Welcome to the Learning Corps podcast, the newest show on the Telos Channel! Together, we’ll excavate the core issues of conflict with experts from around the world, to uncover the path forward toward creative action in our communities. In this Learning Corps conversation, we were joined by Dr. Joy Banner, the Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Descendants Project. The Descendants Project is a nonprofit foundation founded to preserve and protect the health, land, and lives of the Bl...
At the age of 13, Ishmael Beah was recruited to fight in a bloody civil war in Sierra Leone as a child soldier, forever reshaping the story of his life. Against all odds, he survived and came to the US as a refugee. But not everyone in the US was ready for his story, or for the realities of the world he came from. So he began to write, sharing his story in his memoir, A Long Way Gone, detailing the horrors, triumphs, and hopes of his life as a survivor. Today, Ishmael continues to w...
How can you humanize the “other” if you never walk alongside them? David Bailey grew up in relationship with those on the margins of society. But it wasn’t until he moved into an under-resourced community that he began to more fully understand the ways that race, geographic segregation, and poverty intersect to create realities that are difficult to escape. It was through this proximity that he began to build authentic relationships with his neighbors, transforming how he advocates for h...
How can you enjoy for yourself what you deny for your neighbor?This is the question that drove Todd Deatherage in co-founding Telos. It’s a question that compels him to a life of “neighbor love,” to not just passively accept that his neighbors need the same things that he does, but to actively work at providing these things for them. Todd shares how this neighbor love is at the core of Telos’ guiding principle of mutual flourishing, which imagines a future for Palestinians and Israelis w...
In the face of ongoing injustice, does nonviolence actually work? Sulaiman Khatib spent 10 years in prison for being part of armed resistance against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. But during his time in prison, he experienced an unexpected transformation: he became an activist for nonviolence. He came to believe that more than vanquishing his enemy, his freedom was better secured by liberating them—that his liberation and the liberation of the very people imprisoning him ...
Is violence the only effective form of resistance?Fadi Quran grew up under Israeli occupation dreaming of ways to resist the tanks and soldiers he saw around him. But on a pilgrimage to India, tracing the steps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr’s own journey there, he encountered the radical vision of nonviolence that has since changed his life.Today, he is a nonviolent Palestinian activist who weds a deep commitment to truth with a deep care for humanity. His activism not only disrupts the...
Is justice possible without reconciliation?Ainka Jackson was raised in Selma, Alabama around the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement. With the memory of Bloody Sunday behind them, these leaders taught Ainka the power of love and nonviolence to transform systems of oppression.But today, Selma holds a complex legacy of both love and hate. The community continues to face serious obstacles to peace. Despite these immense challenges, Ainka sees an opportunity to build a new reality in her h...
Is it possible to partner for peace with those we could call our “enemies?”Abigail Disney lost some of her community when she built a relationship with the hero of the “opposite side,” pastor Rob Schenck. But along the way, despite their differences, she found a friend and partner for peace in a place she never expected. She documented Rob's story in the feature-length documentary, The Armor of Light, which went on to win an Emmy Award. Abigail has spent her life self-interrogating the s...
How do we remember the most forgotten in the world? Humaira’s family fled Afghanistan as refugees when she was a child. But it wasn’t until she was working in Palestine with refugee youth that she began to truly understand her own story as a refugee, and how to center the most overlooked and unheard on the margins of society. Then, in August the US pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban retook control, and suddenly her people were abandoned. Humaira has been tirelessly advocating fo...
What does it take to imagine a future better than the one you’ve inherited? Angie Thomas grew up in Jackson, Mississippi—one of the most segregated cities in the US. As a kid, she escaped into stories for survival. But in them, she found something more than survival. She found the possibility of a better world.Inspired by her faith, she writes that better world into existence today in her bestselling young adult novels, like the New York Times best-seller and major motion picture, The Ha...
What do we do when someone else’s truth feels like it contradicts our own? Sarah Perle Benazera lives in this tension everyday in her work facilitating dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. But she also feels this personally, living in the in-between of her own identity as a French-born, Israeli-Jewish woman with Algerian parents. As a storyteller and peace activist, Sarah works to bring light to stories that have been buried, especially in Israel/Palestine. People often ask whethe...
How can we choose peace for others when we’ve lost everything for ourselves? Michael Laverty lost his parents as a child. He lost his community when he became a conscientious objector to the apartheid regime in South Africa. And he nearly lost his family in an act of violence that left him scarred for years. Yet despite all of this, he committed his life to peace: to undoing systems of injustice, to standing beside the poorest and most broken of the world, and to giving himself away...
René August is a veteran of the anti-apartheid movement, an Anglican priest, and a reconciliation trainer. She grew up in a racially segregated township in the land now known as South Africa, a land that gave her only one quarter of the vote of a white citizen. Her political life came alive when a group of mostly Black South African theologians released the Kairos Document—a spiritual and political challenge to the Apartheid regime. In that document, she found a spirituality that was big...
“If our criminal legal system actually made people safer, Louisiana would be the safest place in the country.”One of Will’s first interactions with the police happened during cross country practice in high school. The experience forever reshaped how he understood race, policing, and justice. Today, he is on the forefront of transforming the criminal legal system to bring justice to the most incarcerated state of the most incarcerated country in the world: Louisiana. Will serves as the Di...
In our season 1 finale, we hear from lawyer, activist, and founder of Justice Defenders, Alexander McLean. Alexander joined us earlier this year to discuss his work defending and empowering the defenseless in prisons and on death row across Uganda and Kenya. Alexander has an unparalleled ability to see the dignity in every human being, and his work is righting the wrongs of broken systems across East Africa and the world. In the face of injustice and suffering, he has chosen the deeper w...
What does it mean to call a place “home,” to stay and heal it when it's broken and hurting? In this episode, South Louisiana native and interdisciplinary storyteller Monique Verdin shares with us what her home on the disappearing coast of the Louisiana bayou means to her, and the radical ways she’s working to protect it—its land, its people, and its stories. Monique shed so much light on the interconnectedness of place, story and justice in our conversation. The way she's worked to prot...
In life, we don’t often come across people whose passion, kindness, and vision simply blow us away. But in today’s episode, we have. Lana Abu-Hijleh is a development expert, business woman, and peacemaker from the West Bank of Palestine. Her story of love for her homeland, of tragedy and transformation, and of shattering glass ceilings is raw inspiration—the kind of story that stays with you long after the last word rings out. We left this conversation with so much hope, and with newfoun...
Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides, and the title of award-winning author Colum McCann’s newest novel. Colum wrote the New York Times Bestseller after meeting Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, featured in Episode 4 of this season, on a trip with Telos to Israel/Palestine. Apeirogon tells their stories, blending fact and fiction in a dazzling dance of 1001 short chapters, immersed in the complexity of their stories and the conflict itself.In this episode, we learn more ...
In this episode of Undaunted, we hear from fathers, activists, and best friends Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin. According to convention, they should be enemies—Rami is Israeli, Bassam is Palestinian. But they’ve been united together through the gravest of circumstances: the loss of their daughters to the conflict. In the face of their shared grief, they’ve committed their lives to writing a different future for their home. One where the cycle of violence is broken, reconciliation is possible,...
This week, we’re releasing a double feature: our peace hero Robi Damelin, followed by Telos co-founder and president, Greg Khalil. Greg co-founded Telos after living in Ramallah and advising Palestinian leadership on peace negotiations with Israel. When we talk about peacemaking, we mean so much more than kumbaya credits. Today, Greg shares why. He dives into the challenges peacemakers face, how peacemaking can be hard, gritty, even dangerous, and how story can be both the cage and the k...