By Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP)
The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.
In this special crossover episode with our friends at Ing Podcast by MennoMedia, we have a conversation with Marshall V. King, the author of Disarmed: The Radical Life and Legacy of Michael "MJ" Sharp.
The book tells the story of Michael “MJ” Sharp ‘05, whose commitment to peace and peacebuilding led him to work with Mennonite Central Committee and the United Nations. Sharp spent most of his life grappling with both the concepts and realities of militarism and war, violence and peacemaking. His murder in 2017 while working with the United Nations as an armed group expert sent shockwaves around the world. He was ambushed with UN colleague Zaida Catalán of Sweden, who was also killed. The investigation into their death is ongoing; dozens were sentenced to death in late January.
The topic of Sharp’s life and legacy continues in a series of linking episodes of Mennomedia’s podcast “-ing”. Check out the series as host Ben Wideman interviews MJ’s parents Jon and Michele Sharp, his peers and fellow students at EMU, and David Nyiringabo MA ‘20, a graduate of EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who was the first beneficiary of the MJ Sharp Peace and Justice Endowed Scholarship.
King was drawn to the story through “an early sense of injustice” at his murder and the sense that Sharp’s life was the story of “a modern Anabaptist …wrestling with the world.”
“I felt like MJ had actually gone into the world and, and was doing some of the peacemaking work that we often talk about, that we often, you know, proclaim to believe. But MJ was actually out there doing it and then for a time was missing and inevitably found dead,” King said. A career journalist who also knew the Sharp family, he was especially attuned to the knowledge that there existed “a longer telling of the story other than just the headlines.”
King then did the hard work of earning trust and building relationships with people who knew Sharp well. He traveled to Sweden and Germany, to Kansas and New Mexico, using skills he’d practiced from a lifetime in journalism.
“At one point I calmed my anxiety by saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s just 60 to 80 newspaper columns strung together in a book,” King said. One of the major questions he asked about Sharp, whom he calls at turns smart and savvy and wise, was “what could he teach us?” Yet, King also learned much from listening to people around the world whose lives intersected with Sharp’s. “[In] just about every interview I did, there was a moment… where I just marveled at something wise that someone said, or some observation or some piece that MJ had taught them. And tha being in the presence of that over and over again, was an immense gift. I tried to pack the book with as many of those as I could.”
Dr. Jacqueline N. Font-Guzmán, the inaugural executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Eastern Mennonite University, is the featured guest.
Font-Guzmán, a native of Puerto Rico, talks about her journey into conflict resolution and to the position at EMU from the fields of law and healthcare. She also shares about her new book, co-written with Bernie Mayer, The Neutrality Trap: Disrupting and connecting for social change (Wiley, 2021). The message at the heart of The Neutrality Trap is that, when it comes to the important social issues that face us today, avoiding conflict is a mistake. We need conflict, engagement, and disruption in order to make it to the other side and progress toward the worthy goal of social justice.
The two authors, former colleagues at Creighton University, will co-teach a course on disrupting and connecting for social change at CJP’s 2022 Summer Peacebuilding Institute.
“The idea is that a lot of our value in neutrality stems from a position of privilege --that it's easy to be neutral,’ such as the professional codes of ethics for lawyers and medical personnel,” Font-Guzmán explains. “But if you look at it, they're all through the lens of really preserving a status quo and a system that was not built with people that come from a minoritized group like mine…Every time you're thinking about being neutral or professional, what does that really mean?”
Font-Guzmán is a practitioner in the conflict transformation field and is also a professor at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. She has a master’s degree in healthcare administration from St. Louis University, a law degree from InterAmericana University of Puerto Rico and a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution from Nova Southeastern Florida. Font-Guzmán’s first book “Experiencing Puerto Rican Citizenship and Cultural Nationalism” (Palgrave Macmillan) was the winner of the Puerto Rico Bar Association 2015 Juridical Book of the Year.
She characterizes EMU as at “an exciting crossroad where there's a group of people really authentically going through thinking how they can make a better world, how they can really lead together, how we can teach our students to be out there, be truly agents of social change and be leaders in affecting that social change.”
Read about her philosophy and her leadership with new DEI initiatives on campus.
In this episode Lindsay Martin interviews host patience kamau in an effort to understand the behind the scenes development of this podcast, the motivations for its creation and the preparation that lovingly goes into each episode.
Lindsay Martin is associate director of Development for CJP.
patience kamau’s passion is for the earth’s “wild” creatures. She is a peacebuilder-conservationist who at heart, sees her role as a conciliatory one between humans and our global environment’s complex ecosystems. Along with others who feel and think similarly, she seeks to continually step into the flashpoint and convince fellow humans that, though we now contextually exist in a free market economic system based on exultations of short-term growth and endless profits, a blind pursuit of interest maximization with little thought to environmental impact only serves to undermine our species’ long-term survival.
