The Telos Channel

A reflection and short history on one of the most important Civil Rights families you might not have heard of.  Medgar Evers was an icon in the Civil Rights Movement (also known as the Southern Freedom Movement) in Mississippi until his untimely assassination in his family’s home on June 12, 1963. Yet, many of us have never heard about his impact on the movement or the way his assassination reverb...

Meet Peace Songs, the album by the Good Shepherd Music Collective in partnership with Telos, coming this September! In this short, musician, pastor, and Telos team member David Gungor invites us into stories and inspiration behind this exciting new project, which is based on Telos’ Principles and Practices of Peacemaking.  David had his first experience with Telos in 2013 with a group of Christian...

Featuring special guest Yigal Elhanan - member of the Parents Circle and community liaison at Akevot, the Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research  75 years of Israeli independence comes at a pivotal moment in Israeli history: the peace process has all but died, the most right-wing government in its history has ascended into power, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protest...

Last week, Israeli forces stormed Al-Aqsa mosque, beating those inside and arresting hundreds of Palestinians worshipers. In an echo of 2021, it appeared that the convergence of Ramadan, Passover, and Easter in the holy city would spark another escalation as rockets and bombs lighted the skies above Israel's borders and the Gaza Strip. In this episode, we detail the events and offer the neces...

Could this moment in Israel/Palestine offer a strategic reset for US engagement in the region? While Israelis were taking to the streets, we sat down with Palestinian-American businessman and commentator Sam Bahour to hear his thoughts on the current moment—locating it in the larger context, recognizing opportunities for transformation of the deeper realities, and charting a path forward.  We reco...

What does it take to flourish? Both personally and collectively, even in the midst of profound and seemingly intractable conflict? Andrew DeCort, Christian peacemaker, teacher, and author has an idea. He says the formative practices of the prayer offered by Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, what many of us know today as the “Lord’s Prayer,” can shape us into the kind of people with the groun...

Ten Palestinians killed in Jenin. Seven Jewish worshipers killed in Jerusalem. And more since then…What’s happening? Where are things headed, and what can we do about it? This week, we discuss the escalating violence in Israel/Palestine that has caught international attention, unpack what CIA Director William Burns means when he says it bears an “unhappy resemblance” to the Second Intifada, and wh...

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting in the streets of Tel Aviv since the inauguration of the new government on December 29, voicing their concern over the government’s proposals to erode basic democratic ideals of judicial review. But ever more presently, its most extreme elements now have control over the administration of the Palestinian territories, and the nearly 5 million P...

What just happened in Brazil? We’re asking that question too.  This week, we brought on a special guest to help put the events in Brasilia on Sunday in context, especially considering the larger trends of democratic backsliding happening across the globe. And we ask what we as peacemakers should take note of now that the new government in Israel has officially been inaugurated. Read and share the...

It’s the holiday season! For most of us, that means the storm before the calm. So this week, we invited Telos co-founder Todd Deatherage on the call to help us slow down, reflect, and look back on some of the wins of the past few months.  One way we did this was to discuss the liturgical holiday of Advent, which Christians practice during the weeks leading up to Christmas as a season of waiting an...

We’ve all been there: the family has finally all sat down at the Thanksgiving table, ready to enjoy a peaceful meal together when that uncle or that cousin says something outlandish and the whole table erupts or goes quiet and everything goes off the rails. In what can be some of the hardest moments with the people we love most, how do we practice peacemaking? We’ve got a very honest, and very fun...

It’s election season! Across both Israel and the US, citizens have gone to the polls in the past week to vote on the future of their nations. While the results in the US are yet to be determined at the time of posting, Israel’s results are clear—and they’re concerning for those of us who are working towards a future of mutual flourishing for Israelis and Palestinians. How will this new government...

