Spiritual Practice as Reorientation: Digital Polarization and JustPeace

Abstract

This paper examines how spiritual practices can contribute to conflict transformation under contemporary conditions of digital, moral, and relational polarization. It argues that many conflicts today are not only struggles over power, resources, security, or political authority, but also crises of shared reality. In contemporary context of polarization, disagreement often becomes destructive because persons and communities no longer share a stable interpretative ground through which truth, grief, accountability, and responsibility can be pursued together. Against this background, the study does not romanticize spirituality, since religion and spirituality may also intensify exclusion, moral superiority, and hostility. Instead, drawing on Thomas W. Porter’s account of conflict transformation and JustPeace, the paper presents spiritual practices as transformative practices of reorientation. Silence, listening for understanding, and speaking the truth in love reshape the habits through which persons attend, perceive, speak, and relate within conflict. While these practices are already central to conflict transformation and peace studies, this study relocates them at the micro level of everyday digital life, where ordinary acts of reaction, judgment, and attention can either wound and damage, or support and restore others.  The study then extends this reorientation through moral imagination and public trust. The study concludes that spiritual practice does not eliminate conflict or guarantee peace but can reorient persons and communities capable of living out conflict differently, so that harm can be named, accountability can be faced, relationships can be restored, and JustPeace can become morally imaginable and communally practicable.