Work Of Reconciliation Research Articles

Acting on the TRC Calls to Action through education

In this article, the authors share insights from a project focused on building connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, communities, and schools. As an Indigenous and non-Indigenous educator team, we suggest that there are various entry points into the work of reconciliation and share our Approaches to Reconciliation model along with several other resources we have found foundational in this work. We conclude by asking the reader to consider which entry point they will begin with.

St. Thomas More College

As a Catholic college federated with the University of Saskatchewan, St. Thomas More College (STM) benefits from the arrangements negotiated at its founding by the Basilian Fathers. When the Basilians withdrew from STM in 2013, the College entered a new relationship with its diocesan bishop, but continues to steward the educational culture created by its founders. Now under lay leadership and with an increasingly diverse community, STM faces the dual challenge of renewing its Catholic identity and remaining a sustainable liberal arts college. In its current College Plan, it lays out a strategy for doing both while also engaging with the national work of Indigenous reconciliation.

Indigenous Voices in Psychedelic Therapy: Experiential Learnings from a Community-Based Group Psychedelic Therapy Program

ABSTRACTNovel and traditional psychedelic medicines are attracting interest as potential treatments of mental illness. Before psychedelic therapies can be made available in culturally safe and effective ways to diverse peoples, the field must grapple with the complex legacies of colonialism and ongoing clashes between biomedical and Indigenous Ways of Knowing. This article presents results of a pilot program offering group-based therapy augmented by three sessions of ketamine at a psychedelic dose, for a group of Indigenous participants. This unique project was undertaken in partnership between Roots to Thrive and the Snuneymuxw First Nation to assess this approach’s effectiveness and safety for Indigenous peoples. Thematic analysis of qualitative interviews and anonymous feedback received throughout the program from eight participants and two Elders provided rich information on participant motivations, perceived barriers, appreciated and beneficial aspects of the program, and the psychedelic experiences, as well as important directions for further improvement. In addition to challenges, participants attributed significant benefits to the program while highlighting the importance of the involvement of Indigenous team members, the incorporation of traditional approaches to healing, and the cultivation of open and authentic relationships between group participants and facilitators. We discuss important lessons learned and the essential work of reconciliation in, and beyond, psychedelic therapies.

Studying Slavery on Campus: Research, Reconciliation, and Public Engagement

Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of colleges and universities have begun the difficult work of examining how their institutional histories are tied to the systems of slavery, the slave trade, settler colonialism, and segregation. As more schools continue to embark on the soul-searching process of researching the darker sides of their institutional pasts, this roundtable brings together eight scholars who have engaged in the hard work of research and reconciliation to discuss how they have approached the topic of slavery on campus. The discussion includes how to start a slavery on campus project, the challenges faced therewith, and strategies for publicizing the findings. Domby and Green hope the robust discussion will help other scholars begin similar projects around the country.

Preparing Engineering Students for their Professional Obligations for Meaningful Engagement with Indigenous Communities in Canada

Following the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other guiding documents, engineering schools in Canada have begun the work of Indigenous reconciliation by helping students develop competencies relevant to engineering study, research, and practice. In our School, a curricular project has been implemented in the undergraduate program: a key element is the Indigenous Community Consultation Project (ICCP) delivered through a required communication course. Through a case study approach, students learn intercultural communication skills in the specific context of preparing to work with Indigenous communities in Canada. In developing and delivering the ICCP, course instructors are also empowered to take part in relevant professional development initiatives and to grow their pedagogical practices. We are now studying the impact of the ICCP on students’ learning and plan to share results in future publications.

