Stories
Another amazing grassroots effort in the Middle East is Combatants for Peace, a group of former Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers who have united to reject violence and tell their stories to each other as a way of finding peace.
There's roads and there's roads And they call, can't you hear it? Roads of the earth And roads of the spirit . . .
- Bruce Cockburn's "Child of the Wind"
Mali. Mozambique. Central America. The Himalayas. Kosovo.
"Good" Friday was real good this year. We remembered Jesus, and we remembered Jesus disguised in the "least of these" -- those who continue to be tortured, spit on, slapped, insulted, misunderstood
NPR's Wade Goodwyn has been working on this story ever since he attended the premier of the film American Violet at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Hearne, Texas, three weeks ago.
Peace actions often evoke disgust, anger, and fear from the uninvolved bystander. Epithets are hurled at the demonstrators, with coward and traitor perhaps the favorites. Why should advocating peace evoke fear from the bystander?
When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. In 1999, I participated in protests that shut down the WTO meeting in Seattle. In 2008, I read this book and finally understood why!
Social location is vital to understanding how people come to their interpretations, and appropriations, of the Bible and its stories.
Folks in my line of work ... i.e., writers in the field of religion ... do a lot of talking and lecturing during the fall, winter, and spring months when schools are in session and everyone more or less agrees that vacation time is over and done with for another [...]
This Training for Change conference was a good experience, one that I did not expect and that challenged me deeply. One of the tools we practiced was learning to tell our personal stories to build relationships with each other. I'm not very good at that, and I have a hard time finding the desire to open up to strangers.
But the more the ideas of "relationships" and "stories" were [...]