The program can be heard at noon Tuesday, April 16, on the “Minnesota Public Radio News Presents” program at 91.1 FM. The program also can be heard via the Internet. Information is available here.

Alexander spoke in St. Thomas’ Woulfe Alumni Hall on Monday, April 8. Her lecture  was sponsored by Student Diversity and Inclusion Services, University Lectures Committee, College of Arts & Sciences, Dean of Students Office, St. Thomas Activities & Recreation (STAR), Luann Dummer Center for Women, Justice & Peace Studies, American Culture & Difference, and Sociology & Criminal Justice.

The multiple-award-winning documentary “Justice for My Sister” will be shown at 7 p.m. Monday, April 15, in Room 126 of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts on the university’s St. Paul campus.

The film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Kimberly Bautista, its producer and director. “My hope is that audiences from all walks of life will be moved to recognize the violence in our own communities and take a stand against it,” she said.

Adela at age 27.

The program is free and open to the public. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. The discussion with Bautista will be translated from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish.

The feature-length documentary begins with the story of a 27-year-old Guatemalan, Adela, who left for work one day and never returned. Her ex-boyfriend beat her until she was unrecognizable and left her at the side of road.

Despite dismal odds, Adela’s sister Rebeca takes on Guatemala’s corrupt legal system in a three-year fight to bring the ex-boyfriend to justice. Of the 6,000 cases of women murdered in Guatemala over the past decade, only 2 percent of their killers were sentenced.

A trailer for the film can be seen here.

The April 15 program includes the sale of Guatemalan crafts; free-will offerings will be accepted. Checks may be made out to La Paz International Inc. All proceeds go to provide financial support for Rebeca, the subject of the film, and Olga, another Guatemalan woman who lives with her children in poverty.

The program is co-sponsored by St. Thomas’ College of Arts and Sciences, Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion Services,  Luann Dummer Center for Women, and the departments of History, Political Science, Women’s Studies, Family Studies, Justice and Peace Studies, Modern and Classical Languages, and Sociology.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg

The lecture is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning in collaboration with St. Thomas’ Justice and Peace Studies Department.  It is free and open to the public.

Drawing on Judaism’s rich body of sacred texts about peace and peacemaking, Eilberg will explore why conflict arises among individuals and groups, what contributes to the resolution of conflict, and how each of us can serve the cause of peace.

Eilberg will be rabbi-in-residence with the Jay Phillips Center, a joint enterprise of the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University, Collegeville, from Feb. 4 through Feb. 15.

In 1985 Eilberg became the first women ordained as a rabbi in Judaism’s Conservative Movement. A co-founder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, where she directed the Jewish Hospice Care Program, and a founding co-director of the Yedidya Center for Jewish Spiritual Direction, she is nationally known as a leader of the Jewish healing movement and in the field of Jewish spiritual direction.

From 2007 to 2011 Eilberg served as coordinator of the Jay Phillips Center’s Interfaith Conversations Project, fostering interfaith learning and friendship among Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Twin Cities area. Currently she is the center’s interfaith conversations special consultant. She also works with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs on its Civility Campaign and serves on the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations.

Eilberg is also deeply engaged in the work of peace and reconciliation, particularly in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, lecturing and writing on this topic as well as on the art of compassionate listening, healing and spiritual direction. She is at work on a book titled From Enemy to Friend: The Sacred Practice of Jewish Peacemaking.

Intrigued by his work, Fekadu called him directly to ask if he’d speak to her “Conflict Resolution” class that semester. He accepted, and this past summer she worked with him on her self-designed project: “Mentoring Peace Through Art: Empowering Urban Youth Through Street Murals.” The project was funded by the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program at St. Thomas.

“I was in a unique position to research this project because I graduated from the same school and came from the same neighborhood as some of the youth involved in the mural painting,” Fekadu said.