Ritual Techniques in Affliction Rites and the Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical Liturgy of Lund, 2016

Protest and reconciliation rituals play a contested but important role in social change. This essay analyzes how rituals of reconciliation effectively negotiate between competing factions and norms by using ritual techniques as embodied symbols. Against the horizon of theory from Victor and Edith Turner and Cas Wepener, participant observation of the Lutheran and Catholic Joint Commemoration of the Reformation “Common Prayer” in Lund, Sweden on October 31, 2016 reveals five stages: crisis/diagnosis, redress, forgiveness and acceptance, binding, and reparative mission. Each is marked by its own characteristic techniques, whereas some symbolic elements manifest the different stages throughout the liturgy. This liturgy demonstrates how one liturgy can speak to various factions and stages in the process of accommodating a new norm (Christian unity) within a contested set of identities (“Lutheran” and “Catholic”). It is in the stages of forgiveness and binding that the relationship between the ritual-symbolic realm and the real work of social reconciliation is most directly visualized.

On Re‐Membering Reconciliation and the Black Theological Impulse Embedded in the Kairos Document

On <scp>Re‐Membering</scp> Reconciliation and the Black Theological Impulse Embedded in the Kairos Document

Global human mobility and knowledge transfer: Highly skilled return migrants as agents of transnational learning

AbstractGlobal human mobility constitutes a key mechanism for knowledge transfer. This study examines the micro‐dynamics of knowledge transfer in the developed‐developing country migratory context. It highlights the agentic role of return migrants in transforming overseas learning into relevant knowledge in their home contexts. Drawing on situated and relational theories of knowledge and learning, the study views knowledge transfer as a relevance discovery process. It looks at a group of highly skilled migrants who had returned from developed countries to Ethiopia. Despite their high skill, the focus of knowledge transfer was mostly in non‐technical fields that include a broad range of organizational knowledge and work practices. These were made relevant to the local context through the returnees’ ‘work of reconciliation’, involving ‘engagement’, ‘alignment’ and ‘imagination’. The study challenges the standard assumption of a one‐way linear flow of knowledge from developed to developing countries. It sheds new light on the migration‐development link by highlighting the ‘aspirational’ aspect of migrant transnational learning.

Walking the Decolonization Talk: Reckoning with the Past and Wrestling with the Present to Reimagine the Future of Social Work Education in Nunavik

ABSTRACT The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada calls for closing education gaps between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Canadians as part of the real work of reconciliation, that is, walking the decolonization talk. In Nunavik, a part of Inuit Nunangat, addressing these education gaps is complex, requiring trust building between educational institutions and Inuit communities. In Nunavik’s 14 communities, there are only two Inuit who hold Bachelor of Social Work degrees. Establishing or rebuilding trust is extraordinarily difficult given ongoing colonial policies and institutional structures that disregard Inuit experience. This article describes the journey of developing a Bachelor of Social Work degree program in Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, to be called Inulirijiit, in the context of the history of social welfare for Nunavimmiut and how Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008–2015) and the Public Inquiry Commission on Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Certain Public Services in Québec (Viens Commission, 2019) have shaped contemporary social work education and practice. We argue that the Bachelor of Social Work degree program must have at its center Inuit ways of knowing, learning, teaching, and being.

