views violence, community decline, and fear-based responses as indicators of broken relationships. It offers a different response, namely the use of restorative solutions to repair the harm related to conflict, crime, and victimization." In Changing Lenses, Howard Zehr describes restorative justice as focusing on the harms done, and consequent needs and obligations, of all parties involved (victims, offenders and the communities in which the harm occurred). He sets forth these six guiding questions: Who has been hurt? What are their needs? Whose obligations are these? What are the causes? Who has a stake in the situation? What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right? The growth of restorative justice has been facilitated by NGOs dedicated to this approach to justice, such as the Victim Offender Mediation Association, as well as by the establishment of academic centers, such as Zehr's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, the University of Minnesota's Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University, the Center for Peacemaking and Conflict Studies at Fresno Pacific University in California, and the Centre for Restorative Justice at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. In the afterword to the third edition of Changing Lenses, Zehr acknowledges the debt that restorative justice owes to many indigenous traditions. "Two peoples have made very specific and profound contributions to practices in the field – the First Nations people of Canada and the U.S., and the Maori of New Zealand... [I]n many ways, restorative justice represents a validation of values and practices that were characteristic of many indigenous groups," whose traditions were "often discounted and repressed by western colonial powers." Zehr has raised awareness that judicial punishment is a social choice, rather than being the only possible response to crime, and that a more socially productive, healing choice can emerge through the application of restorative justice. Zehr argues that punishment – or inflicting suffering as repayment for harm done – rarely results in healing for anybody and often makes matters worse. Congruent with his Mennonite Church USA tradition, Zehr links restorative justice practices to the Judeo-Christian concept of Shalom: "Emphasizing 'right relationships' between individuals, between groups of people, between people and the earth, and between people and the divine, Shalom declares an ultimate allegiance to respecting life in all its forms... [It] encourages