Fall Retreat 2020
Engaging Deep Divides — Courageous Leadership and Spiritual Care 
The 2020 Fall Retreat was held online on three consecutive Fridays in November. Our focus this year was: Engaging Deep Divides—Courageous Leadership and Spiritual Care.
November 6, 1:00 pm–3:00 pm
Election Chaos and Protecting Democracy–Courageous Leadership in Religion and Conflict Transformation
Hosted by Dean Mary Elizabeth Moore with Featured Speaker: David Anderson Hooker.
Rev. Dr. David Anderson Hooker is Associate Professor of the Practice of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. His current research and practice focuses is in developing and refining practices that transform cultural narratives in support of inclusive, affirming and just communities. Dr. Hooker has worked with local churches, seminaries, denominations, communities, local and national governments, and international NGOs and civil society organizations on post-conflict community building, environmental justice, and other issues of public policy and social justice. He has managed multi-party conflicts, conducted workshops, and consulted across the U.S. and around the world. Hooker also is a lawyer who has represented the State of Georgia as an Assistant Attorney General. He has taught graduate courses in negotiation, mediation, conflict resolution, conflict analysis, trauma healing, and conflict transformation at Eastern Mennonite University. From 2010-2015, Hooker served as Senior Fellow for Community Engagement Strategies at the University of Georgia’s J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development. He is President & Principal Narrator for CounterStories Consulting, llc, where his work focuses on narrative alignment for civic, community, and faith leaders. Hooker is a graduate of Morehouse College (B.S./M.S.) in Atlanta, Georgia; the University of Massachusetts Amherst (M.P.H. & M.P.A.); Emory University’s School of Law (J.D.); and Emory University’s Candler School of Theology (M.Div.) and he earned his Ph.D. from Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is ordained in the United Church of Christ (UCC), was a member of the staff collective and at different times the Board of JustPeace-The UMC Center for Conflict Transformation. He also served for several years as Minister for Local and Global Missions at the First Congregational Church (UCC) Atlanta.
Mary Elizabeth Moore is Dean of the School of Theology and Professor of Theology and Education, Boston University. Her passion is to journey with others to cultivate deeper faith, compassionate humanity, and a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. She feels privileged to work toward those ends with colleagues in Boston University and around the world, especially in the practices of knowing the Holy, building justice, resisting violence, and caring for the earth. Her books include: Teaching as a Sacramental Act; Ministering with the Earth; Covenant and Call; Teaching from the Heart; and The United Methodist Diaconate (co-authored); plus three edited volumes, Children, Youth, and Spirituality in a Troubling World; Practical Theology and Hermeneutics; and A Living Tradition: Critical Recovery of the Wesleyan Heritage. She has engaged in interreligious relationship-building in local, professional, and academic settings and is presently working on a project to develop interreligious approaches to practical theology.
November 13, 10:00 am–12:00 noon
Courageous Leadership: Structuring Dialogues Across Deep Divisions
Hosted by Dr. Felipe Maia with Featured Speakers: Paula Green, Ben Fink, and Gwen Johnson
Paula Green Through the Karuna Center, Paula Green has led multi-year interventions and programs in dozens of the world’s most intractable conflicts. In many of our countries of concern, Karuna Center has engaged repeatedly over a 25-year span, supporting collaborative and inclusive processes that encourage the development of nonviolent responses to communal conflict. Green also launched CONTACT, Conflict Transformation Across Cultures, an internationally acclaimed program for would-be peacebuilders. Each year in June, about 60 participants from across the globe are selected to learn from a team of professionals as well as from each other in an intensive residential learning community of three weeks at SIT’s tranquil and secluded Vermont campus. In response to the polarization that accompanied the U.S. elections of 2016, Paula Green felt it was essential to bring her work home to the U.S. With others, she co-founded Hands Across the Hills, a highly recognized program of dialogue and cultural exchange between a progressive community in western Massachusetts and a conservative community in eastern Kentucky.