Wherever Green Is Orange

Wherever Green Is Orange Stephen O'Neill (bio) "Caught Inextricably in the Web of Their Tragic History" Reconciliation has been something of a mantra for the Decade of Commemorations. At the Social Democratic and Labour Party's (SDLP) annual conference held in the Armagh City Hotel in 2012, the tánaiste Eamon Gilmore rebranded his government's commemoration program as "A Decade of Reconciliation," which formed the title of his keynote address: "Let's aim not simply for a decade of commemoration. Let's work together on a decade of true national reconciliation."1 In 2014, during president Michael D. Higgins's state visit to London, David Cameron echoed the president's words in suggesting that "we must … keep on with the work of reconciliation."2 The Ireland 2016 centenary program suggested that the decade provided an opportunity to "Remember, Reconcile, Imagine, Present, and Celebrate."3 A 2019 Sinn Féin policy document lauding the success of the official commemorations recognized the importance of "continu[ing] to be imaginative and creative in taking initiatives on commemoration and remembering which enhance reconciliation and healing."4 In the ongoing context of the peace process, the act of gleaning this "reconciliation" from commemoration has often relied [End Page 289] upon a deterministic reading of the chosen "decade," which was the climax of one of the most heavily narrativized periods in Irish history. In his influential summary of the Irish cultural and political revolution, F.S.L. Lyons's Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1945 (1979) exemplified a pervasive attitude of fatalism toward the events of "the period from the fall of Parnell to the death of Yeats": It was not primarily an anarchy of violence in the streets, of contempt for law and order such as to make the island, or any part of it, permanently ungovernable. It was rather an anarchy in the mind and in the heart, an anarchy which forbade not just unity of territories but also "unity of being," an anarchy that sprang from the collision within a small and intimate island of seemingly irreconcilable cultures, unable to live together or to live apart, caught inextricably in the web of their tragic history.5 Writing of this diagnosis of "irreconcilable cultures" and its comorbidity with the "intractable, timeless problem" of the north of Ireland, Ian McBride detected "an unmistakable ring of self-exoneration."6 McBride noted that this deterministic interpretation refused the possibility that these readings are dictated by the present rather than the past.7 Such determinism and self-exoneration has dominated the Decade of Commemorations in terms of its chronology, its themes, and the attitudes toward the uses of the past that it has adopted, particularly in its search for a "shared future" as a prehistory of the peace process. The commemoration of partition has proven particularly difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the aims of this peace process. As Lesley McEvoy, Kieran McEvoy, and Kirsten McConnachie wrote in 2006, "The 'two-traditions,' or perhaps more pejoratively 'two tribes,' paradigm was, arguably until the current peace process the dominant construct for not only framing an analysis of the nature of the conflict for much of its history, but also of what was required to achieve its [End Page 290] resolution through reconciliation between those warring traditions."8 Yet even with the onset of the peace process, and indeed arguably because of it, little has changed in terms of the framing of the conflict since then, particularly in relation to understanding the roots of an ongoing partition. The apparatuses of each state on the island have either refused or been incapable of integrating partition into their legitimating narratives, with the failures to find reconcilable ways of marking the foundation of the northern state forming a case in point. As Éamon Phoenix recounted in a conversation about partition with Laura McAtackney and Myles Dungan on RTÉ's The History Show in May 2021, some of the initial plans for commemorating the centenary included a "baby box" and a "twenty-one gun salute," recalling what he termed the worst excesses of "Ulster '71."9 When asked by Dungan how the "potentially divisive" nature of commemorating the beginning of...

Cathy Freeman, reconciliation and the burden of history

ABSTRACT On 25 September 2020, the ABC released a documentary film to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cathy Freeman’s gold medal victory in the women’s 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Media interest in Freeman’s victory still erupts periodically, most recently, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary. This article revisits Cathy Freeman’s historic gold-medal-winning performance in order to ponder the lost promise of reconciliation. At the time, and still today, Freeman’s victory is overwhelmingly celebrated as more than just an athletic feat; it is also lauded as a victory for reconciliation. Rather than trying to determine the extent to which Freeman’s race did bolster reconciliation, or even whether it contributed to reconciliation at all, this article instead analyses the metaphors, rhetoric and images through which Freeman’s victory was represented as an act of reconciliation, and what this tells us about how reconciliation plays out in the Australian context. In particular, it argues that the complex ways in which Freeman’s victory were represented, and continue to be understood, reveal a widespread desire to be free from the burdens of history by projecting the work of reconciliation onto Freeman herself.

We Are the Voice of the Grass: Interfaith Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

