Scott Appleby in Liberating Faith: Religious Voices for Justice, Peace, and Ecological Wisdom, Roger S. Gottlieb, ed., (Lanham, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2003), pp. 435-440.

Liberating Faith is an anthology that shows how religion has joined with and learned from movements for social justice, peace, and ecological wisdom. Appleby’s chapter is excerpted from his book, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). He begins with five vignettes illustrating the range of peacemaking activities in which religious people have played a role, including preventive diplomacy, teaching, poll monitoring, conflict mediation and nonviolent protest. He contends that religious peacebuilding includes not only conflict transformation on the ground and post-conflict reform, but also the efforts of people working away from sites of deadly conflict. Among those are legal advocates of religious human rights, scholars conducting research relevant to cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue, and theologians and ethicists who are probing and strengthening their religious communities’ traditions of nonviolent militancy.

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