“Naropa University presents a public talk, “Building Peace in a Stormy World: A Journey of Service, Hope, and Faith,” by internationally recognized peacemaker Paula Green, EdD, founder and executive director of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding. Part of The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation Distinguished Guest Lecture in Buddhist Studies and American Culture and Values series, the lecture will be held on Wednesday, April 7 from 12-1:30 p.m. at the Naropa Performing Arts Center, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO.

Recognized for her peace-building efforts in the Middle East and Bosnia, Dr. Green was selected as a winner of the Unsung Heroes of Compassion, which was awarded to her by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in April 2009. As Professor of Conflict Transformation at the School for International Training, she also founded and directs Conflict Transformation Across Cultures (CONTACT), an annual Peacebuilding Institute that hosted a training program in Nepal in late February. Her work has been chronicled through written publications and a film, “Communities in Conflict, Healing the Wounds of War,” which documents her multi-year efforts in Bosnia.

Dr. Green is the fourth distinguished guest lecturer invited to Naropa University under a grant from the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism. Green hopes her lecture, which will highlight specific Buddhist teachings that shape her understanding of the root causes of conflict, inspires everyone to work for peace, starting in their own communities.
“It is an honor for me to be selected as a Lenz Distinguished Lecturer,” says Green. “In my profession as a peace builder, I spend much of my time each year in war-torn and war-threatened countries and am frequently confronted with the extremes of human experience. As I search for the answers to the great questions of war and peace, I find the deepest resonance in the Buddha’s teaching. Naropa has always captured my attention with its focus on contemplative education and its role in the integration of spirituality within our academic and social endeavors.”

Naropa’s Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Stuart Sigman said, “Dr. Green’s peace-building work exemplifies the purpose of a Naropa University education to develop skills of inner knowing and inner peace as a vehicle for meeting our world where it is and changing it for the better. Dr. Green’s visit will provide a powerful new impetus for students, faculty and members of the broader community to work together in building a more just and equitable society. I hope the Boulder community from across religious and spiritual traditions will join us for this lecture dedicated to peace and peace-building.”
The Frederick P. Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism, based in Los Angeles, is dedicated to promoting the benefits of Zen Buddhism, meditation, yoga and related Buddhist practices as a pathway to self-realization and the harmonious blending of the material and spiritual in contemporary American society.

Naropa University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and a member of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Naropa University is a private, nonprofit, nonsectarian liberal arts institution dedicated to advancing contemplative education. This approach to learning integrates the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions, helping students know themselves more deeply and engage constructively with others. The university comprises a four-year undergraduate college and graduate programs in the arts, education, environmental leadership, psychology and religious studies.

(original article from News Blaze)

The following is an except from Paula Green’s address at University of Cape Town, South Africa, December 2009, for the conference Beyond Reconciliation: Dealing with the Aftermath of Mass Trauma and Political Violence.

In the wake of genocide and mass violence, we are left with sharply drawn stereotypes of victims and violators. Invisible and often lost to history are the stories of rescuers in times of war, those unusual individuals who resist overwhelming tides of prejudice and risk their own and their families’ lives to rescue the “other,” the outcast, the identified enemy. Few in number but large in significance, it is critical to recognize and acknowledge these moral alternatives to the betrayal and brutality at loose in the community or nation. Such individuals force us to reassess the sweeping dehumanization, generalizations, and shaming that claim that all Hutus, Germans, Serbs, etc, bear collective responsibility for the atrocities committed in their names.

Rescuer research is intended to yield instructive insights that can inform efforts to cultivate altruistic behavior in anticipation of future mass violence. In scholarly literature, one reviewer found that rescuers had a strong ethic of caring, a capacity for empathy, and valued inclusiveness. Another observed that rescuers tend to think critically, tolerate risk, trust their own competence and intuition, and are changed by their actions. Svetlana Broz, a cardiologist and the granddaughter of Marshall Tito, who has collected and published numerous stories of rescue during the Bosnian War, reminds us that: “future generations should have a way of knowing that good people did exist.”