Jimmy Longoria
(Photo courtesy of Longoria)

The title of her project comes from Longoria’s Mentoring Peace Through Art, a nonprofit that Longoria – the only Chicano/Latino/Hispanic to be awarded a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship − cofounded with his wife, Connie Fullmer. The organization mentors youth as a way to identify, engage and develop leadership potential in young individuals through art projects that serve the social needs of diverse communities.

Those needs frequently involve painting over gang graffiti used to mark their territories on the exterior walls of local businesses.

Dr. Mike Klein, a justice and peace studies professor at St.Thomas and Fekadu’s project adviser, described her project: “Heaven engaged in excellent work as a qualitative researcher, blending interviews, observations and documentary research into a coherent narrative. Her case study of Longoria’s mural work documents an innovative project addressing local drug trafficking, youth leadership and murals that represent youth voices while beautifying Minneapolis neighborhoods.”

Gang symbols can appear deceptively nondescript – Fekadu drew an example of one local gang’s marking: three dots in the shape of a triangle. But a gang’s symbol, no matter how simple in design, carries dire consequences for the surrounding neighborhood if not removed.

“The murals don’t fix the gang problem, but they help disperse the dangerous problems, such as drug trafficking, that gangs bring to communities,” Fekadu explained. “They’re not going to do business in front of this enormous, colorful mural that attracts attention. These murals take the walls away from the gangs by painting over the tags (or symbols) that they use to claim their territory.”

She also noted that the impressionistic style of Longoria’s murals, which “pack as much color into many strokes,” and the clear latex coat he applies to every finished mural make it difficult for gangs to write over the murals and for their symbols to be clearly seen.

Dr. Michael Klein.
(Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

Fekadu employed ethnographic methodology in her research, which she described as “qualitative versus quantitative, and rooted in field research … mostly observation that’s participatory in nature and interviews.” She spent the first eight weeks of the summer researching Longoria’s mural sites and observing him and his volunteers at work.

She laughed when asked if she had any art training then remarked that the best part of her ethnographic research, which is, by its nature, immersion-focused, was helping to paint five murals in south Minneapolis. Throughout high school, she always felt an inclination toward art but never pursued it, so his project was a welcome blend of a fond childhood pastime and her career ambitions as an adult.

It was through this lens that she came to “a new understanding of community and what it means to help urban youth,” she noted. “This is not your typical art where you pay for it at the register and plant it on your wall. There’s a lot of interaction in this kind of art, not just among the volunteers, but among the communities that it serves. People would stop by while we painted, and you could tell they were really excited by what we were doing.”

She added, “What’s also really important is that this plays into solutions for getting youth in the area involved in shaping their community − getting them involved so they have a sense of being represented and a sense of ownership in where they live.”

Fekadu plans on applying to a Ph.D. program, possibly overseas. She will spend her last two years at St. Thomas ”figuring out what I want to focus on, but I’m interested in cultural anthropology or sociology programs. And I’ve always seen myself working in the Third World,” she said.

Following the screening, Jim Miller and Alberta Iron Cloud Miller of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation will lead a discussion of the Dakota history and spirituality introduced in the film.

Riders on a 330-mile trip from South Dakota to Minnesota.

The program is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning and the Department of Justice and Peace Studies at St. Thomas in collaboration with the Healing Minnesota Stories initiative promoted by the St. Paul Interfaith Network. It is free and open to the public.

In 2005, Jim Miller had a dream about riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Prior to waking, he found himself at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged. Miller said that, at the time, he knew nothing of the largest mass execution in U.S. history, which was ordered by Abraham Lincoln on Dec. 26, 1862.

“When you have dreams, you know when they come from the creator,” Miller said. “As any recovered alcoholic, I made believe that I didn’t get it. I tried to put it out of my mind, yet it’s one of those dreams that bothers you night and day.”

Four years later, after embracing the message of the dream, Miller and a group of riders retraced the 330-mile route of his dream on horseback from Lower Brule, S. D., to Mankato, Minn., to arrive at the site of the hanging on the anniversary of the execution.