Ben Fink is the founding organizer of Performing Our Future, a multiracial coalition of rural and urban communities based at Roadside Theater/Appalshop in the east Kentucky coalfields. He has made theatre with homeless and housed actors in Minneapolis, teenagers in rural New Jersey, and Turkish and Arab immigrants in Berlin. Ben holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota. His writings on building community stories, power, and wealth have been published by Salon.com, Bill Moyers, the Brookings Institution, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gwen Johnson is longtime secretary-treasurer of the Hemphill Community Center and founder of the Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery and Catering Company. She lives and works in the coal camp of Hemphill, Kentucky, where she grew up the daughter and granddaughter of coal miners. Gwen graduated high school unable to read beyond a second-grade level; she now holds an MA from Goddard College in health arts and sciences. She has worked as an administrator in the University of Kentucky’s Early Childhood Development program since 2003.
Dr. Felipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at STH. Dr. Maia’s research and teaching focus on liberation theologies and philosophies, theology and economics, and the Christian eschatological imagination. His scholarship pays special attention to the ways in which imaginaries about the future shape politics, economics, cultural patterns, and religious practices. Employing sources in Marxist and continental philosophies, Dr. Maia’s current book project offers an analysis of the debate in critical theory addressing the “financialization” of capitalism to show how future-talk is ubiquitous to financial discourse and how contemporary finance engenders a particular mode of temporality. In this context, Dr. Maia suggests that the language of hope, as approached by Latinx liberation theologians, is a subversive social force that can continuously question and resist the hopes and expectations conjured by hegemonic economic discourses.
Watch the video of “Courageous Leadership: Structuring Dialogues Across Deep Divisions” here.
November 20, 10:00 am–12:00 noon
Spiritual Care When Engaging Deep Divisions and Conflict Transformation
Hosted by Bishop Susan Hassinger, with Featured Speakers: Dr. Johonna Turner, Rabbi David Jaffe, and Dr. Shelly Rambo
Dr. Johonna Turner is Assistant Professor of Restorative Justice and Peacebuilding at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University. For over 15 years, Dr. Turner has worked as part of arts collectives, community organizing coalitions, and other social movement organizations to develop youth leadership, empower disenfranchised people, and cultivate transformational approaches to safety and justice. A thoroughly interdisciplinary scholar, Dr Turner received post-graduate training in U.S. cultural studies, women’s studies, and biblical theology/urban ministry. Her areas of scholarship, practice and teaching include restorative and transformative justice, trauma healing, faith-rooted peacebuilding, and critical race feminism.
Rabbi David Jaffe is the author of Changing the World from the Inside Out: A Jewish Approach to Personal and Social Change, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. David received his rabbinic ordination in Israel and holds an Masters in Social Work from Columbia University and a Masters in Jewish Studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He currently facilitates a fellowship on spiritual practices for Jewish leaders engaged in social justice work.
Dr. Shelly Rambo is Associate Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. Her work at the intersection of trauma and religion has led to partnerships with chaplains and international educators in post-conflict areas. Inspired by the work of military chaplains, she was instrumental in designing Boston University School of Theology’s MDiv track in Chaplaincy. She also serves as a faculty leader in Boston University’s Religion and Conflict Transformation program. She is the author of Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, and Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma.
Bishop Susan Hassinger is Bishop-in-Residence and Lecturer in Spirituality and Leadership at Boston University School of Theology. Ordained in 1968, she has served as pastor in various contexts in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of the United Methodist Church, and as district superintendent from 1980-1985. Bishop Hassinger has been part of the design team and first president of JustPeace Center for Conflict Transformation and Mediation, an agency related to the UMC. Her training, in addition to extensive work in conflict transformation, has included organizational development, family systems as applied to groups and organizations, anti-racism and white privilege, and leadership for change.
Watch the video of “Spiritual Care When Engaging Deep Divisions and Conflict Transformation” here.