Ep. 218 - Margaret Eastman Smith: Faith, Family and Freedom

Margaret Eastman Smith grew up inside Moral Re-Armament (MRA), the international movement that emerged from the Oxford Group and sought to transform society through personal moral and spiritual change.

For Margaret, however, MRA wasn’t simply a movement. It was family.

In this episode of Stories from Real Life, Margaret joins host Melvin E. Edwards to discuss her memoir, A Spectacular Inheritance: A Memoir of Letting Go, and the extraordinary journey of discovering an identity outside the tightly connected world that shaped her childhood.

Their conversation explores growing up in an international communal environment; the history and ideals of Moral Re-Armament; the difficult question of whether MRA constituted a cult; leaving a powerful ideological community; developmental trauma and attachment; history and memory; forgiveness; peacebuilding; and the complicated process of deciding what we keep from the people and institutions that formed us.

Margaret Eastman Smith is a writer, historian and peacebuilding scholar whose academic work focuses on history and memory in divided societies and grassroots approaches to peacebuilding. She is also the author of Reckoning with the Past: Teaching History in Northern Ireland.

A Spectacular Inheritance is ultimately about more than leaving a movement. It asks a question that belongs to all of us:

How much of who we are is inherited—and how much do we get to choose?

Learn more about Margaret Eastman Smith:www.margareteastmansmith.com

Additional articles:www.weareonehumanity.org

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