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

“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.”