Peacebuilder: a Conflict Transformation podcast by CJP

Dr. Howard Zehr is director emeritus of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice and a distinguished professor of restorative justice at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In this ninth episode, he talks about his path to victim-offender conferencing as a young practitioner, the early days of restorative justice, and where he sees the field going from here.
One of Zehr’s formative experiences as a young adult was attending Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta. He was confronted with being part of a “minority” as one of the few white students in attendance.
“People just didn’t read me the way I was used to being read. My body language, what I said was interpreted totally different[ly],” Zehr recalls. “It was a profound experience and not an easy one.”
It was in the 1970s, while teaching at another historically black institution, Talladega College in Alabama, when Zehr started working with the criminal justice system. He provided support to prisoners and trained student research teams “to help defense attorneys pick juries in really highly politicized cases: death penalty, prison riots, police brutality.”
In 1985, Zehr published the booklet Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, followed by Changing Lenses in 1990, a seminal work in Zehr’s own career and the field at large. He joined CJP in 1996, at the urging of Professor Ray Gingerich and Director Vernon Jantzi.
“My self concept is basically a journalist of justice,” Zehr says – communication and networking are foundational to his work. The whole reason he launched the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding series was to make the core concepts of CJP accessible to a wider audience.
Zehr pitched the first title, The Little Book of Restorative Justice, to his publisher saying, “I want it to cost about the same as a Big Mac dinner.” Over 100,000 copies of the book have now been sold in a variety of languages.
What does he celebrate most about CJP? “We’re still, as far as I know, the only academic program with a practice, a reflective practitioner value-based kind of approach. Which is what we set out to be.”
Looking forward another 25 years, Zehr says he likes where he sees the next generation going.
“That’s partly why I’m staying out of it,” he says. “A lot of them have a much wider vision about applications – to historical harms, to social injustices – but I don’t want us to lose also some of our focus on things like bringing those who are harmed and those who caused harm in the context of a criminal system together as well ... I hope we can hold those things together.”

This seventh episode features Bill Goldberg, director of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI). He speaks on the importance of grassroots and domestic peacebuilding, even in Eastern Mennonite University’s (EMU) own backyard and campus.
Goldberg jokes that he “married in” to the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) through his wife, former faculty member Lisa Schirch. His background was in international relations that often dealt with negotiations between world leaders. At CJP, though, he saw the value of grassroots-level peacebuilding.
“It actually was more important than the high level. That the high level negotiations would always fall apart if it wasn’t backed by lower level and by communities working together,” Goldberg says. He started taking classes at CJP, then picked up a few short-term contracts, like arranging transportation for SPI. He became the director in 2014.
Goldberg’s predecessors, Pat Martin and Sue Williams, taught him a lot.
“Pat had an open door policy that no matter what she was doing, no matter what time of day it was, if someone came to her office to talk, she would just drop everything and be with that person,” he says. “And with Sue, her analytical mind was just incredible,” whether it was arranging classes or “speaking truth to power.”
One major change Goldberg has witnessed in his time at CJP is a shift towards domestic work, rather than focusing on international conflicts. In his early days he recalls international students challenging the faculty and staff - “you have to fix your own problems as well as help us fix ours. And I think it took 10, 15 years for that realization to set in.”
This change has accelerated in the last few years, he says, due to fewer visas being approved – meaning domestic-born students are now in the majority at CJP – and a surge in white supremacist rhetoric across the U.S. and in Harrisonburg itself.
“It’s just become much easier to be open about racism and bigotry, and to actually be a racist and a bigot out in the open, and so we’re now seeing the need to combat that more,” says Goldberg.
While Goldberg sees this as a necessary and powerful shift, there are still ways he thinks EMU as a whole could improve: like hiring non-Christians as full-time faculty. Goldberg himself is Jewish, and while he understands the value of a Christian Mennonite university, the hiring policy “implies to others, only those who are Christian have the values to teach here.”

Dr. Johonna Turner, is assistant professor of restorative justice and peacebuilding at The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP). In this episode, Turner speaks about her history of community organizing, activism, and youth development work in Washington, D.C.; the Faith Integration Task Force she helped form at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU); and her vision for CJP’s role in transnational movement-building.
Turner first came to CJP in 2010 as a participant in the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program. She had been doing a variety of organizing and arts-based activism in Washington, D.C., and “was looking for a place where I could get some more skills to supplement and to really support me in the work that I was doing ... the youth identified trauma healing as an approach that was especially important for breaking cycles of violence that depend upon repressive, state-sponsored punitive measures.”
She joined the CJP faculty in the fall of 2015, and became the co-director of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice in 2018.
About three years ago, Turner found herself in a number of conversations with faculty and students who wanted “to be more intentional about creating spaces for deliberate reflection on faith in the classroom, and spirituality writ large.” She banded together with Carl Stauffer, Tim Seidel, and Amy Knorr to create the Faith Integration Task Force to facilitate EMU as a “multi-faith space in a Christian university,” that both welcomes perspectives from other faiths while honoring its roots in Christian theology and spirituality.
Out of those conversations, Turner has created classes such as “Peacebuilding Through Biblical Narrative” and “Justice, Peace, and the Biblical Story.” One of Turner’s goals through these courses is to understand the injustice, oppression, and violence “that are preventing abundant life for all people,” and find ways to discuss these issues in the church – a space she says is “often depoliticized.”
While Turner says that CJP’s sense of community is a great strength, she also sees “the need for more intentional integration of critical theory within the curriculum, particularly feminist perspectives, critical race perspectives ... queer perspectives in our curriculum and pedagogy as well, attention to racial and gender justice, attention at large to how systems of oppression are at the root of violence.”
And her vision for CJP at 50?
“A crucible, an incubator, of peacebuilders, organizers, artists, and activists who are not only able to connect their work to what’s happening in their own local contexts, but also able to see the linkages between what’s happening at their own places and what’s happening at other places. Who are able to challenge the systemic roots of oppression that give rise to acts of direct cultural and structural violence. And who are able to more deeply work at challenging all systems of oppression, including heterosexism.”

