MEMORY, TRUTH, AND RECONCILIATION
2024 NAAE ANNUAL CONFERENCE
Online & In-Person
After twenty-five years, the North American Academy of Ecumenists is returning in 2024 to Toronto and to a preeminent consortium of ecumenical education and lived ecumenical exchange: the Toronto School of Theology. As we consider the ecclesial challenges of today, we first commit to reckoning with the history of displacement, violence, abuse, and genocide toward Indigenous Peoples in which the churches are implicated – especially through the Canadian Residential School system as outlined in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We also welcome conversation on questions of the churches’ involvement in or opposition to Indigenous genocide in the USA, Mexico, or elsewhere in Greater North America.
Second, and more broadly, we recognize that contemporary ecumenical perspectives often embrace the providential possibilities of Christian diversity, yet much of that diversity in the present is the product of past mistrust, suppression, violence, or scapegoating. This history is told differently, and often incompatibly, by communities shaped by their perception of others’ betrayal or abandonment of the truth. Such memories that alienate and divide need to be retrieved, expressed, shared, and valued, so that the story of what has taken place can be told together. This reckoning with the truths that animate communities’ sense of the world and of themselves is critical ecumenical work toward just peacemaking and sustainable reconciliation.
The conference proceedings will therefore concern (1) ecumenically pertinent dimensions of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, (2) analogous questions of justice and reconciliation posed to and by the churches elsewhere in Greater North America, and (3) other resonant questions around truth, reconciliation, and memory as ecumenical problems.