In this episode, Dr. Benjamin Bergey speaks about peacebuilding through music, and how working with intercultural youth ensembles inspired him to enter the field.
Bergey teaches music theory and conducting at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). The university recently announced a new concentration in music and peacebuilding, which Bergey developed. He also conducts the EMU choirs and orchestra, conducts the Rapidan Orchestra in Orange County, and served as the music editor for Voices Together, a new Mennonite hymnal.
Bergey told Kamau that he's always been drawn to leading ensembles, since his early days in church – "bringing people together to make something greater than the sum of its parts."
In 2010, during his cross-cultural semester in the Middle East while an undergraduate at EMU, Bergey interviewed Palestinians and Israelis about the role of music as a tool of both protest and community-building. He was particularly inspired by two organizations that brought young Arab and Jewish musicians together to build common ground.
"From a peacebuilding standpoint, we know how dialogue and empathy are those kinds of crucial components in transforming conflict," he said. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus brought the kids together to sing, create their own songs, and take music classes. The Polyphony Foundation did much the same, but with instrumental orchestra activities. Both organizations also facilitate dialogue between the students.
[This podcast was recorded before escalation of the current conflict in Israel/Palestine.]
Bergey recalled watching an Arab and a Jewish student sharing a violin stand, struggling together through a particular passage of Beethoven's “Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21.”
"It's these youth coming together in ways that otherwise doesn't happen …. it doesn't happen organically, right, in just normal day-to-day living," Bergey explained. "Studies show that music making together can … help overcome perceptions of dissimilarity and to work towards accepting others' differences."
Organizations like these that work in high-conflict areas aim to bring people together in a safe environment.
"That takes a lot of intentionality, a lot of careful planning and facilitation, where they can share experiences, bring themselves to feel like they can tell stories and make music," Bergey said. "Because really it's a vulnerable act, especially singing."
Bergey went on to write his doctoral dissertation on music and peacebuilding, and trained with Musicians Without Borders in 2018. With a slogan of “War Divides, Music Connects,” the Netherlands-based nonprofit works around the world with artists, social activists and communities on conflict.
Bergey sees immense potential in this field, even for everyday group settings, in which activities like drum circles, group breathing exercises, or collaborative songwriting can help people become grounded within themselves and build trust with one another.
"This really is an exercise in mindfulness, honestly. It's important for us to both listen and feel what's happening within ourselves, but also be able to listen and, dare I say, empathize with those around us," said Bergey.
Talibah Aquil MA '19 (conflict transformation) talks about her first journey to her ancestral home, Ghana; the captivating performance art capstone that was borne of that experience; and her calling as a bridge between the North American and African continents.
Aquil first decided to travel to Ghana after research through ancestry.com revealed that she had more ancestors from there than any other African country. For her capstone project to her graduate studies at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, she spent three weeks there, interviewing Black Americans and others of the African diaspora who had returned to their homeland about how those experiences shaped their identities.
Aquil used those stories to create "Ghana, Remember Me," a poetry, dance, and music performance that speaks on healing historical trauma within the African diaspora community. The project brought together her experiences and a diverse skill set: A graduate of Howard University with a BA in musical theater, Aquil toured with a professional dance troupe after college.
Performing "Ghana, Remember Me" "brought to my attention how many people really need spaces to talk about identity … and the complexities of it," she said.
That work has helped Aquil face the present as well as her history.
"Something about me connecting to the root of my identity gave me such power that when I came back to the States, it was almost like I was prepared to endure all of the racial chaos that was happening in America, because I knew where I came from," she said. "I saw the power of my people and it gave me strength. It gave me strength. It didn't take away the pain, but it gave me strength to endure."
She recalled a feeling of homecoming, even on her first trip to Ghana.
"Your cells remember … the body knows," Aquil said.
Aquil moved to Ghana last year, and lives in the capital city of Accra.
"I knew in my spirit that I was supposed to be in Ghana and, again – not knowing the puzzle pieces, just like my journey at CJP – I knew that I was supposed to be here. And listening to that intuition, I'm so grateful because it has been wonderful," she said.
Aquil is now a lecturer at CJP, where she introduced a course titled "Re-imagining Identity" that examines the intersections of identity, storytelling, dignity, and the arts. In that same vein of re-imagination, she is also developing an organization called "We Are Magic."
"The goal is to bring diaspora people of color to Ghana – to connect, to history, to identity, and to heal from historical trauma," Aquil explained. "I want to do this at a little to no cost for them. I want to build a place where folks can stay and it be a resting place, a restorative place in Ghana."
