From The Dallas Morning News,

ARLINGTON – For far too long, Protestants and Catholics didn’t mingle in Northern Ireland. Violence tore them apart.

But this month, 16 teenagers from the Belfast area – eight of them Protestant, eight of them Catholic – are side by side and becoming friends in Dallas-Fort Worth . They’ve been bonding as they stocked a food pantry for the needy, built a Fourth of July float and jumped on rides at Six Flags Over Texas.

They’re staying with North Texas teens and their families as part of the Ulster Project, a 35-year-old national effort that helps foster friendships among Irish students and transform them into peacemakers in their homeland. Program supporters say that the American teens benefit, too. In 1994, the project expanded to Arlington.

When Beth McClements, 15, heads back to Northern Ireland, she’ll take some lifelong lessons with her.

“Hopefully, to be a little more tolerant and more accepting of people from different backgrounds,” said McClements, who is Catholic. “Be more understanding and less judgmental.”

Hanging out with Catholics and Protestants has shown McClements that while there may be differences in their faith, “we’re all the same.”

Liza Hawrylak of Arlington says that the Ulster effort is making a difference. Her family has hosted two students from Northern Ireland. The Irish teens find common ground, said Hawrylak, president of Ulster Project Arlington.

“You see how the kids grow and they’ve bonded together and work together,” she said. “We’re bringing peace to the future leaders of Northern Ireland.”

The Ulster Project was launched in 1975 when a Church of Ireland priest was asked what could be done to ease tensions in Northern Ireland.

The priest, who had visited the U.S. during a pastoral exchange program, figured that students could benefit from seeing how Americans lived in a multicultural society.

There are several Ulster Project chapters across America. The Arlington group holds fundraisers through the year to cover half of the Northern Ireland teens’ travel and program costs.

In Northern Ireland, peace has long been elusive. About 3,700 people were killed during a 30-year period called the Troubles, which lasted until the late ’90s.

In 1972, British soldiers killed 13 protesters in Northern Ireland on a day known as Bloody Sunday. Last month, the British prime minister offered an apology after an investigation determined that the killings were unjustified.

A peace agreement in 1998 ended much of the violence.

But tensions linger. Last spring, a bomb went off in the town of Holywood, where McClements lives.

“It’s sad to think that it’s still happening,” she said. “There’s a small group from each side that would still be involved in violence, but everyone else is trying to move forward.”

Life is improving in Northern Ireland, and people are more tolerant, the Ulster Project participants say. Protestants and Catholics are mingling. Schools are integrated and children of both faiths are becoming friends.

“It’s definitely getting better,” McClements said.

The Northern Irish teens in Texas say they’re open-minded. To them, it doesn’t matter who’s Protestant and who’s Catholic.

“I don’t really care what religion somebody is,” said Thomas Elliott, 16, who is Protestant. “As long as they’re a nice person, that’s all that really matters.”

Elliott said the tension between Catholics and Protestants won’t completely disappear. But he hopes that what he learns in Texas rubs off on people back home.

Their American hosts are learning lessons, too.

Beth Grothouse of Arlington, whose family is hosting McClements, hopes to take what she’s learned back to the halls of Lamar High School, where she’s a student.

“There’s just so many people at school who you look at and say, ‘I’m not going to talk to them,’ ” the 15-year-old said. “There are so many little cliques, and people judge. I think it will open me up and be more accepting.”

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From The Washington Post,

Muhammad Ashafa (left) and James Wuye (right)

The unlikely and inspiring Nigerian duo Imam Muhammad Ashafa and Pastor James Wuye were in Switzerland last week at the Caux Forum for Human Security. Their partnership is unlikely because they were militia leaders on opposite sides of the conflict in northern Nigeria and lost not only friends but parts of their own bodies as combatants (James wears his artificial arm proudly). It is inspiring because they are powerful exemplars of the possibility of reconciliation.

Pastor James and Imam Ashafa were at Caux to launch a film called An African Answer (it will be released in September). An earlier film, The Imam and the Pastor, told the story of how they overcame their own hatred and joined forces, and their subsequent joint work in Nigeria. The new film is about their work in Kenya to help dampen the fires of violence that erupted there after the 2007 election.

Kenya’s conflicts are centered on ethnic differences, not religious ones. So the imam and the pastor approached local communities in Eldoret not in their religious roles but as specialists in conflict resolution.

The film is instructive, showing how the duo went about their work. Each man led a group of one of the ethnic communities, the Kalenjins and Kikiyus. They first undertook a classic effort to draw out some positive views each held of the other. Then they delved into the grievances, and there were plenty. Land topped the list, but there was also much resentment about attitudes and respective tendencies to stick to their own communities, including separate Christian churches.

