We are delighted that two COV&R partners are offering pre-conference workshops in conjunction with our meeting in Chicago. Both events promise to enhance participants’ COV&R annual meeting experience with a focus on applying mimetic theory in challenging settings.
Creative Interruption:
Transformative Testimony in Violent Times
A one-day Theology & Peace gathering ahead of COV&R 2026
July 7, 2026 | The DePaul University Loop Campus in Chicago, IL
We are living in an era when violence feels increasingly casual — and increasingly contagious.
Many of us know how to name its patterns clearly. We can point to the polarization, scapegoating, dehumanization, and retaliation, and yet we feel uncertain about how to respond without descending into reactivity or numbness. We recognize what violence is doing. What’s less clear is how to live in ways that disrupt its escalation.
Creative Interruption is a one-day gathering for anyone ready to move beyond analysis. Hosted by Theology & Peace and designed for aspiring peacemakers who want to respond to violence without reproducing it. Creative Interruption brings together theological depth, historical nuance, lived practice, and ethical imagination in a setting designed for thoughtful engagement and community conversation.
Morning Presentation
Wolfgang Palaver: Active Nonviolence at the Center of Just Peace
Christian peace ethics shifted in recent decades from just war to just peace. The criteria of the just war tradition are still valid but the center of peace ethics now focusses on peace and not on war. At the center of the concept of just peace is active nonviolence. Christians have learned from Gandhi that the Sermon on the Mount focuses not on nonresistance but on active nonviolence. In a final part I will address what just peace means for the relationship between church and state by referring to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s interpretation of the katechon (restrainer).
Wolfgang Palaver is Professor emeritus of Catholic Social Thought at the University of Innsbruck, Austria where he taught from 2002 until 2023 and where he was also Dean of the Catholic Theological Faculty from 2013 until 2017. He is an expert on the relationship between violence and religion, and on Christian peace ethics. He is President of Pax Christi Austria since 2019 and became in March 2025 Personal Representative of the OSCE Chairperson-in-Office on Combating Racism, Xenophobia and Discrimination, also focusing on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians and Members of Other Religions.
Afternoon Workshop
Center for Story & Witness: The Role of the Witness in Breaking Cycles of Violence
The nonprofit Center for Story & Witness is dedicated to cultivating and sharing stories that bear witness to gender-based violence and other injustices. The Center’s co-founders, R. Clifton Spargo and Anne K. Ream, will lead an interactive seminar detailing best practices in generating, collecting, and sharing testimony. In recent years, witness writing and oral testimony have come to be recognized as essential elements in social justice movements. Testimony challenges and rewrites our idea of ourselves and our society. Spargo and Ream will share what they’ve learned through their award-winning testimonial writing program and engage session participants in writing exercises modeled on the workshop. The session will reflect on the role testimony plays in educating the public on social, political, and interpersonal violences, and how testimony defines and defends the human rights of victims of violence. Encouraging participants to contemplate acts of bearing witness in their everyday lives, thus blending personal experience and ethical imagination, the session will explore novel ways of incorporating testimony and storytelling into teaching, advocacy, and other professional practices.
During the Q & A session, we will discuss the relationship of creative witness to mimetic violence, the ways testimony and witness disrupt the unanimity of the crowd and diffuse escalation, while also avoiding the negative contagions that solidarity may be prone to.
Learn more and register here.
Peacemaking and Polarization
Sponsored by Sharing Sacred Spaces
Across many of the issues polarizing the United States today, we are facing a multi-front mimetic crisis: escalating cycles of imitation, rivalry, scapegoating, and “us–them” thinking that erode trust and civic life. In such conditions, depolarizing requires people who can step outside mimetic binaries—that is, peacebuilders—who understand and interrupt the destructive patterns, to be the bridges across difference.
In this interactive workshop, Dr. Vanessa Avery will draw on her 10+ years of experience as a bridge-builder doing depolarization work in 8 different cities and with virtual groups online. She will illuminate the process and phenomenon of polarization, its effects on communities and the loss of the “relational middle,” and will teach techniques for engagement across differences that have been time tested and shown to produce positive change.
The workshop will incorporate group practice to build competencies in select fundamental de-polarizing skills.
The workshop will also explore the disposition of the peacemaker – what are the psycho-spiritual competencies required for peacemaking work? How does religion play into peacemaking work, and what kinds of questions aid discernment? Participants will reflect upon common challenges and risks of stepping outside polarized states to consider the personal impacts of peacebuilding work including community norms, interpersonal trust, and the peacemaker’s interior life.
The session will be interactive and practice-forward, leaving participants with tools they can apply in their own institutional and communal contexts, and discernment questions that will fortify their peacebuilding capacity.
BONUS: The workshop is being held in the historic and magnificent Chicago Loop Synagogue. The synagogue is also an architectural marvel which is regularly featured on architecture tours. All workshop participants will be invited to join in a private tour of the synagogue. You can learn about the Chicago Loop Synagogue here.