Although my last name is German I am not an ethnic Mennonite but grew up in the Mennonite church with my family as a young child. I attended Locust Grove Mennonite School in Lancaster, PA, but our family found the Mennonite church 7,000 miles away. My father was drafted out of high school in 1965, fiought in the American War in Vietnam, and had his own sort of conversion experience . As he rode in his armored tank, surrounded by a calvalcade of armed and marching soldiers my father remembers group of Buddhist Monks that came walking for peace into the small village where his bridage had taken hostage. At that moment in time as he saw the monks walking for peace with no food, no weapons, only prayer. He knew that Jesus was a savior of peace and committed himself to finding a community of people that lived peace out of their faith commitments. Growing up in the Mennonite Church shaped my deep commitment to peace, a strong sense of community, and a deep love for the created natural world. I felt as though the Mennonite Church was my family as a child. I was full of faith. Yet after attending the Mennonite Church in for over five years we were still being introduced to visiting clergy and others as the “Ferich family from the city that came to know Christ through the urban outreach ministries of the church.” This is a framework of charity and not a framework for justice. Charity keeps the marginalized marked as the “receiver” with the “giver” earning points. Within the charity framework the “giver” decides which questions are asked. We were never going to be full members, The church leadership needed to remember what they gave us more than they needed us. perhaps we were not born into the church. Charity is justice full of ego, justice means to let go your ego and sit at a table made by all. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said “I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.” HYPERLINK "http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/desmondtut105878.html"Desmond Tutu

Sometimes the exclusion of certain individuals in our communities is painfully obvious. On more than a handful of occasions I have seen people marginalized from churches for a variety of reasons, When I was in high school our family was attending a Brethern in Christ church in Lancaster. One week a guest minister came to give the sermon. A few of the adults, including my Sunday School teacher left the sanctuary, because they found it immoral stay in the church, because the pastor was a woman. Actions like this from individuals within the church damage the development of young women, and are usually also quick to judge the actions of other faith traditions toward women, such as within Islam. Around this time in high school I first traveled outside the United States. I went to Japan to study and live with a family in Yokohama. Only through traveling and living in another country did I come to understand the difference between cultural and moral relevancy. I could unpack and see the white American Christian church was different than the Japanese church, and there were deeply embedded cultural assumptions that influence the communities of faith, In a similar manner the Bible was written mostly by men during a historical context when women were seen as property and the temples of fertility gods and goddesses were filled with men and women having sex to appease the gods. I began to think that perhaps God was too big to only be preached about by men. The voices of the marginalized are needed in learning how we can better love all who are oppressed by the power dynamics of gender, race, and class.

Sometimes the exclusion of individuals within our communities of faith is as subtle as the distinction between justice and charity. When I was in college I studied in the rainforests of Belize for a semester. During this time as I lived near howler monkeys and snakes that could kill you with a single bite. I came to deeply love the deep interconnection of systems through understanding ecology, a radical realization that has shaped my understanding of Communion and all Sacraments. While living here and studying the interconnection of violence done to land and people, I realized that the violence done to the land is direct violence done to people. The Communion that we share within our communities of faith is our communion with our Creator, the death and resurrection of Christi, and our communion with each other. It is also our communion with the land, the land that grows the wheat and the grapevines that become our bread and wine/juice. The Church has marginalized this type of thinking for a long time through the witch trials shunning, and the excommunication of prophets such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart. Many of us grew up in churches where our love for the earth must be carefully watched, because it is a fine line between loving the earth and worshipping it. This fear has perpetuated a great violence within our communities toward the earth and most of our neighbors. Quite a few of us began to realize that not only are we Biblically mandated to love all Creation because of it’s inherent goodness, but also if we are serious about loving our neighbors we are going to be concerned about what we produce, consume, and throw-away because of our deep love for all of this Beloved Community.

