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Peace Building - Part 2
Part 1 of this article (in October) gave a link, http://peacepolicy.nd.edu/, to three sharply different views among faculty members of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame about the intervention in Libya. The article remarked, "The three statements illustrate the difficulties, the ambiguities and the many unknowns in efforts to form and strengthen beneficial relations among international actors. The three also illustrate the fact that there can be widely different opinions as what actual steps to take - in this case to protect human lives and promote international peace - even among those who adhere closely to Catholic Social Teaching."
This Part 2 first calls attention to two links:
1. Catholic Peacebuilding Network, http://cpn.nd.edu/
2. "Peace by piece" interview of Maryann Cusimano Love from U.S. Catholic, September, 2011, http://www.uscatholic.org/culture/war-and-peace/2011/07/peace-piece-peacebuilding-maryann-cusimano-love
The main content of this article consists of the following excerpts from "Religious Identity, Justice, and Hope: The Case of Peacebuilding" by Lisa Sowle Cahill, http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/criterion/spring_10.pdf, pages 2-9:
"[T]he Catholic Peacebuilding Network (CPN), [is] a project of Catholic Relief Services and the University of Notre Dame. This project links activists and academics from around the world who seek to create and build on the conditions for a just and lasting peace. Peacebuilding requires communication across ethnic, religious, and political allegiances...
"Especially today [theology students] are interested in the potential of religion to create or undermine solidarity with those who suffer burdens such as global poverty, HIV/AIDS, domestic violence and sex trafficking, ethnic conflict and civil war, or environmental degradation...
"CPN brought theologians and other academics together with practitioners and church leaders at conferences in Mindanao, the Philippines; Bujumbura, Burundi; and Bogota, Colombia. Our assignment was to begin developing a theology of peace, in conversation with activists and pastoral workers with real experience of the challenges, successes, and failures to which our theologies must be true...
"[F]or social renewal after violence... [w]hat is required is a new or reconstructed narrative in which memories of violence are confronted, the past is truthfully acknowledged, and the violated identities of the victims are reclaimed... Even more than retribution or reparations, social trust requires a new, shared narrative of past and future that includes basic mutual respect. That shared narrative can take hold only through shared practices of mutual respect, practices that often begin with very small and tentative steps."
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