UNC Shooting & Peace Catalyst Mourning in North Carolina
by Thomas Davis
This post is written by Thomas Davis, a Peace Catalyst staff member in the Raleigh area. Though it is not clear whether this was purely a hate crime or involved some other motive, we join in the grief over this loss of life.
This is a sad morning here in the Raleigh area, as we are grieving the loss of lives. Most of you have heard the news already that young Muslim lives were taken last night in a shooting near UNC.
This is a beautiful, kind, loving, and generous family. They have worked here for peace between Muslims, Christians and Jews. And they have worked to help refugees in their native Syria.
I have dined with the victims and their family in their home and am saddened today by the news of this tragedy.
Here is a photo (from CNN) of the three who were killed:
Uganda is in crisis, and the world needs to pay attention. In this blog, an East African researcher and friend of Peace Catalyst discusses Uganda’s situation and what democracies around the world must learn from Uganda before it’s too late.
I’ve been thinking about the Western craving for what I sometimes call a Disneyland ending—a curated, comforting wrap-up to hard stories. I'm in one of these moments. Bear with me as I try to unpack what it feels like when people abandon the ones we care about—or the work we do to stand alongside them.
After everything that has already happened, Gaza’s Christians may now be facing their biggest challenge since the war began.
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…
There is a constant battle between the individual longing for freedom and civilisation demanding conformity and repression of instincts. And so, individuals are constantly sending subtle and not-so-subtle messages about their feelings and this restricted freedom. I had this on my mind recently as I took the trolley bus through Sarajevo.
Uyghur, Kazakh, Tibetan, and other minority families are being traumatized through the assimilationist policies of the Chinese government. These policies include children being forcibly separated from their parents and put in boarding school where they are systematically stripped of their language, culture, and religion.
Pope Francis is currently in Canada and has delivered a historic apology for the suffering and abuse in the Catholic boarding schools for Canada's indigenous peoples. This apology comes on the heels of the Pope's apology from the Vatican in April of this year. Schools of this type are not just things of the past, though. Similar boarding schools are currently in operation in China for Uyghur and Tibetan peoples. Watch the video from this joint event with Peace Catalyst as well as representatives from several Uyghur and Tibetan human rights advocacy organizations to learn more about what's happening.
I applied to Notre Dame’s faculty-led trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina this summer because I wanted to learn more about a part of Europe that is often left out of history books and course syllabi. I wanted to educate myself on the rich history of the country, and the current situation in regards to peacebuilding. This trip did help me accomplish those goals, but the most impactful part of the journey was actually a conversation about my own country.
During our May student trip to Sarajevo, Amra, one of our discussion facilitators, laughed, cigarette dangling from her lips, as she likened the city to a femme fatale—alluring, but with a dark side. It was, we soon learned, an apt description for a lovely and complicated city, one that has been simultaneously strengthened and scarred by its history.
Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a place I had ever pictured myself visiting. But thanks to a student trip made possible by the University of Notre Dame and Peace Catalyst International, I recently visited the country—not as a tourist, but as a student of peacebuilding who gained a new appreciation for the role of religion in peace processes and reconciliation.
