Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

This article explores the notion of worship as a natural and universal disposition, described by Thomas Aquinas in ST II-II, q.81. Worship, however, is for Aquinas most relevant in the context of divine friendship or caritas with God, which Aquinas describes in ST II-II, q.23. This article, therefore, explains a possible connection between worship and love. How can the task to worship God grounded in the debt to God qua creator and the appreciation of the excellence of God be reconciled with the proximity and closeness with God that caritas implies? Drawing from Jewish philosophy, especially Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationships, and new findings in experimental psychology, in particular joint attention, a second-personal model of worship can be developed. This form of worship encompasses, on the one hand, the intimacy and sense of presence of God that worship can involve, and on the other hand, the distinctiveness and pre-eminence of God, essential for a worshipful attitude. The aim of this article is to explore how second-personal relatedness with God is possible in worship directed to God. Since God seems to be present in worship in a twofold manner, the interest is in the role the Holy Spirit can play in worship.

Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world is interpreted as “we-prison” in Dialogical Self Theory (DST). As a counter-example, the phenomenon of awe is presented as an experience that opens the self to the wider universe. In that context, Martin Buber’s work on spirituality and Rollo May’s work on creativity are compared. The shadow sides of mystical experiences are outlined and compared with psychotic states of the mind. The work of Aldous Huxley who described the workings of mescaline as a facilitator of mystical insight is presented. Mystical experiences change the so-called “minimal self” on a more basic sensorial level, and they differ from the narrating and the positioning self. Furthermore, Donald Crosby’s “perspectivism” is incorporated in DST under the heading of “positionalism.” As a practical implication, specific guidelines are presented in order to open the self to the experience of awe as a first step to the “depositioning” of the self.