David Hoekema, professor of philosophy emeritus at Calvin College, portrays the history of the Acholi people from the late 1980s until 2006 as a struggle beneath two battling elephants in his book We Are the Voice of the Grass: Interfaith Peace Activism in Northern Uganda. Hoekema lifts the title from an interview with Bishop Matthew Odong, who uses the Acholi proverb, “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers,” to identify the Acholi people’s suffering during years of civil war and life within the squalor of internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Caught between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by self-proclaimed spirit medium Joseph Kony and the Ugandan army led by (current) president Yoweri Museveni, the Acholi of northern Uganda endured dehumanization and slaughter from both sides. From this suffering emerged a group of Christian and Muslim religious leaders who—together as the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI)—voiced the pain of their people to the Ugandan government and the world. Not only did ARLPI successfully advocate for peace negotiations between enemy forces that led to the controversial Ugandan Amnesty Act of 2000, they also led the way for the LRA’s exit from Uganda. Today ARLPI continues the necessary work of reconciliation and development in Acholiland.Uganda’s complex history of colonialism, independence, and civil strife is re-examined from a postcolonial perspective in the first three chapters. Hoekema first dispels racist myths about the Acholi people, combatting their portrayal as helpless, underdeveloped, and inherently violent. The roots of such mischaracterizations originate from the 1800s and are still manifest in contemporary news reports, the infamous “Kony 2012” propaganda video, and in public statements by Ugandan president Museveni himself. With a corrected perspective, Hoekema then recounts Uganda’s religious history in chapter 4 to illustrate the tensions and demographics between Muslims and Christians (including their traditional religious practices) prior to the LRA insurgency. Throughout Voice of the Grass, Hoekema tells the history of Acholiland from below, extensively quoting Christians and Muslims on both sides of the conflict to correct misleading colonial and governmental narratives.The real heart of the book, chapters 5–8, details ARLPI’s formation and intervention in the war. Acholi priests, pastors, and imams banded together for their people, forming a nonpartisan organization that aimed to make known their people’s suffering to the international community, and bring the LRA and Ugandan army to the negotiating table. Within a month, they met with Museveni, reminding him of the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. Tangible changes came slowly, though. ARLPI had to gain the trust not only of their people, but of enemy forces. Years of botched peace talks, broken ceasefires, and worsening conditions did not sway religious leaders from advocating amnesty for LRA child-soldiers. Hoekema draws out the ethical questions of amnesty, asking whether justice must be sacrificed for reconciliation. Yet Hoekema also acknowledges that ARLPI’s efforts achieved their intended goal. In 2006 the LRA left Uganda and the religious leaders shifted their focus from nonviolent peacemaking to rebuilding Ugandan society in the aftermath of war. Hoekema analyzes what made ARLPI’s efforts at reconciliation successful and lays out the organization’s four pillars—advocacy, dialogue, reconciliation, and humanitarian support—as elements that peacemakers and religious leaders can uphold in their own communities.The LRA conflict was so complex that a book this comprehensive feels like an overview, albeit one that continuously gives voice to those who experienced the conflict firsthand. Hoekema excels in big-picture historiography, though the details of how ARLPI began remain unclear. Hoekema claims the religious leaders are hesitant to take credit for individual initiatives. However, the lack of clarity on how ARLPI began (rather than simply why) deprives the reader of answers to the pressing question, “How do I begin?” Did interfaith peacemaking begin as simply as sitting down to talk with another religious leader? How did ARLPI arrive at seemingly all the right principles from the start? Hoekema emphasizes ARLPI’s perseverance and boldness, but the reader hardly gets to know the leaders involved. Future work needs to be done examining specific Acholi communities through war and reconciliation. More, too, should be written on the dilemmas ARLPI encountered. It would seem, given Hoekema’s conclusions, that reconciliation is possible without justice. Such an ethical and theological conundrum deserves more ink.For peacemakers, peace scholars, religious leaders, and those interested in reconciliation, We Are the Voice of the Grass is a compelling narrative of how sustained interfaith activism helped end a civil war. ARLPI’s peacemaking principles may translate to other contexts, yet their specific activities are worth more extended ethical and theological analysis. Hoekema’s work on ARLPI is ripe for further study.

Exploring Reconciliatory Pedagogy and Its Possibilities through Educator-led Praxis

In the spirit of taking an action-based response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (2015) Calls to Action and principles, a group of educators came together in 2016 to create a one-year graduate pathway program that sets students on paths toward reconciliation. By examining the contributions of international and national scholars who explore topics of reconciliation, we extend this global discussion with insights gained from our praxis-based approach in education. Inspired by Chung (2016), we present a model which identifies a set of entry points into the work of reconciliation: listening and learning from Indigenous peoples; walking with and learning from Indigenous peoples; and, working with and learning from Indigenous peoples. By examining what we have learned through our program “Indigenous education: A call to action,” our model posits that reconciliation is accessible to those who are willing to listen and learn, and, most importantly, take action.

