Quotes from Robert J. Schreiter

His final rejection lasted only three days and he broke out of the tomb victorious. This is the Christ who calls on all the suffering people of the world to throw away all that enslaves them as he did and start to live a life of victory, asserting their full dignity and equality in the world.

Christ then will be seen as fully African and black, fully one of them and on their side. It is this Christ that will lead the Africans to the achievement of the new earth and the new heaven. For

Two events in 1996 spurred me to consider writing another book on reconciliation. The first was an invitation from Antonio Baus, C.PP.S., to come to Chile in January 1997

because, after all the struggles to reconstruct democracy in Chile and having endured so much suffering, people needed a new source of hope. It dawned on me that the resurrection stories of the appearances of Jesus might just hold the key to hope. The lectures were presented as examples of "master narratives" into which we can put our own stories.

Interspersed within those meditations are reflections on issues important for both a spirituality of reconciliation and strategies of reconciliation: memory, healing, forgiveness, truth, and ministry.

Reconciliation had touched her heart, and she did not seek revenge. She only wanted an acknowledgment on the part of the new government of what the apartheid government had done.

They formed what they called the "wall of peace.

What all of these stories point to is the pivotal role women play in suffering, violence, and reconciliation. They are frequently the victims. They are the ones left behind to reconstruct a new society. They are the ones who survive. And they are the ones who find a non-violent way out of violent situations. They teach others how to cope, to heal memories, and to move on.

Perhaps that is why Jesus appeared first to women: they are the ones who most frequently lead acts of reconciliation that can come to make a difference. They are the ambassadors of reconciliation par excellence.

Christ has to be more than a friend of the middle and upper classes.

Women, and women's experience, are essential to the spirituality and the ministry of reconciliation. Women's endless experience of domination by men in cultures of patriarchy has been a school for thinking about alternatives, for seeing a different way. Since a ministry of reconciliation requires seeing a different way, part of creating communities of reconciliation is the cultivation of ways of living together outside the usual paths of power and domination.

That Jesus' body appeared to have been taken away was the final insult after the humiliation and suffering of the execution.

Jesus tells her not to cling to him—"Do not hold on to me." One cannot hold on to the dead; a new kind of relationship has to be established. Much of what Jesus does in the

The most important relationship of presence to combat absence will be in the Eucharist.

Reconciliation processes try to create new spaces that are safe for revisiting the experience of trauma.