Abstract
This essay begins in a diverse, southern California classroom where a student risks sharing a personal struggle that he and his wife are having with their extended families over the baptism of their baby, soon to be born. In subsequent weeks, students support their classmate by listening to him, empathizing with him, and making suggestions in collaborative ways. Roberts develops the points illustrated by this story with insights from Parker Palmer, Sallie McFague, Beverly Harrison, and Desmond Tutu. With the narrative and the theory, she underscores the centrality of deep listening, mutuality and vulnerability, and interrelatedness in processes of community transformation. Roberts also makes a compelling case for forms of engaged pedagogy as essential to learning the philosophy and practices of transformative peacemaking.
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Notes
- 1.
Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 4–11.
- 2.
Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 39, 40, 51.
- 3.
Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997), 112.
- 4.
Palmer, To Know as We Are Known, 17.
- 5.
John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 47–53.
- 6.
Beverly Wildung Harrison, Justice in the Making (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), x.
- 7.
Harrison uses the term “conscientization” as a coming to consciousness, a process that occurs for the already empowered when they open themselves to hear the collective storytelling of those who are frequently unheard. For the disempowered, on the other hand, shared storytelling initiates their own “conscientization” in their recognition that isolated and silent experiences of pain are time and again public, structural problems. See Harrison and Carol S. Robb’s Making the Connections (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) and Harrison’s discussion of the centrality of relationship, 12–20, and the six points of her ethics of liberation, 249–259.
- 8.
Harrison, Making the Connections, 243.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Sallie McFague, Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 66.
- 11.
Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), xi-xii.
- 12.
McFague explains Martin Buber’s idea of I-Thou (compared to I-It) relationships (see Buber’s I and Thou) in Super, Natural Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 100–102. This is a subject-subjects model where relationships are meant to be mutual, not hierarchical, and where subjects are constantly learning from each other. Buber’s use of “Thou,” which McFague borrows, emphasizes the holy and mystical connections we have with each other and all of life.
- 13.
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 31; God Has a Dream (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 19–29.
- 14.
Tutu, God Has a Dream, 62–63; Michael Battle, Reconciliation (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1997), 61–71, 125–27.
- 15.
Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 31.
- 16.
McFague, Super Natural Christians, 51–52.
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Roberts, D. (2016). “I Am Because We Are”: A Relational Foundation for Transformation of Conflicts and Classrooms. In: Ott Marshall, E. (eds) Conflict Transformation and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56840-3_7
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