Check out www.lestweforget.org.nz for stories of heroic Kiwi peacemakers. This website provides information on people from Aotearoa / New Zealand who have made significant contributions to and suffered in the process of promoting peace. You can download a booklet that can be used in groups to reflect on the lives and actions of these peacemakers […]

Three Cups of Tea steeps the reader in nonconventional wisdom about the Islamic world. The book starts with the spiralling descent of an American climber. In 1993, Greg Mortenson scrubbed an attempt on K2, the world’s second-highest peak. He stumbled broken and haggard out of the Himalaya and into the isolated Pakistani village of Korphe. […]

In the West, “A mufti, a Christian and a rabbi …” is often how a good interfaith joke begins. But I live inside this reality. I am a rabbi and my Syrian colleague, Hind Kabawat, is a Christian Arab. We have worked for four years with the Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmed Hassoun, in […]

As Kenya Erupted, Friends From Warring Tribes Faced Down Machetes to Restore Order – “I felt so ill and very bitter,” he said. “That is what forced me to come out and try to stop it, to try to make peace. Someone said ‘You will be killed,’ and I said ‘Then let me die.’ “… […]

To mark the 20th anniversary of his death this year, no more than a handful of Afghan intellectuals held a memorial service at the grave of Abdul Ghaffar Khan. But cultural associations in the region and in Europe are planning numerous ceremonies in the memory of the non-violent Pashtun leader. http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=22632&lan=en&sid=1&sp=0&isNew=1

I’ve chosen to tell you of Louise and Emmanuel, who we met this week. As we approached the group under the spreading branches of a thorn tree, I noticed a vivacious woman with a striking face, full of liveliness. We introduced ourselves to the 16 members of Ukuri Kuganze [meaning truth will triumph]. “ Can […]

http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2008/02/australia-says-sorry-this-is-h-1.html

Meet some of the People Taking Charge. They’re liberating public parks, urban factories, and all the places in between. http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2112 http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=2112&utm_source=dec07&utm_medium=

With deep courage, enormous strength and a set of keys, an uneducated woman named Mama Zula Karuhimbi, born in 1915, managed to save the lives of 100 people. She kept them hidden for 67 days during the 1994 ethnic genocide in Rwanda. She offered them shelter in her house in Gitarama, the country’s second-largest city, […]

by Bishop Gumbleton Surely in the life of Franz Jägerstätter, we find someone who was determined to live within the realm of God, the realm of Jesus. Franz Jägerstätter would have nothing to do with the realm of the world in which he lived; where barbarism of the inhuman and Godless system of Nazism prevailed…Franz […]

I met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, last Wednesday in New York City. Why would I be part of ongoing efforts at “dialogue” with people and institutions that some Americans view as the “enemy”? The branch of Christianity in which I am rooted, Anabaptist-Mennonite, holds that Jesus calls us to offer love and […]

Behavioural scientists have devoted considerable attention to religious extremism and the psychological factors that contribute to an individual’s propensity toward violence. However, relatively little data are available on those who abandon extremism and become proponents of conciliation and peace. Dr. Renee Garfinkel offers a number of tentative conclusions about individuals she has interviewed who have […]