Al Owski’s Reviews > The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace > Status Update

“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.”

“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]”