A Case of Narrative Negotiation
One class from my MA studies at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding which continues to stick in my mind is a course called “Narrative Negotiation.” We learned about the roles of worldviews in negotiating solutions to conflict and how sometimes it’s not the issues or proposed solutions that cause a problem in…
The Stories We Tell
Much has been written on this blog about the stories we tell. This narrative perspective is becoming a stronger one in many fields of study, including therapy, education, conflict resolution, and negotiation. The basic concept is described well in Bruner’s Acts of Meaning (link). Bruner describes human efforts at making meaning as collecting information in…
Everyday Epics
More stories of the past at Kumomoto. Stories that complex-ify. Japan not as a cohesive, evil, military power all seeking destruction of neighbouring nations, but as a land of people in various societies with each their own different story of life and love and suffering, dominance and loss. There was a civil war as recent…
Stories of Salvation
Blame. Hatred. Lament. Ignorance. Shame. Defense. It might just seem like stories of the past, but the struggle for history brings out deep feelings, as I discovered in our visit last year to Kyoto. I had heard the Korean narratives of suffering under numerous invasions and finally occupation from Japan. The Korean story is our…
Rewriting History
I’ve been borrowing books from the Mennonite Church Canada Resource Centre and highly recommend their “recommended titles.” Recently, I finished Emma LaRocque’s “When the Other is Me.” According to one summary online, in this book, “Emma LaRocque presents a powerful interdisciplinary study of the Native literary response to racist writing in the Canadian historical and literary record from…
Removing Mountains
Mountaintop removal. Tar sands. Mass destruction of earth and creation for sake of getting at the coal and oil underground. While there are inevitably complexities for each community facing companies that look for energy sources in their neighbourhoods, and there are no simple stories, on an instinctive level I know it’s wrong. Why are societies…
The Narrative of Holy Violence
I agree that narrative is a major part of human reality. As Paul Loewen said here, the stories we tell make up our worlds. This can be “our” story which shapes our identity and ties us to God and the faith community. Yet, just as easily, humans seem to be able to adopt stories which…
Multi-storied Reality
“So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” – Chimamanda Adichie In “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Adichie describes the powerful role of narrative in reality. She talks about growing up with…
