Reconciliation: A Process In Community
For Journeys of Reconciliation participants, reconciliation has several dimensions. Participants are encouraged to seek reconciliation with one another, as they share new experiences and ideas. They are encouraged to seek reconciliation with communities whose labor and struggle are often distant and unfamiliar to an urban affluent university. And they are encouraged to observe and learn from divided parties who seek reconciliation, trying to transcend the accumulated bitterness of historic division. Intellectually rigorous and pyschologically demanding, each trip carries the hope that participants will be transformed into more thoughtful and caring citizens of the world.

Our Project
Journeys of Reconciliation is an inter-religious project promoting relationships between Emory University and communities around the world that have a history of violence and exploitation.

The program seeks to discover how the following five areas of inquiry play a role in both the conflict and the reconciliation process:

• Religion and Culture
• Public Health
• Gender Roles and Family
• Scholarship and Citizenship
• The Arts and Social Change

Journeys: A Diverse Experience
Each May, Journeys of Reconciliation sponsors two-week immersion experiences for Emory students, staff, and faculty. For each two-week immersion experience, the program seeks as diverse a group as possible, drawing from Emory's unusually diverse body of students, staff, and faculty; its thirty recognized religious groups; its significant non-religious population; and its array of academic disciplines and professional schools.
The program invites groups to encounter the world's complexity, to hear stories of pain and liberation, and to seek wisdom outside university walls. Participants build relationships with host communities in varying ways. In some settings, hosts ask us to contribute to a service project, and we do so gladly. In other settings, service work carries the taint of paternalism, even colonialism, and in those areas we focus exclusively on conversation and collaborative analysis with our hosts. Trip leaders, in conversation with their hosts, help determine the best ways to foster mutual, lasting respect and goodwill.