Also, the University of St. Thomas is one of only a few universities in the United States that has an undergraduate program of study in Irish Gaelic. This fall UST will offer Spoken Modern Irish Gaelic I: IRGA 111, from 9:55 to 11:35 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday in Room 305, O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.

For more information about either language or any of the languages offered by the MCL Department, contact Modern and Classical Languages, (651) 962-5150.

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.

Paul Schons teaches in 1979.

Prior to returning to St. Thomas, he taught in high schools in Gaylord, Minn., and Colorado Springs, Colo. He earned his M.A. from the University of Colorado, and his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He also studied at the University of Trier, Germany, the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and the Carl Duisburg Gesellschaft, Cologne, Germany.

During his 45 years of service to the university, he founded the study abroad program, officially sending the first two students abroad to the University of Vienna in 1972. In addition, he taught St. Thomas’ first online undergraduate course and co-founded the master’s program in international business. His daughter, Dr. Suzanne Schons, is an adjunct faculty member in the Music Department.

Schons was featured in a 2004 St. Thomas magazine article titled “They Came Back” about faculty members who came to the university as students and returned later to teach. In it, he is regarded as “one of the university’s most innovative teachers.” He also was featured in 2012′s “This Dorm’s Life” about the time he spent in Ireland Hall as a student. In it he recalled, “I came in thinking I wanted to major in music (he played the clarinet), but (professor) Frank Mayer informed me, ‘Young man, you have no talent.’ I was really enjoying German by then, so I chose that, and here I am today.”

Paul Schons new faculty portrait from 1967.

According to Terence Langan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, “I don’t think Paul was ever without a smile and a ‘Greetings!’ when we met outside the OEC elevator, nor did he ever fail to initiate an exchange of pleasantries as he rode to the third floor and I to the fourth. Thanks to Paul, I always had a smile on my face as I rode that last bit alone.”

Mass of Christian Burial will be said at 10 a.m Monday, Oct. 29, at the Church of St. Mark, 2001 Dayton Ave., St. Paul. Visitation will be held from 4-8 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 28, at O’Halloran and Murphy Snelling Avenue Chapel, 575 W. Snelling Ave. S., St. Paul, and at the church one-half hour prior to Mass.

The Paul Schons Family Memorial Scholarship for German has been established in his memory. Contributions may be made out to University of St. Thomas (P. Schons in memo line), c/o Jennifer O’Brien, UST Mail DEV, 2115 Summit Ave., St. Paul, Minn. 55105.

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.

While the relationship between art and reality may be tenuous and Cuarón’s opening door is metaphoric, each reminds me that all of us confront cultural blind spots: blocked views that multicultural education and cultural criticism help illuminate. This illumination is akin to moving from a blocked view behind a pillar in the balcony to a seat in the front row where the full story unfolds before you and is more intimately comprehended. Like a footnoted text, an understanding of the history of Mexican cinema relays a variety, depth and breadth that spill as if from the cornucopia to which Mexico’s horn-like shape often has been compared.

History and nationalism in Mexican film  Mexico has a long history of cinema produced concomitant with a national image that was disseminated in state-funded films made for mass consumption by an uncertain post-Mexican Revolution public. But cinema began as elite fare. The first short movie was shown in Mexico City in August 1896, just eight months after the Lumière brothers gave the first public showing of short films at the Grand Café on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines.

There soon followed the opening of Mexico City’s first cinema exhibition space, the Salón Rojo, which projected some of the earliest images ever filmed: more than 35 shorts that Lumière company agents Fernand Bon Bernard and Gabriel Veyre captured in Guadalajara, Veracruz and Mexico City. Like early European short sequences of the era, the Mexican images represent local flora and fauna and people engaged in the activities of daily life. That novel year’s cinema even produced one of moving pictures’ first stars: then president Porfirio Díaz, whose moving images still can be viewed online. The austere military general and president from 1876 to 1911 commissioned short films of himself riding horseback in Chapultepec Park, talking to Thomas Edison, and fulfilling state duties.

During the teens, with the novelty of moving pictures still fresh, the Mexican public thrilled to some of the most captivating imagery in the history of the screen: Mexican Revolutionary footage of galloping horses and gunplay. The 1910 to 1921 conflict was filmed in action sequences by what would now be called “embedded” photojournalists. Its black and white, soundless reels included spectacular – some detractors thought staged – battle sequences and such famed moments as “Villa’s and Zapata’s Troops Entering Mexico City” in 1914. Soon after, silent film stars like Lupe Vélez ignited the screen in films that showcased revolutionary political ideals in an atmosphere of censorship imposed by President Victoriano Huerta.