After I returned from Belize I found myself amidst a conversation with some individuals who felt it was important to go to the places that have been most marginalized by the industrial system, a journey that led us to follow the wastestream. All over the United States there are Envirnmental Justice Communities. These are cities that are disproportionately affected by the consequences of industrial capitalism and a throw-away society. All of our trash and waste, heavily polluting indsustries are often centralized in certain neigborhoods where there are a lot of poor people, people of color, and single mothers. These areas also usually have little access to healthy food. Rather than returning the jungles of Belize and working through my theology amidst the pristine I found it important to work through the matters of my faith in the context of garbage heaps and prostitutes. After college at Eastern University I moved to Camden, NJ.

Camden is similar to places like Detroit, Gary, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Yakima, Flint, our great centers of the industrial boom, now the faces of the consequences of outsourcing and conecentration of polluting industries. I moved to Camden because I wanted to hear people’s stories, I wanted to help to create as much healing as possible, and because I felt as though my own liberation was tied to the people’s of Camden. This great work and commitment was worked out through the context of community. When I was in Belize a few of my friends created a proposal for an intentional Christian community where we would share everything that we owned, while living simply, sharing meals and possessions with the poor and live in a place disproportionately affected by the consequences of the industrial system. We started the Camden Community House, in the context of a recent resurgence of similar communities across the U.S. Many of these communities are similar to the Catholic Worker movment as houses of hospitality and war resistance. Many of these communities including the Camden Community House are have joined in a larger movement called the Community of Communities or The New Monasticism. The New Monasticism has a set of Marks to live by, a certain platform on which to shape decision making and the wisdom for a greater vision of life together. The New Monasticism is defined as “movement of Jesus followers who are committed to a new way of life in community.”

These communies are strong and loving providing a support for members to pursue hospitality, peace making, life together, a certain home economics of sharing. Yet when a group of people gathers together to define a community as a set of people that are inside the community following a set of Marks what happens to the individuals who do not fit within that same mold. Is there something that is lost when these communities can point to a group of people and say “not in our community.” This dualistic thinking perpetuates a paternal aspect in decision-making.

I am still friends with the members of the Camden Community and think that they’re amazing people, but I was not comfortable within the growing state of homogeneity of the community. I left the community because some voices were valued more than others. involved sex-positive relationships, affirming various expressions of monogamy. I was not free to define my boundaries for healthy monogamous sexuality, and neither were many of my friends who also left various communities. Rhere are many voices from within the New Monasticism movement who are spirit-inspired leaders, and prophets of our time but rather than asking only what is added to the communities by the exclusive nature, perhaps we should be asking, what voices the communities have lost. Perhaps I should continue to focus on the constructive ways that I can live for justice and continue to build relationships with all people in Camden. I desire a community of people that support my expression and process of love because their sense of liberation is connected with my own.

Even though I am no longer in the Camden Community House I have found great connection and mutual liberation with the people of Camden, particularly within our neighborhood of Waterfront South. When I first started talking with people and asking them what the wanted I heard a lot of different responses. People said they wanted a grocery store, people said they wanted jobs, and people said they wanted something good for the children in the neighborhood to do. It seemed like a logical connection to start a garden with people in the neighborhood. Eve’s Garden was born in 2003. Eve was a woman that I met in the neighborhood who said she liked to garden. Now we grow over 12,000 heirloom seedlings and farm over an acre of various garden spaces in the neighborhood, hiring the young Jr. Farmers who are paid a stipend.

There is a fierce tradition of peacemaking at Sacred Heart, the local parish here in Camden. I am Catholic now; I go to Sacred Heart Church in Camden. It is a church of justice, peace, art, and community, grounded in a certain ecological liturgy that connects the rotating seasons of the sanctuary with the seasons of the gardenI draw from the traditions of the Mennonite and Catholic churches, finding clarity in peace, beauty, and community. It is a community for peacemakers and the people the church has rejected. Our communion is a commitment to peace with each other and the land.

