2024 CONFERENCE REPORT

Communicating God’s Nonviolent Love:
Teaching & Tools

The 2024 Theology and Peace Conference and Annual Meeting was held at the Casa Iskali Retreat Center, located just outside Chicago, Illinois, from June 10 to 13, 2024. The conference theme, “Communicating God’s Non-Violent Love,” brought attendees from across the United States as well as virtual participants from as far away as New Zealand and Australia. The Conference participants were passionate about sharing the story of God’s unconditional love.

James Warren, the author of Compassion or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard (2013), opened the conference with his concise and insightful review of the origins of mimetic theory. Fr. James Alison gave a brilliant undoing of sacrificial atonement, urging us to move beyond shame because Jesus intended not to short cut our way to forgiveness, but to “occup[y] the space of death and shame so as to detoxify those realities forever” (see https://jamesalison.com/catholicity-sacrifice-and-shame/).

We moved from theory to explore effective means to shift from mimetic rivalry to loving mimesis. Rev. Adam Ericksen, pastor of Clackamas United Church of Christ, Milwaukie, OR, reminded us that the world needs to hear our voices and we can amplify our voices by using social media to spread the “scandalous” message that God’s love overcomes violence. Several of Pastor Adam’s congregants provided powerful testimony about discovering Pastor Adam online and undergoing a personal transformation from hearing and embracing the message of God’s love.

The Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore, associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and author of Race, Religion, and the Pulpit: Reverend Robert L. Bradby and the Making of Urban Detroit (2015), presented her current research entitled Remembered: Enslaved Burial Grounds and the Making of the City of Charlotte. Working through the Equity in Memory and Memorial program, Dr. Mooreseeks to heal racial trauma by reconnecting descendants of enslaved peoples with their white counterparts within Presbyterian churches throughout Charlotte. Dr. Moore uses a mind-body trauma-informed process (www.ImmanualApproach.com) to facilitate racial reconciliation between community groups and implement an approach grounded in transformational love.

The Rev. Ellen Corcella, a palliative care chaplain for Eskenazi Health, a Trauma One Level Midwest hospital system, explored how we might embody God’s non-violent love in our interpersonal relationships positing a trauma-informed paradigm combining Henri Nouwen’s concept of the “wounded healer,” Dr. Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma and spirit, and Rebecca Adams’s concept of “loving mimesis.” Rev. Corcella then led participants in an analysis of a patient case study as an example of ways we can encourage movement from an interaction predicated upon fear and rivalry to an encounter that allows one to witness another’s suffering and uncover a shared human capacity to feel God’s love as one human being to another. 

We held the annual meeting on June 13, electing the following to the Board of Directors: Shannon Mullen, Rebecca Adams, Suella Gerber, Karen Kepner, Wesley Dunbar, and Ellen Corcella. Tim Seitz will be an advisor to the Board and Andrew McCrae will continue to facilitate T&P’s popular program, Mimesis at the Movies. As to the future of T&P, we will continue our online Quarterly Speaker Series starting again on Thursday, September 5, 2024, 7:30-9:00pm (EDT) with Rev. Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw speaking on “Girard and the Four Gospels: The Liberative Key to Girardian Interpretation.” Click here for free registration and more information about Dr. Bashaw.

The Board was tasked with reviewing and providing a report on the resources of T&P and providing suggestions about programming as we move into the future. The enthusiasm for the work, camaraderie, and messaging provided by T&P was expressed best by one new participant at the Annual Meeting who observed that this is a critical time to continue communicating the good news of God’s nonviolent love via the work of Theology & Peace.