In this conversation, Matt Tibbles shares moving personal stories that actualize both his learning journey and the important peacebuilding ideas he studies, practices and teaches – drawing from experiences as a youth pastor and a juvenile detention officer, in education and prevention for a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter, and from among his students in classrooms at EMU.
A 2018 graduate of Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Tibbles is an organizational development and conflict transformation professional with experience working in and with multi-ethnic for-profit businesses, higher education, nonprofit organizations, and indigenous tribes. He balances teaching at EMU with consultancy work among organizations and school districts, focusing on co-creating dignity and honoring trauma-informed and restorative organizational cultures.
Tibbles brings these experiences into the courses he teaches to undergraduates in the peacebuilding and development program and the sociology program. He also teaches graduate courses at CJP.
Tibbles begins by describing a pivotal experience of de-escalating conflict while working as a youth pastor in the Pacific Northwest. Witnessing the effect of trauma on the child involved pushed him to explore the concept more fully in the youth group he worked with at the church. Later in Alaska, he worked at a juvenile detention facility where he encountered trauma-informed care and practices. Night shifts there allowed for deeper exploration of restorative justice, especially through webinars offered by the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice and readings of The Little Book of Restorative Justice by Howard Zehr (Good Books, 2002).
There, Tibbles began to ask different and probing questions about the behavior of the teens he worked with: One guiding question was “In what reality does this behavior make sense?” Viewing those behaviors through a trauma lens, as responses to trauma, helped him and others he worked with see how daily protocols and practices could raise fear and anxiety. For example, walking directly behind a teen in transition between activities triggered a stress reaction, but shifting slightly into her peripheral vision was a much less threatening position.
While our default approach might be “blaming and judging,” asking questions about why behavior might be happening “allowed us to see a much bigger, broader picture of what was going on,” Tibbles said.
After studies at CJP, he’s worked to integrate restorative justice and trauma-informed pedagogy within the larger university community with a ripple effect as students across the disciplines see the potential and benefits to bring those principles into various settings.
“When we’re able to create trauma-informed and resilient systems, my hope is, and I’m seeing it a little bit from students that have graduated, or even students that have transferred out of EMU into another university or college, is that they’re taking these experiences of being trauma-informed and resilient into their own communities into wherever they’re going,” he said. “And they’re beginning, in small ways, to shift systems that haven’t been trauma informed, or, or haven’t focused on resilience into systems that are beginning to explore just even a little bit of what that means and how it [can be] transformative.”
Dr. Carolyn Stauffer, featured in this episode, speaks about about her work in the fields of sexual harm and trauma. Before returning to EMU --her alma mater-- as a professor, she lived in South Africa for 16 years. While there, she recounts working at a rape crisis center in the mid-1990s, where she saw a "hierarchy of identities" among the survivors of sexual assault.
Race "was the primary sort of frame of identity that was given the most recognition … after race then class became an issue," Stauffer explained, especially among those from mixed race communities. In contrast, gender-based issues weren't much considered in the national discourse on oppression, all while "Johannesburg was considered the rape capital of the world."
When Stauffer joined the Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) faculty in 2010, she thought seriously and prayed about how to serve those experiencing intimate partner violence and gender-based violence in the Shenandoah Valley. She started the Silent Violence Project, in which Stauffer and a team (which included Center for Justice and Peacebuilding students) worked with women who were homeless, undocumented, or in the Beachy Amish communities.
"What were the unique risks that they faced based on their identity?" Stauffer asked. "What were the resistance strategies that they used to push back against abusers … what were their resilience strategies?"
At the time, Stauffer was co-director of EMU's MS in biomedicine program. She wanted to ensure that the future healthcare providers under her tutelage would be sensitized to sexual harm survivors, so she held a symposium – with a cadre of conservative Mennonite survivors teaching her students. Many of the survivors hadn't completed the eighth grade.
"I flipped the script and basically positioned them as the experts to train my biomedicine students sexual harm and trauma. And so it was this total change of power dynamics," Stauffer explained.
Despite her vast expertise in this field, Stauffer still welcomes learning from others. She recalls how, after one symposium, someone asked her about the intersection between sexual violence and neurodiversity – for example, a survivor who may have ADHD or autism.
"We have to think beyond just one particular sort of static definition of who that survivor or who that harm doer is. I think that's part of taking the field forward, is including an understanding of the intersection of identity and sexual harm."
Dr. Tim Seidel has played an integral role in the fields of strategic peacebuilding, global studies and interfaith engagement at Eastern Mennonite University. He brings practical experience in all three fields, having lived and worked in Palestine, Israel, and served as Mennonite Central Committee’s director for peace and justice ministries in the United States.