The Mexican Revolution was the first historical event thoroughly documented on film; its panoramic action shots captured by Salvador Toscano Barragán, who also created Mexico’s first narrative film, “Don Juan Tenorio” (1898), based on the 1844 Spanish play. The revolutionary footage’s impressive content was followed by the introduction of sound; the first feature-length film made in Mexico, “Santa” (1932), was adapted from the novel by Federico Gamboa and featured a soundtrack made possible by Joselito and Roberto Rodríguez’s technical innovation, “The Rodríguez Sound System.”

While Hollywood began trying to make movies in Spanish for Mexican consumption in the 1930s, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein visited the United States’ competition south of the Río Bravo. He found a cinema in full swing and entering its golden age in which it produced films that found commercial success based on rampant production and a formula of presenting character types, static gender roles, and themes of guilt and redemption, family integrity, nationalism, and often leftist ideals in films about the revolution. Adding romance, comedies – including Cantinflas films – and other genre films, the golden era of the 1930s to 1950s produced luminous stars such as actors Dolores del Río, Pedro Arméndariz, actors/crooners Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete, and Maria Félix. They worked with creative geniuses like scriptwriter Mauricio Magdaleno, actor-director Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose work can be admired in “Los olvidados” (1950) and “The Night of the Iguana” (1964).

Gems produced during the golden age entertained audiences with high-quality, formulaic fare that asserted national identity by vindicating the good guys of the revolution, rewarding strong men and honorable women, and demonstrating the values of family, church and nation. Spaniard Luis Buñuel moved to Mexico at age 50 and filmed half of his total filmic production there, including “Los olvidados” (1950) and “Nazarín” (1958). But in 1957, Pedro Infante’s death marked the golden age’s symbolic end and, even though the National Autonomous University opened the country’s first film school, the University Center for Cinematic Studies in 1963, Mexico’s cinema experienced a severe crisis. The quantity and quality of films plunged with successive economic crises and nearly nonexistent public and private funding for films in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Curiously, the loosening of regulations for distribution resulted in the rise of low-cost, relatively low-quality feature-length films, including “spaghetti westerns” filmed along the Mexico-U.S. border, melodramatic romances and other genre films. (The largest collection of Mexican wrestling pictures outside of Mexico is housed in the French archives and has a sort of cult following.)

Genre films like the wrestling pictures and campy horror pics rose in the 1960s, and the 1970s-produced film versions of television soap operas. During the 1970s, quality fare from directors Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo also received positive audience responses, although Ripstein’s psychological, family dramas were always more popular outside of Mexico, especially among intellectuals and film critics.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the viewing public kept coming to see movies, and the cinema’s relative profitability attracted interest. In 1980, a state-sponsored film festival began in Mexico and in 1983, the public, decentralized Mexican Cinema Institute was the first of several institutes of the era dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Mexican film. Quality productions in narrative cinema increased, building up to one of the most sustained phenomena in commercial cinema: the crossover success of “Como agua para chocolate” in 1992, adapted from the novel by Laura Esquivel. It has been an uphill road for a handful and then a steady flow of talent in writing, acting and directing since then.

The internationalization of Mexican cinema  If we look at the history of diversity in Mexican cinema, we see that Mexico has represented ethnic minorities, social misfits and various social class demographics on film throughout its long cinematic history. But when Emilio Fernández, the brilliant actor, screenwriter and director who had worked with John Ford, went to Hollywood to make his mark, and Mexican stars ventured northward, they found themselves trapped in stereotypical parts. Their roles were far more limiting – and xenophobic and racist – than anything presented in the innocuous Mexican family drama or romantic revolutionary drama, which at least were told from Mexican perspectives! Partly, Mexico’s exportation of a managed, massproduced image for tourism beginning around the 1940s can be traced as one influence on the United States’ skewed image of the country’s inhabitants. Massive advertising campaigns targeted the United States as a lover who must be courted by Mexico, which was presented as an exotic land filled with soporific beaches, peasant girls with braids and long skirts (la china poblana), siesta-taking charros, tequila, and exotic regional clothing, food, music, etc., all waiting to seduce her touristic “lover” in a mutual embrace and cash flow. 

By the 1990s, the 1980s Mexican films of melodrama and social protest – which were squelched by government and military pressure – ceded to sophisticated films about everything under the sun. And they were popular abroad – in the United States and in Europe. Stars were exported or formed after emigrating: many know that Dolores del Río acted in Hollywood films, that Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca (Anthony Quinn) was born in Oaxaca of Irish-Mexican-Aztec descent during the Mexican Revolution, or that Ricardo Montalbán came from Mexico City, and everyone knows who Salma Hayek, from Veracruz state, is. Female directors like María Novaro made “Danzón” (1992) and “Sin dejar huella” (2000) and a future star named Guillermo del Toro released “Cronos” (1992).

