3. Healing and Reconciliation

This chapter examines the roles of women of faith in promoting healing and reconciliation through leading prayer, confronting grief and loss, conducting burial and funeral rituals, and practicing everyday sharing of resources. As agents in peacebuilding, women of faith are capable of overcoming barriers, and influencing peacebuilding outcomes in their own voices. Often encounters within secular-religious spaces are determined by unequal gender norms and relations, but this is not the only reality for women in the conflict context. Sometimes, such encounters limit men, thereby offering women opportunities to make claims to faith within place and space for peacebuilding. I demonstrate how women of faith transform attitudes and broken relationships, and work toward re-establishing interdependency and personal and collective healing.