From February 26 to March 1, Klaipėda, Lithuania, hosted the international conference Creating Resilient Communities for Peace and Justice. The event brought together researchers, representatives of civil society, business leaders, and practitioners from various countries to discuss the role of cross-sector collaboration in strengthening community resilience and advancing peace and justice amid today’s global challenges.
Dmytro Fedorchak, Manager of educational programs of “Dialogue in Action,” presented a paper titled “Collective Memory and Religious Communities: How Churches in Ukraine Shape Narratives of Resilience and Reconciliation during War.”
In his presentation, Dmytro focused on how war reshapes society’s understanding of memory and loss. In his view, in contemporary Ukraine memory has become not only a way of preserving the past, but also an important moral resource that shapes perceptions of justice, solidarity, and the future of society.
He also emphasized that religious communities often become spaces where society seeks to process collective loss. Churches not only hold funeral services and memorial events, but also help shape the language through which people speak about sacrifice, pain, and hope. In this context, memory during wartime becomes a kind of “moral infrastructure” that influences how society understands justice in the future.
Dmytro also addressed the issue of reconciliation, which remains a sensitive topic in the Ukrainian context. “Reconciliation-oriented memory is not about forgetting injustice. Rather, it aims to prevent injustice from defining our entire moral future. Churches may hold a unique position here, as they hold transcendence alongside trauma, allow lament without dissolving hope, and preserve moral limits in the language of war,” he noted.
We thank the conference organizers – the Center for Dialogue and Conflict Transformation at LCC International University – for creating a space for meaningful international discussions and for the opportunity to present the Ukrainian experience in a global context.
