We live in an age of great, overt, religious conflict. News programs, talk shows, and Judge Judy variants these days thrive on displaying people with conflicting views, to the point of fisticuffs in some cases. How many of these scenes of irreconcilable differences have you witnessed? Have you seen more in the last five years than you saw in the five years before that?

Where is the voice of reconciliation? When was the last time you witnessed an act of embrace that was genuine and not a prelude to betrayal?

It is a great irony that on 9/11/2001, in New York, at the United Nations, a speech was being given at the Sixteenth Annual International Prayer Breakfast that was titled From Exclusion to Embrace reflections on reconciliation

I've read Volf's book and found it to be insightful for understanding how the language of exclusion leads to acts of exclusion and acts of exclusion lead to deception and violence, and inspirational for explaining the antidote to exclusion... making space in myself for the other.

I appreciate this web space because Matt Curtin has made a space here, which is in a way a space inside himself, for others.

Cheers, Mark