2019 Annual Conference

Registration for the Spring 2019 conference is live!

                                    Click here to register!

Single room: $434.50*

Double room: $403*

Conference and Meals: $318 (no lodging)

Conference only: $168 (no meals or lodging)

Student fee: $50 (no lodging or meals other than Saturday lunch)

NOTE: If a student wished to stay only for the plenary and lunch on Saturday, the cost is $10.

*includes registration, all meals, and facilities fee

The 2019 conference begins on the evening of Thursday, April 4th and ends after lunch on Sunday, April 7th, and is held at Quaker Hill Conference Center in Richmond, Indiana. On-site check-in on Thursday begins at 4pm.

       Healing the Breach: Moral Stress and Spiritual Reconciliation

Moral Dimensions of Trauma   

Some traumatic experiences involve moral emotions--guilt, shame, contempt, disgust, and anger--and therefore demand different approaches to care and counseling. How is Post-Traumatic Stress different from moral injury? Beyond the most severe cases, best classified as moral injury, how can we recognize the nature of moral stress as a continuum of human experiences. This session will define and familiarize participants to the most common trauma responses, the dynamics of moral stress and moral injury, and explore experiences that can potentially generate moral anguish.

Response and Recovery

How can modalities of care and counseling develop more effective engagements of moral anguish? How do compassion, trust-building, and gratitude reconnect those with moral anguish to a life-giving sense of goodness? What is the role of communities in recovery?

Moral Stress and Activism

How does moral stress compel activism: to see a more just world realized, experiencing the moral stress at witnessing the world as it is, and desiring to craft a more morally resilient society? This session will apply knowledge of moral stress and trauma to movement spaces and the experiences of activism. We will explore how traumas and trauma responses function in different phases of the “movement cycle” -- meaning in the daily lives of community organizers, in the peak of a political action or protest, and in the aftermath of movement campaigns or protest actions.

Compassionate Care for Activists and Social Movements 

Activism often generates polarities in human experiences: activism is invigorating and exhausting; activism is meaningful and meaning-formative, and disillusioning and depressing; activism promotes bonding and building up of communities, and causes disaffecting and tearing apart of communities. How could compassionate care help to sustain justice-seeking movements and activists?