widespread human ideal. When does this ideal shift from being a form of personal betterment to becoming a radical and violent rejection of the flawed and impure? In this issue, philosopher Charles Taylor writes about the roots of what he terms "categorial" violence, its elements of ritual, its language of purification, its need for a scapegoat.

How do different belief systems reconcile their teachings with acts of violence? Arvind Sharma considers how Hindu teachings shaped the life and death of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's resolute refusal to follow a path of violence, his radical acts of peace, which he believed to be at the heart of his Hindu religion, ultimately led to his assassination by a fellow Indian who also claimed to be acting in the name of his Hindu beliefs.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam would seem to have the unfortunate label of being the religion most closely identified, at least in the West, with killing for one's beliefs. This kind of violence against others, however, is far from inherent to its teachings, nor is it unique to Islam. In an exclusive interview with Voices, Seyyed Hossein Nasr shares his views on Islam and its place in the world.

Other articles explore a variety of personal responses to and reflections on war and killing in different traditions and different parts of the world - the Tibetan monks' response to the Chinese invasion of 1959, violence in the name of God in Christian history, the many sides of Mennonite pacifism, and the culture of "killology" in the secular West.

Finally, in our principal nontheme article, comparative legal scholar Amyn Sajoo considers the contemporary face-off between the religious and the secular, looking to the Islamic tradition for insight into the intertwining of these ostensibly opposite stances.

There will be many more questions to explore along the road: from culture and the arts to politics and science, from prayer and theology to ethics and society, never losing sight of the problems of endemic conflict, human rights abuses and increasing political and economic disparities in Canada and the world as a whole. This issue represents our first step. Voices invites you to join us on the journey.