The priest of the parish, Father Michael Doyle was banished to Sacred Heart after his involvement with the Camden 28, a ploughshares direct action group, tried and acquitted during the American War in Vietnam in the 60’s. I was drawn to Camden, NJ for the same reasons I loved the Mennonite Church as a kid, that and he tells really good stories. A different story must be told from within the context of global ecosystem decay. We must find truth within the narrative of the land. In this city of 80,000 people there is one grocery store . Amidst this food desert loving our neighbor has come to mean growing healthy food is an act of peacemaking. We raise a small army of peaceful warrior farmers who grow vegetables for their families and their neighbors. Working together with the people of Camden to grow their own food rather than just feeding people in soup kitchens feels like a great step from charity toward justice, reclaiming the land in one of America’s most dangerous and violent cities. Just last week a woman was murdered around the corner from me, just days after Camden officials cut 40% of the police force in the city, a city that is regularly ranked as the most dangerous in the U.S. At one of the murder sites in the neighborhood we planted an orchard. This 18-tree fruit orchard, planted in the fall of 2010 with varieties of sweet and sour cherries, apples, peaches, pear, and hazelnut trees, dreams the dream of the earth. The orchard and other garden spaces, whisper the vision given in Revelation, the Tree of Life growing in the city beside the river, the fruits of the tree for the healing of Nations. This orchard flourishes where Dawn McCrary was strangled in 1997, at the age of 24. This farming builds relationships.

At Eve's Garden, nobody plants alone. Planting is our communion with the earth. Bread is our communion with the land and each other.

Eve’s Garden is now under a non-profit called The Camden Center for Environmental Transformation. The Center is an old abandoned convent that we fully rehabbed into a 24-bed retreat center across the street from Eve’s Garden. The Center is focused on Environmental Justice with groups from all over the region coming to learn about and help to transform the systemic environmental problems , as they learn how to better love their neighbors when they return to their home communities, as we work together to transform our problems into resources. Whenever anybody flushes a toilet, throws something aways, or recycles in Camden County, it arrives to our neighborhood where it has an environmental impact and reduces the quality of life for people in Camden. Camdn has combined stormwater and sewage systems. When it rains the streets and some of the basements fill with this combined sewage. About 50 million gallons of sludge come to Waterfront South everyday. One of our responses to this problem has been to make and sell rainbarrels. A rainbarrel is a 55-gallon barrel situated under the downspout so as it rains, the barrel fills up with water. We get all of the barrels from a factory down the street that previously had to pay $6 a barrel to dispose of them. Now the owner of the factory throws them over our fence and we hire people from the neighborhood to transform them into rainbarrels.Inside the greenhouse we just completed a closed-loop aquaponic system. This is a great model for how we can transform our problems into resources. Fish are grown in a barrel in the ground, and the water is pumped through a stone-filled bed where vegetables are being grown hydropnically (without soil) suspended in stones and flushed with the nutrient-rich fish water. As the plants utilized the fish emulsion, the water is cleaned and enters back into the fish tank.

Mother Earth: A lament

I am so grateful when I see a child carrying a bag of sunflower seeds. Many of the children like to eat them, and their imaginations are engaged when we go to the garden and stand beneath the towering sunflowers that we planted and harvest the seeds from gigantic heads. We harvest the sunflower seeds the ways the native people did, a process that often leads children into the transformative "ah-ha moment." They are captured by the transformation of the sunflower from seed to flower to seed, "oh! sunflower SEEDS!" We cut the sunflowers from our garden to be placed in the sanctuary for the Feast of the Transfiguration (August 6^th) when Christ is transfigured on the mountain with Elijah and Moses. We also cut the sunflowers to lament the bombing of Hiroshima on the same day. We have also carried the cut sunflowers to Camden City Hall and placed them at the door of our officials in one of America’s most dangerous and polluted cities.

Our ecological liturgical year recreates a culture around healthy celebration and food, our communion grown in peace. We grow as a prayerful community and reclaim the calendar. Certainly the spring is one of the most exciting times for us in the garden. We all gather together and plant our potatoes in the garden on Saint Patrick's Day. We fire the bread oven that we made from natural materials and cook these potatoes when they harvest on June 16^th for Blooms Day. We continue to create our own folklore with characters such as the Mulberry Princess as we follow her clues to the ripened mulberry trees in the beginning of June. We follow pirate maps found in fishermen's bottles that lead to the buried treasures in our garden. It is a miracle in "America's Most Dangerous City” to find ourselves surrounded by great wisdom and the creativity of the margins. We are filled with the energy of the children in a world of uninterrupted play at the Center For Environmental Transformation, a retreat center, think tank, and action arm for eco-justice in Camden and the region. ( HYPERLINK "http://www.camdencenterfortransformation.org/" \t "_blank" www.camdencenterfortransformation.org).

