Status Updates From The Moral Imagination: The ...

“The final discipline…of the moral imagination… the willingness to take a risk. To risk is to step into the unknown without any guarantee of success or even safety. Risk by its very nature is mysterious. It is mystery lived, for it ventures into lands that are not controlled or charted. People living in settings of deep-rooted conflict are faced with an extraordinary irony. Violence is known; peace is the mystery.”

“Though not foretold or initially clear, people who display a deep quality of moral imagination in these settings of violence demonstrate a capacity to live in a personal and social space that gives birth to the unexpected. Having much in common, the survival of both creativity and imagination require this quality of living.”

“Matthew Fox (2002) calls creativity the place "where the divine and the human meet." There is, once again, inherent to our exploration, a quality of paradox that accompanies the process, for the creative act simultaneously has an element of the transcendent and the mundane. In other words, creativity moves beyond what exists toward something new and unexpected while rising from and speaking to the everyday.”

“The moral imagination takes form and expression through an act. While we might initially think of the space where moral and imagination meet as a conceptual exercise, in reality we cannot know this kind of imagination outside of concrete human action. Theologically this notion is found in the Word that becomes flesh, the moment when potentiality moves from the realm of possibility to the world of the tangible.”

“Paradoxical curiosity stimulates and provokes the moral imagination. It is a discipline that, in settings of deep-rooted violence filled with social polarization, views complexity as a friend and refuses to fall into the historic traps of dualistic divisions, which drive the cycles of violence. Paradoxical curiosity sustains a permanent inquisitiveness that vigilantly explores the world of possibilities…”

“Paradoxical curiosity starts with a commitment to accept people at face value. Heart value goes beyond the presentation of appearance and ventures into the way these things are perceived and interpreted by people. It explores where meaning is rooted. It seeks to find the home of meaning in the experience of people. Face value and heart value suppose a paradox.”

“Peacebuilding requires a vision of relationship. Stated bluntly, if there is
no capacity to imagine the canvas of mutual relationships and situate oneself as part of that historic and ever-evolving web, peacebuilding collapses. The centrality of relationship provides the context… for breaking violence… the moral imagination… that ultimately the quality of our life is dependent on the quality of life of others.“

“Patterns of violence are never superseded without acts that have a confessional quality at their base. … these acts emerge from a voice that says … “I am part of this pattern. My choices and behaviors affect it.” While the justification of violent response has many tributaries, the moral imagination that rises beyond violence has but two: taking personal responsibility and acknowledging relational mutuality.”

“The perpetration of violence, more than anything else, requires a deep, implicit belief that desired change can be achieved independently of the web of relationships. Breaking violence requires that people embrace a more fundamental truth: Who we have been, are, and will be emerges and shapes itself in a context of relational interdependency.”

“Time and again, where in small or large ways the shackles of violence are broken, we find a singular tap root that gives life to the moral imagination: the capacity of individuals and communities to imagine themselves in a web of relationship even with their enemies.”

“What disciplines, if they were not present, would make peacebuilding impossible? On exploration I discovered that when held together and practiced, these disciplines form the moral imagination that make peacebuilding possible. The essence is found in four disciplines, each of which requires imagination. They are relationship, paradoxical curiosity, creativity, and risk.”

“What I had not fully contemplated was the idea that rather than focus directly on the complexity, it would be useful to locate a core set of patterns and dynamics that generate the complexity. In other words, simplicity precedes complexity. This required me to think about simplicity as a source of energy rather than as the choice of reductionism.”

“The north of peacebuilding is best articulated as finding our way toward becoming and being local and global human communities characterized by respect, dignity, fairness, cooperation, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. To understand this north, to read such a compass, requires that we recognize and develop our moral imagination far more intentionally.”

“vocation calls us back to the road that winds beyond the rest stops of techniques and day-to-day practice. It beckons us to search for our deeper purpose and possibility, found more in who we are than in what we do. For our human community to find this deeper sense of who we are, where we are situated, and where we are going requires that we locate our bearings, our compass.”

“[Mills] admonished academics … to take up their proper vocation. That vocation is lost, he argued, when it is distracted by the narrowness of discipline-based technical applications or becomes drunk with esoteric verbiage that avoids critical assessment of the social world. The antidote, he penned in an unforgettable phrase, is only found in those willing to engage and build "the sociological imagination."”

“C. Wright Mills (1959) … Exposing the false tensions of ideologies that wished to govern political and intellectual debate and stripping bare the verbose layers of grand social theory that obscured rather than clarified, Mills made a simple argument: Structural history and personal biography are connected.”

“This is my 200-year present. It is made up of the lives that touched me and of those I will touch. The 200-year present represents my lived history. It is in this sense of "the present" that we need to locate ourselves in order to understand the nature of the turning point.”

“Boulding suggests we calculate "the present" by subtracting the date of birth of the oldest person we have known in our lives from the projected passing-on date of the youngest person in our family. In my case, the hands that held mine date back into the nineteenth century and those I now touch will live forward into the twenty-second. This is my 200-year present.”

“understanding the nature of a turning point requires a capacity to locate ourselves in an expansive, not a narrow view of time. Elise Boulding suggested that such a view of time must take place within what we touch and know but never be limited to a fleeting moment that passes us by. In a provocative twist of terms she created an intriguing image: We live in a "two-hundred-year present" (Boulding, 1990:3).”

“This is a challenge I wish to place before the burgeoning fields of conflict transformation and peacebuilding… we need a dose of realism. Ours are professions afflicted with a proclivity toward the promise of great change. It is true. Our rhetoric comes easy. If constructive social change rolled forward as easily as our words and promises pour out, world justice and peace would have surely been attained by now.”

“If we take seriously this realizable potential and our incapacity to reach it, we are left with a singularly perplexing question that seems especially appropriate in the timeframe of the first decade of the new millennium: What collective and global legacy are we leaving for our great-great-grandchildren this century?”

“Do not remember the former things,
Or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
—Isaiah 43:18–19”

“It was not a particular religious tradition: the stories in fact cut across religions. It was not political, economic, or military power in any of the cases. What then, created a moment, a turning point, of such significance that it shifted whole aspects of a violent, protracted setting of conflict? I believe it was the serendipitous appearance of the moral imagination in human affairs.”

“The commander said to me, "If I put down my weapons and go to Dushanbe with you, can you guarantee my safety and life?" The Tajik storyteller paused… "My difficulty was that I could not guarantee his safety…So I told my philosopher warlord friend the truth, ‘I cannot guarantee your safety. … But I can guarantee this. I will go with you, side by side. And if you die, I will die.' " ”

“Stated simply, the moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown…”

“While I have never been a big fan of problem stating, I have come to
appreciate the art of posing a good question. The question this book poses is simple and endlessly complex: How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?”

“"It took some time, but I found my voice. At some point, even though it is totally uncertain, you have to take the risk of following your own intuition, your own voice." [Akmal Mizshakarol]”