Transforming

Global crises—from pandemics to climate change—demonstrate the vulnerability of the biosphere and each of us as individuals, calling for responses guided by creative analysis and compassionate reflection. Transforming explores actions that create paths of understanding and collaboration as the groundwork for transformative community.

An extraordinary book that truly transforms you inside and out. . . . Vern Neufeld Redekop and Gloria Neufeld Redekop’s edited book has a fascinating collection of chapters that are intricately related to the three pillars of psychospiritual and transcendental life: spirituality, emergent creativity, and reconciliation. Katherine Peil Kauffman’s presentation of an integrated view of individual emotions; Naresh Singh’s pioneering application of complexity theory to societal development; Karen Hamilton’s and Iman Ibrahim’s positions of religious conflict resolution; and Lauren Levesque’s potential use of music in reconciliation are striking examples of the many pragmatic perspectives. An evocative prescription that emerges out of the book is the use of complexity theory to integrate the interwoven transformations at different scales—intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community—eventually leading to transformation of the entire biosphere.

Transforming is a refreshing and exciting volume that is in itself an example of ‘emergent creativity’—to use one of the book’s key concepts. The approaches to and processes of transformation offer many new theoretical ideas and examples of how to build peace that resonate with concepts of biological life, spirituality, justice, and the human heart. Throughout the book, the focus on creativity, generativity, and transformativity is so needed in our work, our communities, and our world.

In Transforming, Vern Neufeld Redekop and Gloria Neufeld Redekop assemble and convey the dominant hope for our time. Creative reconciliation emerging as an ever new ‘Adjacent Possible’ that is impossible to predict and in a manner that goes beyond what we could imagine. All of life for 3.7 billion years is an emergence that ever transforms into the adjacent possibilities that life itself creates. We are now destroying the biosphere of which we are members. It’s time to transform.

This book shows how to apply intelligent thinking and insights from lands and cultures across the world to solve the real problems of our time, right now — when we most need them. It is an exciting book because it spotlights embedded wisdom in the world’s diverse cultures, nurtures it forward in a synthesised, sensitive discussion that is supremely urgent, dynamic and generative. The upswell of deep and practical knowledge presented here has, until now, eluded pronouncement in such a poised way. This book accomplishes the task of what we face across the globe together, because it fosters peace between all people and the flourishing of the Earth.

Vern Neufeld Redekop is professor emeritus of conflict studies at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada. His book From Violence to Blessing has been translated into French and Arabic and has been widely used internationally to promote reconciliation.

Gloria Neufeld Redekop is a researcher and author in spirituality and religious social history. Her publications include Bad Girls and Boys Go to Hell (or Not): Engaging Fundamentalist Evangelicalism and The Work of Their Hands: Mennonite Women’s Societies in Canada.