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This is a buzz word currently… what do you mean by it? How do you define it?

Practicing Resurrection

At our greenhouse in Camden, NJ we find truth and beauty in healing the land. In our neighborhood of Waterfront South next to the Delaware River the community of people gather together to reconnect with the earth.

Holy Oil

The Passover Sedar and the Maundy Thursday services are both deeply connected to the rhythms of the moon. In addition to the holy bread and wine, there is also the holy oil also from the earth. Something so sacramental as the oil of our blessings and healings is so closely related to the oil that has brought decades of occupied violence and controlled imaginations. You see, when the automobile was first made attainable by the general population with the Model T, it was made to run on either gasoline or ethanol. Except back then in the 1920's it wasn't really called ethanol, it was called moonshine. Moonshine was made by the people close to the land, the farmers and mountain people of distant lands and generation who knew how to take something that was rotting, destined for trash and transform it into a resource. With a flip of a switch Ford's automobile converted the carborator from running on gasoline or ethanol.

At this point in time the Rockerfeller's held a near monopoly on the gasoline industry. Certainly the Rockerfellers didn't appreciate it when the people could drive and then stop at a local farm filling up at the still. Standard Oil Company flipped the hyperbolic switch toward industrial corporate power during the time of the prohibition. John D. Rockerfeller funded prohibition. At which point in time the moonshine, which was made from anything containing a sugar or a starch, became illegal. Rather than our gasoline supporting local economies, we have been carried down a trajectory toward endless war. Most of the attempts that the United States Government has made in reverting back to the use of ethanol has been to make it using corn. Now the interesting part to using corn -based ethanol is that not only has it made corn practically unaffordable throughout the majority of cash crop growing Latin Americans, the monocultures of the petro-industrial agricultural system require one gallon of gasoline to grow a bushel of corn. It is more efficient to use the straight up gasoline in our engines then in the tractors to grow the corn, to generate the heat for the ethanol conversion. Most importantly in the context of human induced global environmental degradation, and the collapsing global economies, we fill our landfills with the materials that would have been our blessing.

In our neighborhood where there are 28 known contaminated USEPA sites and the waste for the region comes in both all the trash, stormwater, and recycling , we are sitting on the new goldmine. Two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder wrote that the two greatest curses of civilization were the discovery of silver and gold. Perhaps oil and gas should be added to the list of natural wealth that ends up damaging more then helping people in many parts of the world that are rich in subsoil resources. I imagine the land in Pennsyvania and all our waterways between being filled with poinsins of the Hydrolic Fracking raping to remove natural gas out from the Marcellus Shale and filling wells with the concoction of drilling fluids. Here across the Delaware River in Philadelphia, the people are marching in protest against the dumping of the drilling fluids from Fracking in the sewage treatment plants that are far more than less equipped to purify the poinsons thusly pouring into our open waterways.

I love my neighborhood, I love the children and their wild imaginations. Where I live in Waterfront South I garden with people of all ages, growing community and the creativity to transform our problems into resouces. We fill as though our community has had more than it's fair share with highly polluted and documented industrial centralizing on along the Delaware River in South Camden. With the history of a shipyard closing and factories outsourcing, we are now restoring a beautiful tax-base and green Waterfront South Green Infrastructure Sustainability Plan.

Despite the rise and terrible fall of Camden we can envision a place where the children don't have to breathe any chemicals as a bottom line. One day when our economies are valuing Stormwater Credits as the PWD is doing in Philadelphia.

Waste-Stream

CCMUA

Children

Trash-To-Steam

Diesel Emissions

Urban Forestry

We landed in Ho Chi Mihn City and met up with my brother it was warm and hot. When I stepped off the plane I thought of Vincent. Vincent is a lovely young Vietnamese boy in the neighborhood who comes to the greenhouse and goes to Sacred Heart. One Friday afternoon he and I were standing by the breadoven with an open wood fire cooking our bread. Vincent took a deep breath and exclaimed, "mmm it smells LIKE NAAAAM!"

and as i stepped off the airplane in Ho Chi Minh City (formally known as Saigon) I exclaimed, "mmm it smells like our Breadoven in CAMDEN!!!"