“Dakota 38,” which documents their journey, is a story of hope and healing as they confront the painful history it represents and the plight of their communities today.

Dr. Jeffrrey Pilcher

The talk, “Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food,” is free and open to the public.

The burritos and taco shells that many think of as Mexican actually were created in the United States, while Americanized foods have been carried around the world in tin cans and served in tourist restaurants.

Using the “chili queens” of San Antonio and the inventors of the taco shell as examples, Pilcher will show how Mexican Americans helped to make Mexican food global. He also will discuss the struggle between globalization and national sovereignty that is represented by the clash of fast food and Mexican regional cuisines.

Pilcher teaches and writes on the history of foods throughout the world, but especially on Mexican food.

His lecture is co-sponsored by the St. Thomas departments of History, Modern and Classical Languages, Geography, International Studies, American Culture and Difference, Women’s Studies and Justice and Peace Studies.

The program, free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning and the Justice and Peace Studies Department at St. Thomas, in collaboration with the St. Paul Interfaith Network as a part of its monthly midday interfaith dialogue series.

A buffet lunch will be served free of charge; doors will open at 11:30 a.m. Caƞtemaza will speak and take questions for roughly the first hour. After a short break, participants are invited to stay for a second hour to discuss the presentation in small groups. Philosophical and spiritual perspectives on the language also will be discussed.

The Dakota language in Minnesota has fewer than 10 first-language speakers left. Caƞtemaza will discuss how U.S. American Indian policy, the church and Euro-American citizens have affected the Dakota language as well as current Dakota language revitalization efforts.

Caƞtemaza (Neil McKay)

A member of the Dakota Spirit Lake Nation, Caƞtemaza teaches Dakota language and American Indian history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His teaching, writing and research interests are in the area of preservation and restoration of the Dakota language and culture. Currently he is finishing a master’s degree in second languages and cultures, and also consults and advises on indigenous language education and issues.

This is the second of three related programs on American Indian culture and history at St. Thomas this fall. Dakota scholar Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa spoke Sept. 13. A screening of the film, “Dakota 38,” followed by a discussion led by American Indian spiritual leader Jim Miller and his spouse, Alberta Iron Cloud, will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 17, in the Great Room (Room 100) of McNeely Hall, located on the university’s St. Paul campus at Cleveland and Summit avenues.

The Jay Phillips Center is a joint enterprise of the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University in Collegeville.  More information can be found at the center’s website

Dr. Gerald Schlabach, who has been the JPST program director for five years and is now chair of the new department, said, “In effect, we had already become a department years ago. It was just time to name it that way. This change represents an affirmation from the university at large − a seal of approval − for the ways we’ve been working in the last few years to build up the program and strengthen our curriculum.”

Dr. Gerald Schlabach

Modifications to the curriculum, he said, mark the “the biggest single change” that the transformation from program to department will have on JPST students: “In addition to the general major, our curriculum now offers three concentrations that focus on career skill sets: conflict transformation, public policy analysis and advocacy, and leadership for social justice. We wanted to give even clearer tracks to students who inevitably ask what they can do with a JPST major.”

The new concentrations are the department’s way of building upon the program’s commitment to integrate theory with practice and are reflected in its new slogan, “Justice and Peace Studies: More Practical Than Ever.”

Schlabach said the biggest concern raised by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences was whether the program would retain its “interdisciplinary character” through the transition, and he clarified that that will not change: “The JPST curriculum always has drawn from and will continue to draw from many university departments, including Theology (in which the program was based), English, Sociology and Criminal Justice, Communication and Journalism, even the School of Engineering, which has been promoting the concept of ‘peace engineering.’”

Now that JPST is an official department, Schlabach believes “we will have greater visibility for students who want to make a difference in the world but who might not have chosen to major in justice and peace studies because they don’t consider themselves activists. Now we can make all the clearer that there are ways to work for the common good – the kind of things in the university mission statement – in lots of different professions.”

