Author Archive

As school districts across North America – indeed perhaps across the world – struggle with how to enable students to study productively in safe, respectful school environments, more school personnel are checking into restorative justice and asking themselves whether the practices of “RJ” could be applied in their environments.

Emily Willie, seminary student at Boston University School of Theology and summer intern with JustPeace, delivered this message at a chapel service in D.C. on August 3rd. She talks about creativity, naming harm, truth-telling, James Brown, and the need to get creative in order to honor ourselves and our relationships.

Faith & Leadership: Conflict transformation doesn’t presume an inactive or non-active engagement with the world, and it doesn’t presume a non-confrontational stance with the world. But it does presume that we don’t have to stay in destructive conflicts, that they can be transformed to be creative and positive.

As a practicing attorney, Linda Warren Seely deals with a certain amount of conflict. But her Christian faith calls her to help people settle disagreements outside the legal process where possible and in ways that might be more satisfying and sustaining for all parties.

Rev. Ken Carter, District Superintendent of the Waynesville District in North Carolina, recently led a study of “The Journey: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Restorative Justice” at the Western North Carolina United Methodist Women’s School of Christian Mission. He reflected on the experience on his blog.

In January, Krista Tippett began a new project called the Civil Conversation Project – an ongoing series of radio shows and a website that yearns for new and better way “to speak and listen to each other, to live forward together, even while holding passionate disagreements.”

Guy Mande: Forgiveness, also arose as a difficult process to deal with but again necessary for reconciliation within a given community. How can those who committed several atrocities be allowed to walk freely on the streets without any sense of accountability or reparation?

The United Methodist Women have put together a video of an interfaith conversation led by Harriet Olson, Deputy General Secretary of the United Methodist Women, on what the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities have experienced together since 9/11.

BBC News covers the extraordinary act of forgiveness by Rais Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi Muslim, who reached out to his attempted murderer on death row to forgive and plea for his clemency.

Coming this Fall on PBS, will be a bold new mini-series, Women, War & Peace. The series, which begins in October 2011, challenges “the conventional wisdom that war and peace are men’s domain and to place women at the center of an urgent dialogue about conflict and security.”