A dehydrator and a dream
When the COVID-19 pandemic began a year ago, global food security networks were put to the test. In the Philippines, where Dann and Joji Pantoja serve as Mennonite Church Canada International Witness workers, the people in the city were suddenly cut off from their food supply as the country locked down. In the mountain region…
Mediating in the church
As a lawyer for more than 40 years, Wayne Plenert has seen his share of interpersonal conflicts in the secular world. But, now retired and a member of Northgate Anabaptist Fellowship of Dawson Creek, B.C., he believes that conflicts also are inevitable in faith communities and are too often destructive, with damaging fallout. His interest…
Renowned peacebuilder receives award
Internationally renowned peacebuilder John Paul Lederach, who has committed his life and work to nonviolent approaches to conflict for more than 40 years, has been awarded the 36th Niwano Peace Foundation Peace Prize. Lederach, currently a senior fellow at Humanity United, is a co-founder and the first director of the Eastern Mennonite University’s (EMU) Center…
Alumni award winner works tirelessly for peace
A crowd of old friends and alumni, as well as people interested in restorative justice, filled the Grebel Gallery on Oct. 11, 2018, to hear from Dean Peachey. He reflected on the seeds of peace that were sown during the 25 years he and his wife Melissa Miller spent in Kitchener-Waterloo. As Grebel’s 2018 Distinguished…
Blooming Positive Project responds to theft
In the early summer the staff at Communitas Supportive Care Society arrived at work to discover that someone had stolen the floral hanging baskets from the front of their office building. All ten of them. The discovery was met with anger, outrage, frustration, and disbelief: We should totally do a social media post about this!…
Building peace through teaching English
Transformative. That’s the word Cheryl Woelk uses to describe the impact of language teaching and learning on human relationships. She recently co-authored a book on the subject, together with Jan Edwards Dormer. Teaching English for Reconciliation: Pursuing Peace through Transformed Relationships in Language Learning and Teaching offers insights into using the English language-learning environment to…
It seemed like a good idea
A relative of mine sometimes starts out a funny story with the line, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Ah, yes, how things can turn from well-intentioned to humorous! Or much worse. Last fall, I attended a lecture by Reina Neufeldt entitled “When good intentions are not enough: Confronting ethical challenges in…
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…
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…