The program is sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning and the Justice and Peace Studies Program at St. Thomas in collaboration with the St. Paul Interfaith Network as a part of its monthly midday interfaith dialogue series. A buffet lunch will be served free of charge.

Dr. Chris Mato Nunpa

“The history of the Dakota-U.S. War of 1862 and its consequences are little-known and long-suppressed among the majority of Minnesotans,” said Mato Nunpa, and “the role of religious ideology in the treatment of native populations is in many cases a key part of that story.”

Mato Nunpa will discuss and take questions about this local “inconvenient truth” from noon until 1 p.m.  After a short break, participants may stay for a second hour to respond in guided, small-group discussions on the topic.

A historian, elder and activist from the Pezihutazizi Otunwe (Yellow Medicine Community) in southwestern Minnesota, Mato Nunpa was associate professor of indigenous nations and Dakota studies at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall and now teaches as community faculty member at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul.  He is working on a book titled A Sweet-Smelling Savour: Genocide, the Bible and the Indigenous Peoples of the United States.

The Jay Phillips Center is a joint enterprise of the University of St. Thomas and St. John’s University in Collegeville.  More information can be found on the center’s website.

The presentations mark the culmination of a workshop extending over seven months to support research in the areas of service-learning and engaged pedagogy sponsored by the Office of Service-Learning.

The schedule and speakers are:

• 1 p.m. – Dr. Debra Peterson and Dr. Tim Scully, Communication and Journalism Department
• 1:30 p.m. – Dr. Ernest Owens, Management Department
• 2 p.m. – Dr. Susan Callaway, English Department
• 2:30 p.m. – Break
• 2:45  p.m. – Dr. Mike Klein, Justice and Peace Studies Department
• 3:15 p.m. – Dr. Kimberly Vrudny, Theology Department

Abstracts of the papers

Debra Petersen and Tim Scully: “Study-away Service-Learning: Preparing Students for a Transformational Experience”

If international service-learning is indeed “the most powerful pedagogy available to higher education,” we should examine its effects on our students and the strategies we use to maximize the desired outcomes with the goal of improving our ISL courses. For over a decade, UST Communication and Journalism faculty and students in “Hawaii: Multi-Cultural Communication in Diverse Organizations” have had a small bilingual charter school on Kaua’i, Hawaii, as their service-learning partner. Many of these UST students report that their relatively brief time at the school was a life-changing experience. This paper will focus on the current structure of the course and how it is designed to prepare students for a transformative experience at the service-learning site, as well as unexpected ways that this experience has been enhanced.

Ernest Owens: “The Effects of Sponsor Immersion on Service-Learning Based Project Management Curriculum”

Most research in service-learning and project management focuses on the process of service-learning or the methods of project management. This review will focus on the role of community sponsors and their efforts to engender successful service-learning-based projects. The analysis will frame the pedagogy for a semesterlong course where the sponsor participates as a student in the course on project management. This paper explores what happens when the sponsor is not an external leader guiding the effort from outside the classroom, but an integral member of the classroom experience. This paper elucidates some of the outcomes where the sponsor is trained alongside and experiencing the project on an equal footing with the students.

Susan Callaway: “Contexts and Contributions: A Case for Service-Learning in the Writing Center”

Despite the challenges inherent in community outreach, writing centers can benefit from service-learning in the peer consulting preparation course. Service-learning disrupts the assumptions consultants hold about writing, learning, literacy and their roles with their peers in the university. Through the lens of the UST Center for Writing’s work in the community, this paper describes the intersections between writing centers and service-learning, and then examines the issues a writing center director should be aware of in establishing outreach, all the while mining the benefits of partnering in the community.

Mike Klein: “Beyond the Dichotomy of Charity or Justice: Complementary Service-learning Strategies on the Social Change Wheel”

Social change wheel models provide a unifying framework for interrelated strategies addressing social issues without undermining critical analysis of power and injustice. Moving from a theoretical approach to practical application, this article presents the social change wheel as a synthesizing model and describes applications for service-learning reflection, analysis and planning.

