Drawing on all the community's collective voicesâ€"from “doctors to drug dealersâ€�â€"Fearless Dialogues is a groundbreaking program that seeks real solutions to problems of chronic unemployment, violence, and hopelessness. In cities around the United States and now the world, the program's founder, Gregory C. Ellison, and his team create conversations among community members who have never spoken to one another, the goal of which are real, implementable, and lasting changes to the life of the community. These community transformations are based on both face-to-face encounters and substantive analysis of the problems the community faces. In Fearless Dialogues: A New Movement for Justice , Ellison makes this same kind of analysis available to readers, walking them through the steps that must be taken to find common ground in our divided communities and then to implement genuine and lasting change. "Ellison writes in a thoroughly idiosyncratic way, and his sources are eclectic. The result is an intellectual quilt fabricated to brilliant effect. The book maintains a pastoral quality with its insistence on seeing and hearing the marginalized. Ellison is a theologian for our times and this book will inspire new connections in communities that choose to heed lessons here. --— Publishers Weekly ,starred review Gregory C. Ellison II is Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Candler School of Theology and cofounder of Fearless Dialogues, a grassroots community initiative that draws unlikely partners together to create positive change in self and others. Ellison is the author of Cut Dead but Still Alive: Caring for African American Young Men in Today's Culture and Fearless Dialogues: A New Movement for Justice . Fearless Dialogues A New Movement for Justice By Gregory C. Ellison II Westminster John Knox Press Copyright © 2017 Gregory C. Ellison II All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-664-26065-1 Contents Foreword by Parker J. Palmer, vii, Acknowledgments, xi, 1. Fear+Less Dialogues Introduced, 1, 2. Conversations with Country Dark: Beyond the Fear of the Unknown, 15, 3. The Welcome Table of Radical Hospitality: Beyond the Fear of Strangers, 35, 4. When Pupils See: Beyond the Fear of Plopping, 65, 5. Listening for the Love Below: Beyond the Fear of Appearing Ignorant, 85, 6. To Die a Good Death: Beyond the Fear of Oppressive Systems, 119, Notes, 153, CHAPTER 1 Fear+Less Dialogues Introduced No dogs nip at my heels as I outstretch the three-feet measuring tape overhead, but I feel the ancestral presence of freedom fighters hoisting picket signs. With fists clenched on each side of the measuring tape, I sense a kinship with young activists who throw up their arms in protest and bow their knee to die-in. Unchoked by tear gas, my legs stand firm. But my unclouded eyes still water as I recall the faces of a hundred hues. For a solitary moment, I gaze silently into the eyes of remembered faces standing before me. They too hold three-feet measuring tapes above their heads. Through my watery eyes, I see them clearly. There is the former gang leader in New Orleans with the garish knife wound chiseled around his neck from ear to ear. To his left, the Spanish-speaking New York pastor and the wheelchaired activist from Georgia. My eyes continue to rove the room and I peep the quizzical grin of the aging white male business tycoon. Next to him, I behold the prophetic vision of the brown-faced girl from Ferguson, who saw a flash of heaven in her community where others saw only hell. I look around the room and recall the faces of thousands of unlikely partners drawn together by Fearless Dialogues for hard heartfelt conversations.... Then I see Monique Rivarde. Twelve months before Fearless Dialogues entered public discourse, I met Monique in a crowded courtroom. A cloud cover of rage hovered over the sentencing, and teardrops showered down this mother's cheeks. Nevertheless, undeterred by fear, Monique looked squarely into the eyes of the murderers of her eighteen-year-old son and challenged them to commit to become better men. Not once did Monique raise her voice, but when she spoke, people leaned in closer to hear. Months later in a Fearless Dialogues community conversation about police brutality, Monique sat amid a cloud of witnesses numbering nearly two hundred and offered another challenge: See and hear the pains of the unacknowledged all around us. Her words reverberated through every soul in the room. Again, she spoke barely above a thunderous whisper. Rivarde represents a form of resistance that is quiet and forceful. According to Kevin Quashie, "resistance" that is solely described as a deafening outcry "is too clunky, vague and imprecise to be a catch-all for a whole range of human behaviors and ambitions." When quiet resistance is overlooked in history, it is possible to uplift the strides of televised protest and stamp out the acts of day-to-day resistance of