Building Beloved Communities Through Peace – with Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore and Rev. Ricky D. Moore

Building Beloved Communities Through Peace:

Mimetic Structures of the Applied Spirituality of the Immanuel Approach

Racial and ethnic divisions continue to plague nations around the world, and peacebuilders of all walks and faiths continue sustaining communal harmony amid ongoing legacies of trauma and oppression. 

Tuesday, June 4, 5 to 8 pm

This lecture by Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, will explore the revelations of neuroscience, mimetic theory, and applied spirituality to address the intergenerational legacies of racial and ethnic trauma. 

Wednesday, June 5, 10 am to 1 pm

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr. Moore and her husband, Rev. Ricky D. Moore, co-founder of Moore Grace Ministries Inc. and Building Equity, LLC. Together, they will present insights from their ongoing community-engaged project, Equity in Memory and Memorial of Enslaved Burial Grounds (E2M), which brings together groups of descendants of enslaved people and those of enslavers to transform these trauma legacies. The workshop will engage participants in the Immanuel Process of self-awareness and transcendence for restoring beloved communities.

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In America, the struggle to overcome the inherited legacies of slavery and its far-reaching effects of mass incarceration, disenfranchisement, and other forms of systemic injustice continues today. The markers of these forms of inherited trauma are ironically rooted in America’s most historical and prominent sites of sacredness–its churches. Nowhere is this reality seen clearer than in the thousands of neglected enslaved burial grounds that pepper the church yards and neighborhoods of the American South. Descendants of enslaved Africans and the European enslavers who first brought them to the shores of America, still live in close proximity to one another while racial inequities persist in the form of redlining, land displacement, and the macro and micro-expressions of anti-Black violence. Peace is still needed between the Black and White inheritors of America’s legacy of slavery.

The lecture and workshop will offer one pathway forward. This pathway builds upon the insights gleaned from my community-engaged project titled Equity in Memory and Memorial of Enslaved Burial Grounds (E2M). Here, the revelations of neuroscience, mimetic theory, and applied spirituality in the form of what neuroscientist Jim Wilder terms the Immanuel Approach are shared as another route by which to build resiliency and communal peace among communities ravaged by historic and current legacies of racial and ethnic trauma.  

Central to the discussion is the work of neuroscientists, religious studies thinkers, and scholars in applied spirituality. There are two main arguments in this talk. First, the road to peace among communities impacted by racial and ethnic oppression requires knowledge of how our brains work, especially under the realities of trauma. Second, peace requires emotional maturity created by the applied spiritual practices of the Immanuel Approach. 

The work of Rebecca Adams, Pierré Bourdieu, René Girard, Vern Neufeld Redekop, Alan Shore, and Jim Wilder will be Rev. Dr. Julia Robinson Moore and Rev. Ricky D. Moore conversation partners in our journey together as we explore how to build communities that have the ability to walk in what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defined as “Agape”–– “a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of their neighbor” and carries a “willingness to go any length to restore community.” Lastly, using dialogue processes that include advance preparation separately with groups of descendants of enslaved people and those of enslavers and use of the Immanuel Process of self-awareness can lead to transformation, transcendence of trauma, and shared resolve to take action in the community.

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This event is hosted in partnership with The School of Leadership, Ecology and Equity, Saint-Paul University, committed to addressing systems of oppression, restoring equity, and creating sustainable, thriving communities. Building Beloved Communities Through Peace engages spirituality for the healing of intergenerational and racial trauma, contributing to the equity mission of the School and to CICR's mission to empower conflict-resilient communities and peace practitioners. 

For more information, please email pstls@ustpaul.ca.