Kimberly Vrudny: “‘Doing No Harm’ and Other Implausibilities: Photographic Ethics in the Field”

Dynamics of power and privilege are evident in documentary photography, as photographers with expensive cameras and generous travel allowances journey around the world, sometimes making a spectacle of human suffering. In creating “30 Years / 30 Lives,” a photography exhibit that introduces viewers to 30 individuals in the United States, South Africa, Thailand and Mexico whose lives in some way intersect with HIV/AIDS, I attempted to advance photographic ethics in the context of humanitarian relief by occupying a middle place between arguments that suggest such photography is never warranted, and the free-for-all arguments that suggest anything goes. Before departing to carry out the project, I outlined 10 ethical principles that should guide the practice of documentary photography, and then I attempted to abide by them in the field. In this paper, I examine three of those principles – preventing exploitation, mitigating privilege and overcoming stereotypes – with stories from behind the scenes, highlighting moments when remaining true to the principle was not always as straightforward as I might have wished, as well as moments when my horizons were broadened by interaction with participants in the project.

The committee charged with designing a response consulted Gordon Zahn, a St. Thomas alumnus with a national reputation in issues of justice and peace. We were debating whether to create a specific academic program dedicated to justice and peace or to infuse issues of justice and peace across the entire St. Thomas curriculum.

Zahn advised that a serious infusion of such concerns across the curriculum would not last unless we had a core program dedicated to justice and peace, so we developed what has become the Justice and Peace Studies Program. Experience shows that the program and its students and faculty have energized academic study and practical action for justice and peace across the university.

St. Thomas describes its mission as follows: “Inspired by Catholic intellectual tradition, the University of St. Thomas educates students to be morally responsible leaders who think critically, act wisely and work skillfully to advance the common good.”

By their nature, morally responsible leaders seek out areas of injustice and human suffering, and work to resolve those issues. At St. Thomas we teach students to serve the needs of others through existing societal structures – economic, political, social, educational and legal systems. And it is the first level of moral responsibility to work within these structures with honesty, integrity and compassion.

A deeper level of moral responsibility occurs when we witness the structures that allow, encourage or force injustice. It is then that we must confront the indiscretions and offer practical alternatives.

In his encyclical letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II emphasized structures of sin “which … are rooted in personal sin, and thus always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove. And thus they grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people’s behavior.”

These structures are “the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins … of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; of those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world, and also of those who sidestep the effort and sacrifice required.”

Morally responsible leaders need to not only think critically about how human suffering is caused by these structures in society, but they also must act wisely and work skillfully to relieve human suffering and change the structures that cause it. In other words, we cannot know and yet refuse to act.

Programs like VISION and off-campus study or service that confront social problems help St. Thomas students experience firsthand the suffering caused by unjust structures. They give a human face to injustice, and help overcome the “laziness” and “indifference” mentioned by Pope John Paul. Courses in the Justice and Peace Studies Program provide students with the critical thinking skills that help them to understand structures of sin or injustice. These skills then carry over to other classes and disciplines, and help to emphasize creative, compassionate and nonviolent action. The program itself promotes skillful work for justice and peace, especially with its courses in active nonviolence and conflict resolution.

Some assert that such concern for changing status-quo structures represents a misuse of the Christian message. But in 1971, the Catholic bishops of the world said, “We have … been able to perceive the serious injustices which are building around the world of men a network of domination, oppression and abuses which stifle freedom and which keep the greater part of humanity from sharing in the building up and enjoyment of a more just and more fraternal world.  …Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation” (emphasis added).

The fact that our Justice and Peace Studies Program receives strong administrative, faculty, staff and student support says a lot about who we are as a community.

About the author: Father David Smith is the founding and now former director of the St. Thomas Justice and Peace Studies Program. He retired from the university in spring 2007 and his book, Understanding World Religions: A Roadmap for Justice and Peace, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this fall.