Last week most major news outlets were covering the death and funeral arrangements of Queen Elizabeth II. At the same time, Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico just days before the 5 year anniversary of Hurricane Maria, with hardly any headline coverage. In this episode we discuss different conversations around the death of the Queen, the legacy of British Imperialism, and what colonialism has to do w...

According to new restrictions set in place by the Israeli authorities, any foreign passport holder in the West Bank, including American citizens, will have to declare to the Israeli police if they’ve developed a romantic relationship with a Palestinian within 30 days.  At least until the government revised the proposed restriction just two weeks ago, after human rights organizations and internatio...

After heavy rains in Jackson, Mississippi pushed the city’s water treatment plant past its breaking point, hundreds of thousands of residents were left without running water for days.  This water crisis isn’t Jackson’s first however—it’s part of a much larger history of neglect, disinvestment, and race. What’s ahead for Mississippi’s capital city, and what can we do to support it? We invited Bisho...

This week, we welcome Yvonne Holden as the newest member of the Telos Team! She is joining us as the Director of U.S. Programming and we are so excited for you to meet her. After getting to know Yvonne, the team dives into a conversation on a recent controversy sparked after New Orleans attorney Wynton Yates posted a TikTok that went viral about an Airbnb listing advertised as an “1830s slave cabi...

President Biden wrapped up his tour in the Middle East, and our team is still trying to make sense of the visit. There was lots of talk about democracy, freedom, and security in equal measure (eerily reminiscent of our call for "freedom, security, and dignity in equal measure"), but no mention of the underlying realities of occupation, or of the US’ profound influence to push for peace....

What is the US’ role in the Middle East? In May, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh was killed while reporting in Jenin in the West Bank. The US finally released a statement last week both “urging accountability” for her death and saying that it cannot be determined who killed her—but if it was the Israeli military, which independent news agencies and the UN have concluded, it would...

Happy Juneteenth! Today marks the second year that Juneteenth, a day celebrating the effective end of slavery in the United States, will be commemorated as a federal holiday. And it's a day to celebrate! To mark the occasion, we brought on our friend and expert Yvonne Holden, Director of Visitor Experience and Operations at the Whitney Plantation outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, which is on...

At the age of 13, Ishmael Beah was recruited to fight in a bloody civil war in Sierra Leone as a child soldier, forever reshaping the story of his life.  Against all odds, he survived and came to the US as a refugee. But not everyone in the US was ready for his story, or for the realities of the world he came from. So he began to write, sharing his story in his memoir, A Long Way Gone, detailing t...

Palestinian American Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed on May 11th while reporting on Israeli raids in the Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin. Eyewitnesses and video and audio evidence point toward the shots coming from Israeli forces, a claim that Israeli authorities at least initially disputed. And over the weekend, multiple communities in the US were terrorized by mass shootings...

How can you humanize the “other” if you never walk alongside them?  David Bailey grew up in relationship with those on the margins of society. But it wasn’t until he moved into an under-resourced community that he began to more fully understand the ways that race, geographic segregation, and poverty intersect to create realities that are difficult to escape. It was through this proximity that he b...

This week on The Check-in, we tried something new: a live episode! A few weeks ago, we gathered the Hosts from our Telos Table program, which builds the peacemaking movement locally in cities across North America, for a weekend of training and connection. We discussed the ways communication can divide, but also the ways it can be used to counteract violence and build pathways to peace. We then had...

Last weekend, Israeli police raided Al-Aqsa mosque, injuring hundreds at Islam's third holiest site, and inflaming tensions during a tense moment in Israel/Palestine as Ramadan, Passover, and Easter converge. Tensions have continued to rise, and we discuss our prediction for where things might go in the next few weeks, as well as how we can cut through the noise to promote a framework of huma...

This week, we turn our eyes back to Israel/Palestine, where a spate of attacks which killed around a dozen Israelis have tensions heightened leading into the holidays. We also discuss the recent gathering of nations who signed the Abraham Accords with Israel in the Negev, including a visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. What does the summit have to say about the Palestinian issue? *Not...