Engaging the Moral Imagination
Charles Gibbs

In a world where each day is a tug of war between despair and hope, I’d like to tell an interfaith story of authentic hope. A story of extraordinary ordinary people. Of their vision and courage. A story of “building new tomorrows from the rubble of today.” This is a true story, except for the parts that haven’t happened yet.

In December 2006, twenty-one people gathered at a retreat center nestled among the redwoods on a cloud-shrouded slope of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County California. These people came from Ethiopia, India, the Philippines, Uganda, Maine, Colorado and California. They were Muslim, Christian and Hindu. Men and women. Younger and older. And all sorts of sizes, shapes and colors.

They were drawn together by the United Religions Initiative because of their work for peace, justice and healing.

Work waging peace, rescuing child soldiers, and doing economic development in the middle of 20 years of civil war in Northern Uganda. Work creating community based infrastructures for peace and supporting high level efforts for peace in the middle of growing Christian-Muslim tension in Ethiopia and the threat of war on Ethiopia’s border with Somalia. Work to create interfaith community and to promote peaceful reconciliation in the midst of an intra-Christian conflict that threatens to erupt violently with dire consequences for people of all faiths in Southern India.
Work to create an interfaith leadership council inspiring peacebuilding and addressing issues of poverty in a Christian-Muslim community in Metro Manila that could, at any moment, either explode or become a model of interfaith cooperation for the good of all. Work to knit together and empower a global interfaith community dedicated to end religiously motivated violence and to create cultures of peace, justice and healing. They were drawn together, for five week-long sessions over fifteen months, to engage the moral imagination as an essential tool for peacebuilding.

Their teachers – John Paul Lederach, whose nearly thirty years of peace building, teaching and writing has produced his extraordinary recent book: The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace; his colleague, Herm Weaver, who, among many other things, brings the gift of music to their shared work; and each other.