Todays session started with understanding the various roles that religion plays in peace building.  It was very interesting to hear the various approaches we can take toward viewing the role that religion plays in peace-building.

I liked how Dr. Bock opened the session with asking us what we hoped to gain out of understanding the role that religion plays in peace-building and it was interesting to understand the various responses people had to the question that he posed. The activity then which made us think about a positive and negative impact or role that religion has had in the area of conflict was an eyeopening exercise for me because it made me realize how easy it was for all of us to find a negative way in which religion has created conflict but to think of a positive way in which religion affected conflict was much harder.

Another intriguing term that Mr. Bock introduced in his class presentation was the term “coreligionists” and how it is an effective and important method in promoting conflict resolution because of the power that someone who professes your religion has in using the space that they embody to provokes peoples thoughts and challenge them to re-think fundamentalist.

It was also an engaging topic to discuss about the power that the state has in how religion gets used to create and further perpetrate conflict and whether or not there can be a situation or a state where we can have religion independent of state and whether or not there can be a party that intervene just with the motive of help or can there be a state that is truly secular especially in places where religion has been so deeply embedded within society ?

The next session that we had was on the scarcity of water and the approach of using the 3 Ps being People, Planet and Prosperity to understand how deeply disturbing the water problem in the world is and how we can use methods like rain water harvesting, grey water harvesting and recycling water to use the same gallon of water over and over again was an approach that made a lot of sense and also did a good job of tackling the problems of the 3 Ps and the idea of expanding the pie was definitely a new perspective that gave me a lot to think about.