Peacemakers is for everyone willing to do the work — across faith traditions, identities, communities, and life circumstances. The course is built for people of all backgrounds and none. But it asks for readiness, because the work the cohort does together only holds when each participant is in. This page is about who the course is built for, what readiness looks like, and what the interview before a pilot cohort actually covers.
Who the course is for
The course is built on the conviction that peacemaking is a practice every adult is capable of learning. It does not require a particular religious background — the wisdom traditions cited each week include Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous, and secular sources, presented as equal voices in the room. It does not require a particular political position. It does not require previous experience with this kind of work, though people who have done it for decades belong here too.
What it does require is willingness. Just one filter, with no caveats about background, belief, or biography.
Some honest signals
The course is rigorous. It asks you to look at things many people prefer not to look at — your reactivity, the harm you have caused, the harm you have carried, the places you have been complicit. There are seasons of life when this work is exactly right, and seasons when something else needs to come first. None of these signals are permanent disqualifications. They are signals about timing. The course will be there when the season is right.
Signal 01
If you are in the middle of active crisis — recent loss, severe mental health symptoms, ongoing acute trauma — the right next step is most likely professional support, not a cohort. The course will still be here when you have the foundation underneath you to do this work alongside other things.
Signal 02
The course works on you. It does not give you a script for fixing your partner, your parent, your coworker. If your hope is that the course will make someone else different, the course will disappoint you. (Paradoxically, the work you do may end up being what changes them — but only after it has changed you.)
Signal 03
Gaps in attendance break the cohort, not just for you but for everyone else. The repetitive rhythm of report-back is the engine of the work. If you cannot commit the time right now — schedule, energy, or life circumstance — wait for a cohort that you can.
Signal 04
The course is not an academic discussion of peacemaking. It is a behavior-change practice. If your interest is in the ideas but you are not ready to be changed by what you learn, the course will frustrate you. The reading-and-discussing version of this material exists in many other places.
What to expect
The interview is a conversation, not an evaluation. Lindsey will spend most of the time listening. There are no right answers. The aim is for both of you to know clearly what is being committed to before either of you says yes.
What Lindsey may ask
What you can expect from us
The principle
After the interview, both you and Lindsey will think about it for a few days. If either of you concludes this is not the right cohort or the right season, that decision is welcomed — not treated as failure. Saying no, on either side, protects the cohort and protects the person. The course works because everyone in it is here because they chose to be, fully informed.
What the interview is for
"To make sure that everyone who joins the cohort is here on purpose — and that no one is here under false pretenses about what it will ask."
The frame underneath all of this
We want to be clear about what the interview is, and what it isn't.
The frame
We are not screening for a certain kind of person. Faith, background, politics, biography, history with this kind of work — none of it is the filter. The course is genuinely for everyone willing to do the work.
What we are protecting is a cohort of people who have agreed to do something hard together for ten weeks. The interview is the first chance for everyone involved to be honest about what that means — what it will ask, what it will cost, and what it will not be.
If you want to do this work, and you are ready to do it right now, the rest will follow. The conversation with Lindsey is just the first one in a long sequence of honest conversations the course is built to teach.