This hour we take on the generic and strangely divisive notion of peace.

We infuse it with unpredictable images from a wise and adventurous life and conflict transformation

around the globe.

I've been following the Menonite activists, John Paul Lederock's work for years.

And we hear his stories this hour, which you have never heard in the news, from places

like Colombia, Nepal, Tajikistan, and Northern Ireland.

We learn what really happens when people transcend violence while living in it and so

find the moral imagination to live beyond it.

John Paul Lederock says, for example, that the key to enduring change is not mass numbers

of people, but a quality of relationship between unlikely people.

In some ways, to be very honest, the sophistication by which they're doing it at a local level

is leap years ahead of how politics is typically done, which is an all or nothing kind of a

format in which every decision is engaged primarily on whether if we haven't won, we have

at least assured that the other cannot carry victory away.

And where the bottom common ground becomes some form of sort of weak compromise, but basically

it's assuring that no one else gets ahead of us.

And I think those are the challenges that we really have.

The art of peace.

I'm Krista Tippett.

This is On Being from APM, American Public Media.

For over three decades, John Paul Lederock has spent four to five months a year on the

road mediating crises of life and death in over 25 countries and five continents.

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