A Meeting Place for Peace: Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. Addresses ‘Moral Courage’ in Hawai‘i
On July 15, 2026, a capacity crowd filled the Architecture Auditorium at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for a public lecture by minister, author, archivist, curator, professor, and civil rights scholar Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., titled “Moral Courage and Nonviolent Transformation.” Newly installed UH Mānoa Chancellor Vassilis Syrmos hosted the address, and Hawai‘i Governor Josh Green presented Carter with a formal proclamation, joined by UH President Wendy Hensel. For the International Community of Artists for Peace (ICAP), built on the conviction that artists and moral leaders alike have a role to play in building peace, Carter’s address offered a rare chance to hear directly from someone who has spent decades at the intersection of faith, ethics, and reconciliation.
Images courtesy of Ricardo Shima
Dr. Carter recently retired as the founding dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, a position he held for 46 years. He is also the founder of the Gandhi–King–Ikeda Institute for Ethics and Reconciliation at Morehouse, an initiative dedicated to advancing global harmony and interfaith dialogue — a fitting credential for an address that wove together the legacies of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Daisaku Ikeda, the Buddhist philosopher.
Dr. Carter opened not with doctrine but with geography, describing the Pacific Ocean as “humanity’s largest flat sphere” — a surface that has carried both conquerors and peacemakers across its waters for centuries. Hawai‘i, he argued, is not on the margins of civilization but at its meeting place, where “east greets west” and difference becomes the architecture of community rather than a source of division. It was a theme suited to the room: a lecture hall where a Baptist minister spoke about a Buddhist philosopher to an audience gathered under the banner of interfaith cooperation.
Dr. Carter traced his own formation under King’s mentorship, and later Ikeda’s, describing the two men as complementary teachers whose combined influence shaped his understanding of what he called “courageous, virtue-ethical intelligence” — the capacity to choose dialogue over domination, understanding over humiliation, and hope over fear. He offered this as a needed counterweight to an age that has, in his words, rewarded competitive intelligence and monetized artificial intelligence while neglecting the compassionate kind.
of the event.
From there, Dr. Carter proposed five “virtue-ethical options” for building a nonviolent civilization: the courage of compassion, the principle of dialogue, the integrity of inner transformation, the generosity of global citizenship, and the perseverance of hope — closing with what he called the highest of all, the courage of creating love. Each, he suggested, describes a discipline rather than a feeling: compassion as “the audacity to suffer with another,” hope as “disciplined moral imagination” rather than naive optimism.
It is not hard to hear, in Dr. Carter’s account of dialogue across difference, something close to what ICAP asks of artists — that a shared stage, like a shared moral vocabulary, can hold people across lines of culture, faith, and history without asking them to erase what makes them distinct. Herbie Hancock has often described jazz in similar terms: an art form built on listening as much as speaking, on responding to another voice rather than overpowering it. Lawrence Carter’s insistence that peace is “cultivated within the human heart” before it is negotiated between nations is a reminder of why ICAP treats the arts not as a decorative accompaniment to peacebuilding, but as one of its working methods.
Following Carter’s remarks, there was a panel discussion on the practical applications of nonviolent transformation. Chancellor Syrmos remarked that Dr. Carter’s lessons on nonviolence and moral leadership call on audiences to have courage and look beyond themselves, especially in challenging times.
Carter’s address is a reminder that the questions ICAP artists have continually been posing through music and other arts — how do we listen across differences, how do we build trust one exchange at a time — are the same questions Carter has spent his life asking through ministry and mentorship. Different instruments, the same musical score.