Sometimes I've seen Vincent playing war with toy guns, I wonder which side he fights for?

This past January my father and I returned to Vietnam. It was the first time that he had been outside the U.S. since he had fought in the war. We journeyed deep into the mountains, along riversides, and beaches, meeting the faces of farmers and fishermen, connecting with a landscape of memories full of violence for the people of Vietnam, and the returning injured, scarred, and broken Veterans of War.

When my dad returned from his tour of duty he carried a knife around with him almost at all times, always looking out for the enemy, the Cong. Now I know that this is something almost all soldiers do after returning.

Although my last name is German I am not an ethnic Mennonite but grew up in the Mennonite church with my family . I attended Locust Grove Mennonite School in Lancaster, PA, but we found the Mennonite church deep in the jungle far on the other side of the world in a warzone. My father was drafted out of high school in 1965 straight into the armored cavalry in the United States Amry. He fought in the American War in Vietnam, and amidst the violence on land and people he found peace. As he rode in his armored tank, surrounded by a calvalcade of armed and marching soldiers my father remembers a group of Buddhist Monks that came walking for peace into the small village where his brigade was occupying. He saw about a dozen monks wearing only saffron tunics walking for peace with no food, no weapons, only prayer. Dad committed himself to finding a group of Christians that carried out their faith commitments in the same way, following Christ in simplicity, peace, and community. It led him to the Mennonite Church when he returned to Lancaster. This war brought my family to the Mennonite Church, and shaped a great journey of peace and community for me.

I felt as though the Mennonite Church was my family as a child. I was full of faith. After attending the Mennonite Church for over five years we were still being introduced to visiting clergy and outsiders as “the Ferich family from the city that came to know Christ through the urban outreach ministries of the church.” We were never going to be full members, somehow brought into the community to make the leadership feel justified. The church leadership chose to remember what they “gave” us more than needing us in the community. This is a framework of charity and not a framework for justice. Within the charity framework the “giver” decides which questions are asked, chosing who is empowered. Charity is justice with an ego.

how does this connect with charity and justice?

Sometimes the exclusion of individuals within our communities of faith is as subtle as the distinction between justice and charity. When I was in college I studied in the rainforests of Belize for a semester. During this time as I lived near howler monkeys and snakes that could kill you with a single bite. I came to deeply love the deep interconnection of systems through understanding ecology, a radical realization that has shaped my understanding of Communion and all Sacraments. IN Belize I realized that The Communion is perhaps one of the best manifestations of Community. This cup is our communion with each other and the land, it is the Body of Christ. It is our communion with the land, the land that grows the wheat and the grapevines that become our bread and wine, it is our communion with those who grew it. The Communion Cup is the interconnetcion of the whole world, the Community of all creation, all that is good and inclusive. The Church excluded this type of thinking for a long time through the witch trials, shunning, and the excommunication of prophets such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , Matthew Fox, and Meister Eckhart. Many of us grew up in churches where our love for the earth must be carefully watched, because it is a fine line between loving the earth and worshipping it. This fear has perpetuated a great violence within our communities toward the earth and most of our neighbors. Quite a few of us began to realize that not only are we Biblically mandated to love all Creation because of it’s inherent goodness, but also if we are serious about loving our neighbors we are going to be concerned about what we produce, consume, and throw-away because of our deep love for all of this Beloved Community. We follow our waste-stream because we want to love our neighbors by caring what they are breathing, eating, and drinking. Perhaps if we meet the poor who live beside the landfill where our waste goes we will throw-away less, and maybe as children of God we can envision a resurrection that transforms problems into resources, the community of resurrection that we are called to. Following the waste-stream led me to Camden, NJ.