The ’90s initiated an exciting time that has only gotten better with the rise of directors Alfonso Arau (“Como agua para chocolate”), Carlos Carrera (“El crimen del Padre Amaro”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Amores perros,” “21 Grams,” “Babel”), writers and directors Alfonso and Carlos Cuarón (“Y tu mamá también”), del Toro (“El espinazo del diablo,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”), and actors Gael García Bernal (“Motorcycle Diaries”) and Diego Luna (“Y tu mamá también”), who star in “Rudo y cursi.”

Along with Spain, various Latin American countries such as Argentina, Cuba, Chile, Brazil and Mexico have long cinematic traditions and often, state apparati for education in cinematic arts and film preservation and promotion. But films today are increasingly internationally produced and distributed, and feature local talent. Directors train both in their home countries and at the NYU and UCLA film schools; they develop projects at the Sundance Film Festival, find producers and distributors in Spain and the United States, and exhibit at festivals in Argentina, Cuba, Canada, France and Australia and at universities, where their films find their way onto course syllabi. While Perú, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia develop exciting new directors and collaborative projects, southern Mexico and Guatemala are areas of great documentary cinema projects, and Costa Rica finds itself in a stage of development, as do other nations in Central America and the Caribbean basin.

Teaching diversity through Mexican cinema  So many Latin American countries have produced crossover successes, that often directors like Brazilian Walter Salles (“Central Station,” “Motorcycle Diaries”) and Cuban Humberto Solás, who made “Barrio Cuba” (2005) make us forget predecessors like Glauber Rocha (Brazil) and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Cuba). Alea, called “El Titón” because of his importance to cinema, not only made the excellent 1968 film “Memorias del subdesarrollo,” he also collaborated on the Cuban-Mexican-Spanish production “Fresa y chocolate” (1994), followed by his “Guantanamera” in 1995.

When asked recently about his international success, Carlos Cuarón stressed the need to think globally instead of nationally, saying that the accident of one’s birthplace determines an arbitrary nationality and that “We care about humanities and not nationalities.” The historical continuities and international relationships among films, scripts, actors, production and distribution are inevitable. When students begin to understand the history of production, the directors’ and scriptwriters’ styles and messages, cinematic techniques, and the linguistic, geographic and cultural specifics behind a feature-length narrative film, they begin to engage in acts of cultural pluralism through reacting to and engaging with cinematic language and content.

Some intriguing Mexican films  There are several Mexican films that, while they form a micro-history of Mexican cinema, also teach of diverse directorial styles and themes of gender, social class, ethnicity, and rural and urban identity. As just a few are annotated here, I hope that the reader will seek out some of them to watch while thinking about our parallel development and now, collaborative productions with our neighbors to the south.

“Vámonos con Pancho Villa” and “Allá en el Rancho Grande” (both 1936) and both directed by Fernando de Fuentes. The former is a bold film about the Mexican Revolution and is considered by many one of the most important Mexican films ever made. The latter was one of the original “comedias rancheras” (ranch comedies) and was shot by cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.

“Doña Bárbara” (1943) directed by Fernando de Fuentes and starring María Félix. Based on the novel by Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos, the film traces the trials of an independent, land-owning woman who rises to economic independence in a patriarchal rural sphere. It’s a sort of Mexican precursor to “Johnny Guitar” (1954), but with a more ambiguous ending.

“Los olvidados” (1950) directed by Luis Buñuel and starring Roberto Cobo. Social realism and touches of surrealist imagery characterize this film, which portrays with brutal realism the poverty and destitution plaguing Mexico City’s “forgotten ones.”

“El imperio de la fortuna” (1986) directed by Arturo Ripstein and starring Ernesto Gómez Cruz. This remake of “El gallo de oro” (1964), based on a Juan Rulfo story, uses a melodramatic hero’s failed business prospects as an allegory of the transition from rural, cooperative, domestic life to increased urbanization and mercantilism in mid-century Mexico. In a feminist critique of circumscribed female roles, two generations of women are shown mimicking, performing or mirroring inherited gender identities.

“Amores perros” (2000) directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Gael García Bernal. This film uses a car crash and a ripping soundtrack to tell stories of familial and economic insecurity in the wake of the mid-1990s economic crisis in Mexico.

