Category Archives: News & Notes

Meeting Missouri Mediators

October 16, 2023 – 4:48 pm

The Association of Missouri Mediators graciously welcomed me last month as one of the speakers for a day of advanced mediation training. I taught a session on Apologies in Mediation, and also conducted the “Ethics Game.” The training was a hybrid of people in person as well as on Zoom. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience […]

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Church’s Responsibility to Its Own

March 26, 2021 – 11:34 am

No church wants to face what Crabapple First Baptist Church faced last week: news that one of its members had murdered eight people on a shooting spree. The church needed to determine its response, and communicate it not only to its own congregation but to the community and the world. Not easy to do while […]

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The New ICC

December 9, 2020 – 7:51 pm

The Institute for Christian Conciliation (ICC) was formed nearly three decades ago, as the division within Peacemaker Ministries dedicated to managing cases and training “conciliators” to intervene in other people’s conflicts. In 2016, Peacemaker Ministries, in order to streamline its focus, transferred the ICC to a new entity called “ICC Peace.” ICC Peace was organized […]

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A Better Way to Argue

December 21, 2015 – 9:34 am

New research has shown that framing your argument from your opponent’s “moral perspective” is much more likely to be persuasive. Professors Rob Willard, from Stanford, and Matthew Feinberg at University of Toronto, conducted a set of six studies involving over one thousand people, to determine how re-framing based on moral perspective could be persuasive in political […]

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Exonerated

July 7, 2015 – 5:12 pm

I’ve been moved by the recent revelation of a wrongful conviction here in Grand Rapids. When he was just 16, Quentin Carter was found guilty by a Kent County jury in 1992 of raping a 10-year-old neighbor girl and sent to prison. He served his full sentence—17 years—, despite his good behavior in prison, because he […]

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