Justice on the healing edge

Earlier this year, my mentor & friend, Howard Zehr, told me about an organization that had reached out to him for help in their formation: the International Guild of Visual Peacemakers, whose website just went live last week. Howard guest-blogged one of their first posts on the site. He nicely describes his cross-disciplinary and arts-infused work in both fields of restorative justice and photography. This approach is one that I seek to embody in my work. Here's a snippet from his post:

Photography at the healing edge

One part of me is a photographer. I’ve worked internationally as an NGO photojournalist. I’ve done marketing and magazine stories. I love landscapes and portraiture (see www.howardzehr.com).  But what I like most is doing documentary work. In my experience, documentary photography can help bridge the chasms that separate people. If done respectfully and collaboratively, it can also provide a way for people to share of themselves. My vision, like that of the IGVP, is to use photography as a way to work on the healing edge.

The other passion, and much of my career, has been in the criminal justice field, and specifically a field that I helped found called restorative justice. Unlike criminal justice that tends to divide, restorative justice is essentially a peacemaking approach to justice. Restorative justice is justice on the healing edge. (emphasis mine)

See also Howard's Restorative Justice blog at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

This Is Water in the Church

There has been some very strange and wonderful synchronicity emerging in my social/intellectual life over the course of this year. Read on after the break to catch some glimpses inside my head and social life, as I talk about friends, literature, barefoot running, and good, contemporary Christian philosophy...

(Note: This post contains no mention of the excellent album pictured to the right.)