Cancer and Conjugality in Contemporary Delhi: Mediating Life between Violence and Care

This article tracks the entanglement of cancer and patterns of conjugality in Delhi. Building on fieldwork with about 120 households in Delhi, it describes how the disease put pressure on already fraught marital biographies, revealing durable fissures in household relations. Often, these shifts in the distribution of conjugal vulnerability opened cracks that allowed long histories of domestic violence to seep through. In subtle ways, women could accrue a delicate agency through their practices of care. But at the same time, they continued to inhabit the vulnerable space of affinal homes. This article describes how in these arrangements, care and violence followed each other closely in their tracks. Building on these insights, the article deepens and shifts how anthropologists have understood the social life of the cancer. Specifically, anthropologists writing about the disease have demonstrated the ubiquity of a biotechnical imaginary of hope and survivorship in the Global North. This article develops an anthropology of cancer from the Global South that takes seriously the work of palliation and reconciliation, in the process provincializing Global North imaginaries of hope and survivorship.

Antydemoniczny charakter sakramentu pokuty i pojednania

Sakrament pokuty i pojednania to kontynuacja zbawczej mocy Tajemnicy Paschalnej Chrystusa jako wielkiego dzieła pojednania człowieka z Bogiem, z bliźnimi, z samym sobą i z całym światem stworzonym. Jednoczy w ten sposób to, co zostało rozdzielone przez ludzki grzech, popełniony za podszeptem diabła. Przebaczenie i łaska otrzymane od Boga w tym sakramencie pozwala pokonać rozłam i podziały, które są znakiem rozpoznawczym działania złego ducha oraz wziąć udział w zwycięstwie Chrystusa nad grzechem, śmiercią i Szatanem. Sama struktura spowiedzi pozwala odkryć antydemoniczny charakter tego sakramentu oraz prawdziwą wolność dzieci Bożych w Chrystusie.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

“Words crumbled in my mouth like rotten mushrooms”

A near exclusive focus on Hannah Arendt’s concept of forgiveness from her major work The Human Condition has obscured the equally important model of reconciliation in her writings on aesthetics and in her Thought Notebook. By engaging Arendt in a dialogue with her contemporaries and friends Ingeborg Bachmann and Hermann Broch, on the one hand, and with the classic thinkers of tragedy, Aristotle and Goethe, on the other hand, I show how reconciliation responds to the situation of fatherlessness after 1945 and, as a “reconciliation with reality,” offers a new basis for intersubjectivity. Having, as Arendt writes, “enough of origin within” ourselves to do without pre-established categories cannot mean that we must begin to “father” ourselves but that, on the contrary, our inception as beings born to begin anew leaves us radically forlorn and yet equipped with everything we need to “make world” with one another. The essay contends that imagination, judgment, and understanding build a network of thought figures in Arendt that are tied to reality through the work of reconciliation.

