2024 Conference
June 10-13, 2024 | Casa Iskali | Des Plaines, IL
Communicating God’s Non-Violent Love
James Alison, Julia Robinson Moore, Suzanne Ross, and Adam Ericksen
The 2024 Theology & Peace Conference and Annual Meeting was held at the Casa Iskali Retreat Center, located just outside Chicago, Illinois, from June 10 to 13, 2024. The conference theme, “Communicating God’s Non-Violent Love,” brought attendees from across the United States as well as virtual participants from as far away as New Zealand and Australia. The conference participants were passionate about sharing the story of God’s unconditional love.
James Warren
James Warren, the author of Compassion or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard (2013), opened the conference with his concise and insightful review of the origins of mimetic theory.
Warren also delighted conference participants with a display of his skills as a professional magician.
James Alison
Fr. James Alison delivered a brilliant undoing of sacrificial atonement, urging us to move beyond shame because Jesus intended not to shortcut our way to forgiveness, but to “occup[y] the space of death and shame so as to detoxify those realities forever.”
We moved from theory to explore effective means to shift from mimetic rivalry to loving mimesis. Rev. Adam Ericksen, pastor of Clackamas United Church of Christ in Milwaukie, OR, reminded us that the world needs to hear our voices and we can amplify our voices by using social media to spread the “scandalous” message that God’s love overcomes violence. Several of Pastor Adam’s congregants joined us via Zoom to share powerful testimony about discovering Pastor Adam online and undergoing a personal transformation from hearing and embracing the message of God’s love.
Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore
Moving from theory to explore effective means to shift from mimetic rivalry to loving mimesis, The Rev. Adam Ericksen, pastor of Clackamas United Church of Christ, Milwaukie, OR, reminded us that the world needs to hear our voices and we can amplify our voices by using social media to spread the “scandalous” message that God’s love overcomes violence. Several of Pastor Adam’s congregants provided powerful testimony about discovering Pastor Adam online and undergoing a personal transformation from hearing and embracing the message of God’s love.
Rev. Ellen Corcella
The Rev. Ellen Corcella, a palliative care chaplain for Eskenazi Health, a Trauma One Level Midwest hospital system, explored how we might embody God’s non-violent love in our interpersonal relationships, positing a trauma-informed paradigm combining Henri Nouwen’s concept of the “wounded healer,” Dr. Shelly Rambo’s theology of trauma and spirit, and Rebecca Adams’s concept of loving mimesis. Rev. Corcella then led participants in an analysis of a patient case study as an example of ways we can encourage movement from an interaction predicated upon fear and rivalry to an encounter that allows one to witness another’s suffering and uncover a shared human capacity to feel God’s love as one human being to another.
Our final night together included an evening of improv theater games hosted by Maura Junius, who demonstrated that Christian discipleship can be just such a type of play — encountering whatever unique and surprising circumstances a roulette universe spins our way, and making creative choices in response to those circumstances. Improvisation in response to God invites those around us into greater participation and play with God, thereby communicating God’s nonviolent love through joy, freedom, and creative choice rather than through force or indoctrination.
We held our Annual Meeting on June 13, electing the following members to the Board of Directors: Shannon Mullen, Rebecca Adams, Suella Gerber, Karen Kepner, Wesley Dunbar, and Ellen Corcella. The Board was tasked with reviewing and providing a report on the resources of T&P and providing suggestions about programming as we move into the future. Tim Seitz-Brown will be an advisor to the Board and Andrew McRae will continue to facilitate T&P’s popular program, Mimesis at the Movies. Our online Quarterly Speaker Series will also carry on.