Faith-based Peacebuilding: Insights from the Three Main Monotheisms

Almost all world faiths consider peace as a central issue and religions can be a site of reconciliation or at least have the potential to become sites to prevent and solve local and global conflicts. Peacebuilding activities grounded on faith require not only social sciences standards to be studied, but also religious and spiritual resources such as ritual, prayer and spiritual healing, (along with other peacebuilding tools shared with secular experiences). The spiritual and religious resources can be analysed with standard measures of sociology, but the analysis would still not be complete and deep enough to understand their role in the empirical experiences of faith-based peace builders. One must consider also the moral and ethical issues that ground the theologies of all major world Religions, specifically in the Monotheisms that are the focus of this paper.