The Poetics of Building Peace

The conference topic the “arts of peace” could perhaps not be better expressed than through the presence and resiliency of the Falui Poets Society. These opening words come from a recent collaborative book between my daughter, Angie and myself, that we have titled When Blood and Bones Cry Out: The Aural Landscape of Building Peace, and provide the focus I would like to pursue in this session. Lodged as we are in a context of a historic Anabaptist seminary with the invitation to explore how “conflict transformation” represents an art and how that art informs the “making” of peace I cannot help but begin with a small note on a key biblical passage: Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. Our modern predilection toward analysis, process, outcome, technique, and prescription for those of us motivated by Christian faith and engaged professionally in “peacemaking” we tend to take Jesus’ statement as a foundation for our work. Yet we perhaps miss the genius of how this teaching may have originally been framed that situates in a significant way our discussion today…