To honor our founder Rick Love’s legacy, to further his vision, and to raise up more peacebuilders like him, Peace Catalyst will be presenting the 3rd annual Rick Love Peace Awards at Alliance for Peacebuilding’s PeaceCon this year. These awards will honor those who creatively cross divides to build peace, exhibiting the same character and courage displayed by Rick, including two young peacebuilders under the age of 30.

Several nights ago, I was invited by my dear friend to come to Vratnik, but this time to a local “kafana” (pub) to come and sing Sevdah, a traditional genre of song from Bosnia that usually talks about unrequited love, tragedy, and fallen heroes. I’m a big advocate of in-person therapy, but oftentimes that type of therapy is unavailable or unattainable. So that evening, I decided to offer a different kind of therapy, the kind that sings songs of sorrow and gives permission to even the most hardened of men to experience the emotions of pain.

Christ at the Checkpoint was by far the most impactful conference I’ve ever attended. Nothing can compare to hearing from Palestinian Christians themselves at this particular moment of crisis. Even while these Palestinian Christian leaders affirmed their love for Jewish people and the depth of solidarity they feel from Jewish allies around the world, they spoke with authority and clarity to call western Christians to confront our own anti-Palestinian racism and the underlying Christian Zionism that results in harmful theological and political positions. So what can we do? Here are some resources.

Why am I going to Christ at the Checkpoint (CATC) 2024? On the one hand, this is a simple question to answer. I’m going to CATC because I have accepted the invitation to journey to the other side of the wall to stand in solidarity with Palestinians. On the other hand, the answer requires a bit of personal history…

The prevalence of transgenerational trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not well understood or communicated. The older generations, who lived through and survived the war, never received the help needed to heal from that trauma, and this results in mental health issues for the country’s youth that are made even worse by the persistence of ethnically-biased and conflicting narratives. This is all why our intern in Sarajevo is learning from and working with a local organization called Progres as part of her internship with us. Keep reading for more about what she’s learning.

As we all know, the world desperately needs peacebuilders right now, and thanks to participants and partners like you who make our work possible, the world is getting more peacebuilders. Not sure you believe us? People in our communities all around the world told us that they did all of this in 2023 as a result of participating in Peace Catalyst's work.

In conflict, being intentional about making the other person feel that they are being treated with dignity is a way to positively transform the situation. In other words, avoid making someone feel humiliated. French author Antoine Sant-Exupéry wrote, “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.” So how do we avoid making someone feel humiliated? Read on!

 During the season of Lent, we worked together with multiple local organizers to help host Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimagewalks in multiple cities around the U.S. (and attended a couple more as participants). 

Gaza Ceasefire Pilgrimage is a worldwide movement of Christians who set out to walk the length of the Gaza Strip during Lent in a gesture of prayerful solidarity with those suffering violence. As participants in this global movement, we held walks in the Twin Cities, Seattle, Boise, San Diego, and Davis, with a total of 400+ participants. Read on for highlights.

In the increasingly globalized and diversified world we find ourselves in, our psychological tendency to become entrenched in whatever we believe seems to do us more harm than good. So how can we work to challenge this? Here are a couple ideas.