Reading for Reconciliation? Indigenous Literatures in a Post-TRC Canada

Reading for Reconciliation?Indigenous Literatures in a Post-TRC Canada Aubrey Jean Hanson (bio) In december 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc) released its final report, and since then people in Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts (literary and otherwise) have been working to understand that report's implications. As a Métis scholar whose work bridges the fields of Indigenous literatures and Indigenous education, I have been making connections between the report's recommendations and my ongoing scholarship on Indigenous literatures and learning. These connections raise generative questions about the educational aspects of reading literary texts and about the framing of social and political change between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. In this paper, I focus on connections between Indigenous literatures and learning in order to better understand the reimagining embodied by the trc's transformative Calls to Action. I draw on perspectives from my current research on Indigenous literatures and resurgence—including conversations with teachers and with Indigenous writers—to ask what it means to read for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. What might it mean, instead, to read for resurgence? By interrogating the framework of reconciliation, I argue that, while the literary arts may be inspiring and reflecting Indigenous communities' resurgence, a great [End Page 69] deal of learning is required by the rest of Canada to develop responsive relationships with this work. In order to make this argument, I bring together examinations that occur across the distinct sections of this article. The catalyst for my considerations here—my starting point—is an example of public discourse around reconciliation, education, and Indigenous literatures—namely a conversation that occurred in the winter of 2015–2016 on Canada's public broadcast radio, the cbc. Specifically, I develop my argument in relation to a suggestion for Canadian learning made by Canada's Minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs in a cbc interview and then look at Indigenous writers' responses to that suggestion in a subsequent cbc interview—responses that challenge the discourse surrounding reconciliation. Second, I build upon those responses to analyze the relationship, implied in the minister's suggestion, between non-Indigenous readers' engagements with Indigenous literatures and the learning precipitated by those engagements. Third, I read the trc's Calls to Action in order to highlight the educational dimensions embedded in that document's vision for reconciliation and to consider their implications for literary scholars. Fourth, I examine perspectives from my own research with writers and teachers in light of these understandings of reconciliation. Finally, I explore the possibility of reading for resurgence through a reading of Cree author Tracey Lindberg's novel Birdie. In concluding these arguments about literatures and learning, I seek to contribute to stronger understandings of what it means for non-Indigenous people to read Indigenous literatures at this particular moment in Canadian public consciousness. Reconciliation, in my argument, is not only fraught: it has the potential, if not carefully theorized, to be mobilized by official discourses in order to reinscribe Indigenous expression within the norms of the settler state. Reading for reconciliation and Indigenous book club month Shortly after the trc's Calls to Action were released in 2015, the Honourable Carolyn Bennett, Minister for Indigenous and Northern Affairs, was interviewed on the cbc radio program The Current. She was there to elaborate on the new Liberal government's commitment to renewing relationships with Indigenous peoples. The federal election, with its dramatic shift in leadership, took place shortly before the trc's conclusion. In addressing the Liberal Party's plans for renewing relationships, Bennett celebrates the feeling that things are changing for the better, while also pointing out the continuing prevalence of racism and hatred aimed at Indigenous people. She suggests in the interview that many Canadians are [End Page 70] indeed ready to step up and contribute to change but reiterates the responsibility of non-Indigenous people to educate themselves about Indigenous issues and connect with Indigenous communities. This learning is necessary, she emphasizes, to the work of reconciliation, in order "to eliminate the ignorance that we all had because it wasn't taught to us in school."1 As a scholar of...

Reconciliation Through Narrative: Toward a Theology of Spiritual Care in Public Health Care

In the West, chaplains are often employed by state mandated and state funded health care institutions. Because such western institutions are predicated upon the principles of secular liberalism, understanding the work of chaplains within such contexts is an urgent intellectual need. This paper seeks to describe such work through a Christian theological lens, arguing chaplaincy work can counter balance frequent experiences of alienation when people encounter health care systems as patients. Drawing upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, Rowan Williams, and Mieke Bal, this paper describes spiritual care as being a specific kind of narrative practice that can prompt the work of reconciliation in chaplaincy clients themselves, in the clients’ lived experience, and in their experience of health care systems.

Lament in Three Movements: The Implications of Psalm 13 for Justice and Reconciliation

Christian peacemakers and ministers of reconciliation serving in contexts of conflict require practices to help them cope with painful situations and formulate constructive responses to them. Lament is one indispensible practice for ministers and their communities, simultaneously directing their pain to God and expanding their theological and social imagination for difficult tasks. The Scriptures provide ample resources for embracing the gift of lament. Here I argue that Psalm 13 offers a model of lament in three movements for ministers of reconciliation. I begin by briefly delineating the nature of lament in Scripture. Next, I analyze Psalm 13 as a representative lament, with special reference to its implications for Christians engaged in the work of reconciliation in challenging contexts. Finally, I conclude with a case study of activist Angelina Atyam in order to illustrate how the movements of Psalm 13 can be expressed in renewed theological imagination and social ministry.