Seidel shares his journey to EMU, where he has helped to start an undergraduate global studies major and an interfaith studies minor. He also teaches graduate students at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and serves as director of EMU’s Center for Interfaith Engagement.
Seidel brings four topics to the podcast conversation and unpacks them in discussion with Kamau:
The conversation includes probing questions, ranging throughout hundreds of years of global history, touches on popular culture and current events, and follows a critical thread of colonialism into each of the topics.
In a nutshell: “How do we pay attention to the world that we live in today and its colonial constitutions? How do the colonial legacies persist into the present and what are the ways in which people inhabiting this world are struggling and resisting?”
If you’re one of those listeners who thrills to the intellectual “chase,” you will want to come to this 55-minute podcast with some paper and a pen to jot down words and names for further investigation, including the several indigenous and BIPOC scholars, authors, political figures and activists who are referenced.
Many of the ideas and explorations discussed in the episode are explored in Seidel’s scholarly works and associated presentations. For a full list and links, visit his EMU webpage.
Seidel previously taught at American University and Lancaster Theological Seminary. He holds an MTS from Wesley Theological Seminary and a PhD from the School of International Service at American university in Washington DC. At Messiah College, he earned a BA in biochemistry with minors in cultural anthropology and mathematics.
In this episode, Dr. Catherine Barnes talks about designing and facilitating deliberative dialogue processes, as well as current events including the military coup in Myanmar.
Dr. Barnes has worked for conflict transformation and social change for more than 30 years in many countries. She has worked with civil society, activists, diplomats and politicians, and armed groups to build their capacities for preventing violence and using conflict as an opportunity for addressing the systems giving rise to oppression and grievance.
The conversation begins with a deep dive into deliberative dialogue: what it is, when it's useful, and what it has the power to do for a community struggling with conflict.
"The dialogue is very much about setting the conversation in this connection point – at a human level – between those who are involved and the perspectives that they have to bring. So that particularly if there's been tension, conflict, or even indeed oppression, that you have this humanization of relationships," Barnes explains.
One of the early experiences that led Barnes towards this field of work was growing up in the Quaker Universalist tradition, in which congregants gather in silence "and seek the light of God moving within," she said. They "have … this understanding that often in those spaces, there may be someone who feels moved to share something."
Barnes went on to earn her doctorate in conflict analysis and resolution from George Mason University alongside Jayne Docherty, Barry Hart, and Lisa Schirch. She's done conflict transformation work all over the world – including training deliberative dialogue process designers and facilitators in Myanmar.
About the current violence in the country, Barnes said she feels "so heartbroken. I feel scared, scared for people who I have come to know and respect and, indeed, to love … I think it really does reveal in many ways how the zero sum nature of a power paradigm based on unilateral control and coercion is so hard to shift."
"Are there resilience tools that you think are within the community that might help carry them through this?" Kamau asks.
"I always, always have hope," Barnes replied. "I often will say that it's actually, it's within movements that you almost need these skills even more to try to think about, 'how do we generate something that will be different in nature, different in kind than the old system that had been oppressive?'"
The first episode features Dr. Vernon Jantzi, currently director of academic programs here at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) and a co-founder of the center more than 25 years ago. Janzti served as director and co-director from 1995-2002.
Jantzi begins the interview with a story of fascinating coincidence: how his visit to a rural community while on alternative service in Nicaragua became the subject of a 10-minute extemporaneous speech in Spanish and how that topic led, not to an assistantship at Cornell to teach the language, but instead a full scholarship to earn his doctorate in sociology.
He also discusses how his work with land reform in Costa Rica led to an exploration of mediation and peacebuilding, followed by a collaboration with John Paul Lederach, then also teaching in the sociology department at EMU, to create a graduate program in conflict transformation.
Now 26 years later, Jantzi reflects on the changes he’s seen in CJP and how the center is reimagining itself in ways that are responsive to the current political environment in the United States but also to its global network of alumni.
“...Working with people in different parts of the world, they'd say, ‘well, you know, it's great to have you here ...But you know, if you really wanted to make a difference, you'd go back and you would change the way your government relates to the rest of the world, or you would do this,’” Jantzi said. “...That’s the exciting part about being at CJP right now.”
Respect, dignity, an awareness of the need to honor past history and trauma to promote current healing and how we do this at the national and local levels -- Jantzi sees these approaches as key values for CJP now and in the coming months.
Jantzi’s longtime connection to peacebuilding work in Mexico offers a case study for the importance of trust and cooperation among community members. Successful efforts to “rebuild the social fabric” in that region now integrate elements of restorative justice, trauma healing and truth-telling, he says.
The podcast currently has 21 episodes available.