The first visit seemed to bring some greater consciousness of the complexities of the sources of conflict and produced a committee with a mandate to monitor the fragile peace. A second visit some months later delved deeper and sought ideas for common action. A plan to unify the ethnically separated markets in a town emerged.

And then, the film shows, members of the communities wrote down their grievances on pieces of paper and burned them in a ceremonial fire. This ritual was aimed at catharsis and symbolized a commitment to consign the bitterness of past hurts and longstanding grievances to the flames.

The two Nigerians seemed to lead the Christian reconciliation rituals without a trace of concern for religious difference – indeed a sense pervades the images that the unifying power of faith is far greater than any specific difference in beliefs or teachings. Forgiveness, love of neighbor, and commitment to address and resolve conflicts were powerful bonds.

A jarring but realistic feature of the film is the dominance of men. Women play only marginal roles. That’s an honest reflection of the social norms in the communities concerned and is another reminder of how important it is to bring women into central roles in work for peace. They have so much to offer.

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From The Huffington Post,

Bernie Glassman, founder of Zen Peacemakers, has been a student of Zen for over 50 years. Since 1996, he have been leading Bearing Witness retreats in the Auschwitz concentration camp with people from all different faiths and nations. This November, Zen Peacemakers are planning the first retreat involving young adults from key conflict areas. The three tenets of the Zen Peacemakers are not-knowing, bearing witness and loving actions. They deepen the practice of bearing witness at Auschwitz and on the streets, and they practice loving actions based on the first two tenets through their service projects of the Montague Farm Zen House. In the following interview, Bernie Glassman discusses Zen Peacemakers’ Auschwitz retreat.

These comments are part of a longer interview with Bernie Glassman in January, 2010. The questions were written by Christa Spannbauer, journalist and assistant to Roshi Willigis Jäger, and the interview was conducted by Ari Pliskin.

What do you teach at Auschwitz?

Nothing. I am not the teacher there. Auschwitz is the teacher. Its an amazing teacher. I’m always seeking places to learn. Many times, I invite people to do the trip with me. Maybe they’ll learn something, too. I try to bring us into a situation in which there is almost no way not to learn. This plunges us into the state of not-knowing and then we can bear witness to the joy and suffering of the world.

Many people and groups visit Auschwitz. What makes the Zen Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat unique?

Most visit and then leave the same day. We stay for six days. We also bring people from many cultures, countries and traditions. We bring people from both sides: children of survivors and children of SS officers. Those who come consider themselves open-minded enough to come, but when they come together in the same room, it is a different story. Problems erupt and people clash.

What happens when people clash on the retreat?

If you stay in the cauldron of Auschwitz, by the third or fourth day, changes happen. At one retreat, a Jewish man had become friendly with a German woman and discovered her father ran the camp that killed his family. At first, he was enraged and she was overwhelmed with guilt. Within another day, they went through the cycles of emotions and they were hugging and kissing. I don’t know what would happen if any given person came, but I know they won’t be the same when they leave.

Why Auschwitz?

There is a part of us that allows us to dehumanize people. It’s an aspect of ourselves that we don’t want to touch. Auschwitz is the world-monument of that aspect.

How can we deal with the dehumanizing aspect in us so that it doesn’t cause so much harm in the world?

The first way to deal with this aspect is to remember. “Re-membering” as the opposite of dismembering — remembering is putting back together what’s been taken apart. After the eighth year of remembering victims, Heinz-Jürgen Metzger, the coordinator of Peacemaker work in Europe, said it was time to start remembering the perpetrators. Heinz’s uncle was castrated because he wouldn’t do the work of the SS. Heinz didn’t learn about this for 25 years because his family was disgraced because his uncle wouldn’t comply. When Heinz proposed remembering the perpetrators, about half the participants were ready to leave.

I brought up the issue of remembering and honoring the perpetrators at a later retreat, which was very difficult. Honoring means we cite their name, like we do for those who died there. The goal was to change from just blaming and hating the perpetrators to get into what was going on a deeper level. So we did a ceremony in the guards’ tower, where each person honors a time when they were a perpetrator or someone was a perpetrator to them.

How far can you go in this remembering? If this is one world, and the point is to re-member the whole world, where do you stop? That’s where your practice has to be. To go into the spaces of what the perpetrators went through and what happened after — many committed suicide.

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Father Leonel Narvaez takes on the challenge of writing about a complex issue at depth.  His op-ed for Eureka Street begins with  the difficulties of establishing peace after 54,000 Colombia insurgents agreed to cooperate with the Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation.  Narvaez goes on to discuss the necessity for both forgiveness and reconciliation in any progress to a genuine and lasting peace.

To read the full op-ed, click here.