June 17-20, 2019
12th ANNUAL THEOLOGY & PEACE CONFERENCE
“Beloved Community as the Way from Scapegoating to Ubuntu”
Nashville, Tennessee
Stay tuned for our forthcoming list of speakers!

René Girard

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mimetic Theory, as articulated by René Girard, offers profound insight into human nature, desire, rivalry and the tendency to create scapegoats on both the individual and systemic levels.

Martin Luther King‘s vision of Beloved Community offers an antidote to the disease that mimetic theory diagnoses.

Coming out of the context of apartheid South Africa, Desmond Tutu‘s theology of Ubuntu helps us understand our inter-dependence as a fundamental truth of being human, namely, that “I am only because we are.”

Desmond Tutu

The Beloved Community affords us the opportunity to move beyond our tribal tendencies and the scapegoat mechanism that insidiously infects our hearts, our communities, our political institutions and even our churches, and to enjoy inter-dependence and inter-dividuality in the spirit of Ubuntu.