And Now A Word About Secular Humanism, Spirituality, and the Practice of Justice and Conflict Resolution

The papers presented in this Dialogue raise very important and moving questions about the relationship of spirituality, moral values, and religion to the practice of law generally, and the practice of conflict resolution specifically. In this Commentary, I want to focus on two related questions: First, where do our moral values, spirituality, and sense of communion or connection come from? And second, how do values derived from various sources of secular humanism inform our practices? For some of us, organized religion is not the primary source of our commitment to the moral values that inform our legal and conflict resolution practices, but other values or values surprisingly similar to religious values do inform our work. This Commentary addresses some of those alternative sources of spiritual values, as used by the participants in this Dialogue