These days, I feel as if I am always rushing to get in an analysis of a book or film into my column before the next disaster, the next bomb that I will feel duty bound to address.  I was expecting (dreading) a bomb on Easter. Weren’t we all?

Read more: The haunting trauma of buried history

Last week, I reviewed Rev. Yakubu Pam and Dr. Katrina Korb’s book Fighting for Peace: Learning from the Peace Heroes Among Us, which tells stories of both Christians and Muslims who have overcome prejudices and hardships to work for peace. The day after I turned in my review, I attended the launching for the book held Thursday, 22 March, at the office of the Young Ambassadors for Community Peace and Interfaith Foundation (YACPIF) in Jos. Although initially envisioning a bigger affair, the authors felt it would be inappropriate to have a large launching while families were still grieving after the two church bombings in Jos and subsequent violence against members of the Muslim community. Instead they combined a youth meeting with the book launch. While the meeting was attended by a few people from the university and the film industry, including filmmaker Sani Mu’azu who had written the forward to the book, most of the participants were youth from the community involved with YACPIF as “young ambassadors.” It was their voices who were most heard at the event. If reading the book had sometimes brought tears to my eyes, I was even more touched by hearing Christian and Muslim young people tell in their own voices, stories of friendship and peacemaking.

Read more: Peace in Jos: Marching forward, little by little

When I decided to review Abidemi Sanusi’s novel Eyo, which was nominated for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize, I had forgotten this week’s date. It wasn’t until I was editing my review that I realized that it will be published on the last day of Lent, the Christian period of fasting and self-denial, leading to tomorrow’s joyous Easter Sunday celebration. Though the book is not a joyful “Eastery” one, I thought that the way it delves into the depth of human wretchedness and hints at the fragile redemption of love provides an appropriate reflection for this season.

Read more: Captured by modern-day slavery in Eyo

During the November 2008 crisis in Jos, an old Muslim man went to sit on the steps of the neighborhood Assemblies of God church in Kwararafa. Four times, he turned away angry youth who wanted to burn the church. The fifth time, the youth attacked him. Two weeks later he died of his wounds. Before he died, he told his wife, “You tell Pastor that he shouldn’t worry. For what I have done for the church is for the sake of peace and the neighborhood and I love him very well.” Thus goes one of the first stories found in Fighting for Peace: Learning from the Peace Heroes Among Us by Reverend Yakubu Pam and Dr. Katrina A. Korb. In the book, which was launched at the Young Ambassadors for Community Peace and Inter-faith Foundation (YACPIF) office in Jos on Thursday, the authors follow the thesis of Ugandan priest Emmanuel Katongole (presented briefly in a guest column by Dr. Korb in September 2011) that the stories we tell shape the people we become. Fighting for Peace challenges negative stereotypes heard so often of Plateau State and the north, telling detailed stories of eleven heroes, both Muslims and Christians, who, in the face of violence, chose the path of peace. The book is in much the same genre as Ruth Beattie’s, My Brother’s Keeper: Stories of Grace from the Jos Plateau (ACTS: 2010) that compares the author’s experiences growing up during the political and religious conflict in Northern Ireland with her observations of the conflict in Jos. However, while My Brother’s Keeper tells stories of “good Samaritan” Christians and Muslims directed to an explicitly Christian audience, Fighting for Peace attempts to balance between Christian and Muslim perspectives, offering arguments for peace from pastors and imams, the Bible and Qur’an.

Read more: Learning how to fight...peacefully