Camden is an Environmental Justice Community, a place that is disproportionately effected by the environmental consequences of a region. In towns where there is more than one polluting industry, 70% of the people living within two miles of multiple hazardous waste facilities are people of color. All of our trash and waste, heavily polluting indsustries are often centralized in certain neigborhoods where there are a lot of poor people, people of color, and single mothers. These areas also usually have little access to healthy food. Rather than returning the jungles of Belize and working through my theology amidst the pristine I found it important to work through the matters of my faith in the context of garbage heaps and prostitutes. After college at Eastern University I moved to Camden, NJ, bearer of the violence of the empire. Camden is similar to places like Detroit, Gary, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Yakima, Flint, our great centers of the industrial boom, now the faces of the consequences of outsourcing and conecentration of polluting industries. I moved to Camden because I wanted to hear people’s stories, I wanted to help to create as much healing as possible, and because my own liberation is tied to the people’s of Camden. This great work and commitment was worked out through the context of community. When I was in Belize a few of my friends created a proposal for an intentional Christian community where we would share everything that we owned, while living simply, sharing meals and possessions with the poor and live in a place disproportionately affected by the consequences of the industrial system. We started the Camden Community House, in the context of a recent resurgence of similar communities across the U.S. Many of these communities are similar to the Catholic Worker movment as houses of hospitality and war resistance. Many of these communities including the Camden Community House are joined in a larger movement called the Community of Communities or The New Monasticism. The New Monasticism has a set of Marks to live by, a certain platform on which to shape decision making and the wisdom for a greater vision of life together, a code of conduct. The New Monasticism is defined as a “movement of Jesus followers who are committed to a new way of life in community.”

These communities are strong and loving, providing a support for members to pursue hospitality, peace making, life together, a certain home economics of sharing.

Yet when a group of people gathers together to define a community as a set of people that are inside the community following a set of Marks what happens to the individuals who do not fit within that same mold. Is there something that is lost when these communities can point to a group of people and say “not in our community.” This dualistic thinking perpetuates a paternal aspect in decision-making, resembling the principalties and powers in the world that it seeks to disengage. I left the community because some voices were valued more than others, and the ones that are more valued could not agree to disagree. I value diversity in strengthening community and began to see that the celebrated leaders of the New Monasticism were really only welcoming the voices that sounded a lot like their own. One of the Marks of the New Monasticism includes the Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children. This Mark in particular has been a great source of inconsistency and alienation within the New Monasticism. There are a handful of white and male leaders within the New Monasticism who have developed a moral higher ground judging others on a platform of sexclusion. I am neither married nor celibate, yet their was no room for my expression of monogomy. The New Monasticism to me has come to mean a group of people who are set apart and don’t want to include others in the community because it will dilute the substance of the community or how the community is viewed from the outside. I did not leave the Camden House with any sense of antagonism, but do wonder if the exclusive nature of so many of our communities is infact what prevents us from the depth of love, and diversity of theological wisdom that we are called to. I would like to add a Mark that would read, “A Lament for the loss of community through the creation of these Marks, the people that we have knowingly or unknowingly excluded from our inner circle.” I write this words with humility and healing, I mean no harm but as Archbishop Desmond Tutu rights, As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said “I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.” Desmond Tutu. Currently I continue to focus on living for justice and community with the people of Camden and all people who send their waste here. I desire a community of people that support my expression and process of love because their sense of liberation is connected with my own, focused on healing with all Creation.

Even though I am no longer in the Camden Community House, my relationships with the people of this and all communities are important to me. I have found great connection and mutual liberation with the people of Camden, particularly within our neighborhood of Waterfront South. When I first started talking with people and asking them what they wanted I heard a lot of different responses. People said they wanted a grocery store, people said they wanted jobs, and people said they wanted something good for the children in the neighborhood to do. It seemed like a logical connection to start a garden with people in the city with only one grocery store for 80,000 people. Eve’s Garden was born in 2003. Eve was a woman that I met in the neighborhood who said she liked to garden. Now we grow over 12,000 heirloom seedlings and farm over an acre of various garden spaces in the neighborhood, hiring the young Jr. Farmers from the neighborhood who are paid a stipend. We work through the creation of justice together, and not the table scraps of charity.

1. Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.

2. Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.

3. Hospitality to the stranger.

4. Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.

5. Humble submission to Chirst’s body, the church.

6. Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate.

7. Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.

8. Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.

9. Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.

10. Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economics.

11. Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.

12. Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.