Above:The Baha'i House of Worship of Asia. Below:Life and times of your fellow World Citizen, Kolya

Class Teaches Virtues to Children of Many Faiths

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Morning Edition, March 7, 2008 · It sounds like the start of a bad joke: A Jew, a Baptist and a Baha'i get together every Sunday morning ...

But it's a new kind of Sunday school, where families from a range of religions gather to teach virtues to their young children. On a recent Sunday in Falls Church, Va., Layli and Gil Miller-Muro invited parents and children — aged 14 months to 6 years old — to their home to learn about helpfulness.

"Parents of my generation feel incredible pressure to make our kids read earlier, to know math sooner and better, to get into the top preschools and then the best schools," Layli explains. "But what many of us forget is the other side of the character of our children, not just the academic side, but the spiritual side and their character side."

And so last September, the Miller-Muros, who are Baha'i, approached their religious community and asked them to sponsor a virtues class — where the children learn virtues such as obedience, service and friendliness.

In the past decade, the Baha'i faith has sponsored about 900 such classes nationwide. They're based on the central Baha'i tenet that all religions are different but come from the same source, God. Gil says the couple then asked their friends if they'd be interested.

"When we proposed this idea to them, they said that was something they'd like to do to," Gil says. "So we realized we had a critical mass and it was time to get started."

The parents come from Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Greek Orthodox and Baha'i backgrounds. Rachel Galoob-Ortega, who is Jewish, says she wants her son Luka to learn about and accept all religions.

"What I really want for Luka is when he grows up and someone says to him, 'I'm Baha'i' or 'I'm Zoroastrian' — if he doesn't know, for him to say, 'Well, tell me about that,"" Galoob-Ortega says. "I want him to show a level of curiosity, rather thinking, 'Well, that's not Judaism, that's not what I know.' And to me, that would be important to the development of his character."

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