Category: publications

Simone Weil on love, justice and collective healing.

New Peer-Reviewed Open-Access Article.

Read the full paper here:

Dehumanisation as spiritual harm: Simone Weil on love justice and collective healing

This paper examines the spiritual dimension of dehumanisation and argues that confronting this neglected aspect is essential to healing historical and structural harms. Drawing on the philosophical and theological writings of Simone Weil, it offers a relational interpretation of her insights into the sacred roots of human dignity, the soul-wounding effects of dehumanisation, and love as an antidote to brutality. Through Weil’s concepts of affliction, social degradation and structural injustice, the paper demonstrates that dehumanisation operates not only through material and psychological violence but also through spiritual violation that severs persons and communities from the good.

Building on Weil’s ethical vision, the paper advances a four-fold intergenerational approach to addressing spiritual harm: (1) acknowledging dehumanisation and the reality of affliction; (2) reclaiming human dignity rooted in the sacred; (3) strengthening spiritual belonging through community and intergenerational continuity; and (4) imagining a culture of love oriented to justice and co-flourishing.

Illustrated through contemporary examples, including UNESCO’s Collective Healing Initiative, the paper argues that Weil’s wisdom contributes both philosophically and practically to collective healing, social justice and the regeneration of communities impacted by slavery, colonialism and other enduring forms of inhumanity.

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de gruyter publication, beyond humanity, edited by Scherto

Beyond Inhumanity – Open-Access book published by DeGruyter

Edited by Prof Scherto Gill, Beyond Inhumanity is a book that emerges from the ongoing intellectual dialogue as part of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. The Initiative focuses on healing the wounds of inhumanity, co-creating just societies and enhancing the flourishing of current and future generations.

About this book

Collective efforts to address the legacies of slavery and colonialism tend to orient solely towards dealing with material compensation, such as reducing economic disparity, and levelling access to public services. However, communities directly impacted by the dehumanizing legacies have insisted on a broader reckoning—one that recognizes all dimensions of the harms, including the spiritual injury and the relevant psychosocial trauma inflicted across the generations. They remind us that harms of structural injustice extend beyond the material, the physical and the psychological, also entangling the moral, relational, and spiritual fabric of human life. Understanding harms of inhumanity brings to light the layers of damage and is key to identifying interdisciplinary approaches to collective healing, social transformation and the well-being of all.

This book emerges from the ongoing intellectual dialogue as part of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative. The Initiative focuses on healing the wounds of inhumanity, co-creating just societies and enhancing the flourishing of current and future generations.

Beyond Inhumanity published by DeGruyter —>

  • Brings together under-explored questions and provides succinct answers to them in one volume.
  • Includes multi-disciplinary perspectives.
  • Connected to a UNESCO global initiative.

Author / Editor information

Scherto Gill, University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter, UK.

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CHC handbook launch at UNESCO HQ, Paris, 2024

GHfP Institute at UNESCO HQ – Collective Healing Handbook

On 10th October 2024, UNESCO Assistant Director General, Mrs Gabriela Ramos, launched the Collective Healing Handbook for Facilitators in Paris, to mark the 30th Anniversary of UNESCO Routes of Enslaved People’s Programme.

The research and development of this Handbook was supported by grants from the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace. The Handbook is intended to support the efforts of facilitators and other professionals who are interested in hosting Collective Healing Circles (CHCs) in their local community. The intellectual insights underpinning the CHCs proposed in this Handbook are drawn from contemporary research on historical atrocities, such as the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans, colonialisation, and mass killing and violent displacement of Indigenous peoples, as well as the legacies of dehumanisation, such as racism and structural injustice.

Collective-Healing-Circle-Programme Handbook_Towards-Just-Society-and-Communal-Well-BeingDownload

The practical ideas for implementing the CHC Programme featured throughout the Handbook are inspired by existing proven approaches of similar programmes, and those which have emerged from a one-year pilot of the Programme in five countries (Kenya, Nigeria, the UK, the USA and Colombia) on four continents. Click the link below to download the CHC Programme Handbook for Facilitators.

The launch was followed by reports and testimonies from community partners and participants of the UNESCO Collective Healing Initiative on the process and impact of our CHC activities on four continents.

Amongst those in the audience at UNESCO HQ were global leaders, national delegations, and civil society representatives.

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