In this episode, Dr. Benjamin Bergey speaks about peacebuilding through music, and how working with intercultural youth ensembles inspired him to enter the field.
Bergey teaches music theory and conducting at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). The university recently announced a new concentration in music and peacebuilding, which Bergey developed. He also conducts the EMU choirs and orchestra, conducts the Rapidan Orchestra in Orange County, and served as the music editor for Voices Together, a new Mennonite hymnal.

Bergey told Kamau that he's always been drawn to leading ensembles, since his early days in church – "bringing people together to make something greater than the sum of its parts."

In 2010, during his cross-cultural semester in the Middle East while an undergraduate at EMU, Bergey interviewed Palestinians and Israelis about the role of music as a tool of both protest and community-building. He was particularly inspired by two organizations that brought young Arab and Jewish musicians together to build common ground.

"From a peacebuilding standpoint, we know how dialogue and empathy are those kinds of crucial components in transforming conflict," he said. The Jerusalem Youth Chorus brought the kids together to sing, create their own songs, and take music classes. The Polyphony Foundation did much the same, but with instrumental orchestra activities. Both organizations also facilitate dialogue between the students.

[This podcast was recorded before escalation of the current conflict in Israel/Palestine.]

Bergey recalled watching an Arab and a Jewish student sharing a violin stand, struggling together through a particular passage of Beethoven's “Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21.”

"It's these youth coming together in ways that otherwise doesn't happen .... it doesn't happen organically, right, in just normal day-to-day living," Bergey explained. "Studies show that music making together can ... help overcome perceptions of dissimilarity and to work towards accepting others' differences."

Organizations like these that work in high-conflict areas aim to bring people together in a safe environment.

"That takes a lot of intentionality, a lot of careful planning and facilitation, where they can share experiences, bring themselves to feel like they can tell stories and make music," Bergey said. "Because really it's a vulnerable act, especially singing."

Bergey went on to write his doctoral dissertation on music and peacebuilding, and trained with Musicians Without Borders in 2018. With a slogan of “War Divides, Music Connects,” the Netherlands-based nonprofit works around the world with artists, social activists and communities on conflict.

Bergey sees immense potential in this field, even for everyday group settings, in which activities like drum circles, group breathing exercises, or collaborative songwriting can help people become grounded within themselves and build trust with one another.

"This really is an exercise in mindfulness, honestly. It's important for us to both listen and feel what's happening within ourselves, but also be able to listen and, dare I say, empathize with those around us," said Bergey.

Academic program coordinator, Janelle Myers-Benner, has worked at CJP in various capacities for 20 years. Myers-Benner speaks of her formative experiences volunteering in Bolivia; the many programmatic shifts she’s helped usher through CJP; and memories of her second daughter, Nora, who died in 2008.
As young adults, Myers-Benner and her husband, Jason, spent a year working at an orphanage in Bolivia. They returned to Harrisonburg “struggling with big, big questions, and [CJP] was a place where questions were welcome, and not only welcomed but engaged,” she says. Myers-Benner then got her first job with what was then called the Conflict Transformation Program in 1999 as a work study student.
“I cannot reflect on my 20 years at CJP without Nora coming prominently to mind,” Myers-Benner says. Nora, the Myers-Benners’ second daughter, was born in October 2007 with a rare genetic condition. Myers-Benner worked from home and hospital throughout Nora’s life and returned to the CJP office when Nora was about four or five months old, baby in tow.
She remembers the community rallying around her family during this time. In one story Myers-Benner recounts that Linda Swanson, a student at the time, “almost filled the CJP freezer with these big trays! I think she fed our family for a couple weeks ... there was this abundance of generosity and this outpouring of love.” A CJP alumna, Ann McBroom, took Nora for long walks while Myers-Benner helped the program transition to EMU’s new database.
“Many of the people who come through our doors are just unforgettable people ... the roots feel very deep, and the connections feel very deep,” Myers-Benner says.
Her hopes for CJP going forward are also focused on the people. In another 25 years, Myers-Benner says she hopes the school will further “center the leadership of indigenous people and people of color.”
“We need leaders who are creative, who can dream, who can hope, who can envision something different than what we currently have, who’ve shown the ability to rise above immense challenges.”