Awakening

Awakening illuminates key discoveries in the sciences, theology, psychology, spirituality, humanities, and peace and conflict studies. The process of awakening is seen through the lens of emergent creativity and spirituality with a view toward taking responsibility for relationships and creating justice.

Vern Neufeld Redekop and Gloria Neufeld Redekop’s edited book Awakening: Exploring Spirituality, Emergent Creativity, and Reconciliation illustrates that spirituality is relational, diachronic, and part of tacit knowledge that empowers a person to develop the inner resources of creativity, empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation in order to transform the most difficult situations in deep rooted conflicts. The book is a must read for those interested in the role of spirituality in peacebuilding, and in transforming conflicts constructively.

Awakening offers a wide range of inquiries and conversations pursuant into reconciliation in an ever more polarized and fragmented world. Stuart Kauffman's framing chapter focused toward the potential and pillars of re-enchantment coupled with extraordinary reflections and responses across disciplines, provide ever more compelling evidence that imagination with inner-outer awareness, heart-based, and relationship-centric understandings of transforming conflict are not peripheral but form the very DNA of peacebuilding practice. An extraordinary book that evokes reflection and offers courage to take up the emergent learning beyond the far too-often narrow and mechanistic views of peace practices.

Vern and Gloria Neufeld Redekop, in Awakenings, offer to the mimetic theory conversation started by René Girard a companion that will serve to spark conversation about the work of reconciliation... Whereas Girard’s work focuses on violence bought on through mimesis—and only quelled by the identification and killing of a scapegoat—this volume looks at peaceful reconciliation. Drawing heavily on the work of American biologist/medical doctor Stuart Kauffman on complex systems, this book helps readers understand how reconciliation often emerges from chaotic systems, and even in unexpected ways... Much like Girard’s work, this book leaves the reader with a healthy bit of ambiguity that leads to more questions, and infinite possibilities to move forward in the reconciliation process. A companion book edited by the couple, entitled, Transforming, follows this one. If it is as insightful as this volume, there is much to which one might look forward.

Vern Neufeld Redekop is professor of conflict studies at Saint Paul University.

Gloria Neufeld Redekop is author and researcher in spirituality and religious social history.