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Before 1961: Millions flee from East Germany

The armed border was designated by East German officials as a defensive barrier against aggression from the West. In reality, it was a prison wall holding in the eastern population. From the end of World War II through the construction of the wall in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans had fled their homes to the West. That amounted to 20 percent of the nation’s entire population. Those who left included in large numbers the educated, the talented, the religious, the imaginative and the productive members of the society. The effect was a “bleeding to death” of East German society and economy. President Kennedy in his speech in Berlin said, “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.”

1970: Crossing the border

My personal experience of the impact of the imprisonment came in 1970 during the height of the Cold War, when as a young (and probably rather foolhardy) St. Thomas instructor I decided I had to visit and experience East Germany. I went across the border without benefit of any group or organized program. The process of passing through the wall and securing the needed visa was cumbersome but not overly difficult. The full impact of the meaning of the wall for an individual came at the point of leaving again. After 10 days of traveling to East German cities, I returned to the crossing point, was directed to a large waiting room and was instructed to slip my passport into a mail slot for processing. As I sat and waited, gazing alternately at the wall outside the window and my watch, I was struck powerfully by the fact that I was without a passport and quite alone in a country which was a declared enemy of the United States. I was at the mercy of a government with no respect for individual liberty. People had been shot trying to leave this land.

After a tense hour, my passport was returned and I was permitted to leave. I returned to the West with a newfound appreciation of the freedoms we have and the respect for human life, human dignity and privacy we take for granted. I felt a new sense of compassion for those citizens in a captive nation, who had been impounded for 10 years already at that time and would need to wait more than 20 years before they could experience the independence which I was enjoying after re-entering West Berlin.

During my time in the East, I observed many things that were remarkable in contrast to our life in the West. One was the evident suspicion with which people reacted to each other at nearly every encounter. I was struck by hearing a profound silence in crowds and seeing a furtive look of apprehension in conversations. We in the West learned later that the East German secret police, the Stasi, were not only themselves omnipresent but also used a massive number of civilian informants recruited through threats, coercion, promises of favors, job pressure or, in some cases, dedication to the communist cause. It has been estimated that more than one in 10 East German civilians was reporting to the police on any suspicious statements or activities of their co-workers, friends, neighbors and family members. Even children were employed to report on their parents and teachers. University students were pressured into reporting on fellow students and faculty.

Fall 1989: With a hammer and chisel in my hand

My next direct encounter with the wall was, with hammer and chisel in hand, participating in the popular destruction of the divisive structure. During the fall semester of 1989, I held an appointment as visiting professor at the University of Paderborn in West Germany, while on leave from St. Thomas. On the evening news, we had been learning of the massive protests in East Germany and the thousands of people fleeing the country to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. We were quite unprepared, though, for the sudden opening of the border in Berlin. During the evening of Nov. 9, thousands of East Germans poured through the openings of the wall – their first opportunity since Aug. 13, 1961.

As soon as possible my wife, Nancy, and our 16-year-old daughter, Suzanne, and I boarded a train for Berlin to participate in the euphoria permeating the city. We joined the masses chipping away at the wall and anticipating the end of 40 years of isolation and imprisonment. The East German guards on the train ride through East German territory were no longer the gruff, antagonistic, scowling communist guardians of a few weeks earlier but rather were cordial, courteous … and smiling! At the wall we were amazed to see East and West German border guards engaged in friendly conversation over and through what had previously been an impenetrable barrier. Countless numbers of easterners were now passing through the wall and driving far into West Germany in their little “Trabbis” (the East German automobile, officially known as “Trabant”), seeing supermarkets for the first time, experiencing a limitless supply of consumer goods, exulting in the freedom to travel and seeing the attractions of the West they had known only by surreptitiously watching West German television.

The courageous flights to Czechoslovakia and Hungary by thousands of East German citizens along with the protest marches had had their effect. The government in East Germany had been sufficiently weakened so that the long-time leader of the country, Erich Honecker, had been forced to resign on Oct. 18, 1989, and was replaced by the hardliner Egon Krenz. Under pressure from the protesting population and due to a certain degree of confusion, travel to West Berlin was allowed starting on that historic night in an attempt to appease the populace. The opening of the wall resulted not in the calming of the eastern population but rather in the rapid further deterioration of government authority and the successive end of the German Democratic Republic, as the eastern German state had been named.

1990: Fear of another Tiananmen Square massacre

Several months later, shortly after the reunification of the two German states, when I was invited as a lecturer to the University of Leipzig, I experienced firsthand the personal impact of the anti-government demonstrations. The demonstrations in the East had started in Leipzig in September 1989 and then spread to other cities. In Leipzig the demonstrations continued every Monday evening, starting in the Church of St. Nikolai and then spilling into the square near the university where thousands joined in, marching and chanting slogans challenging the government.

In lecture halls and classrooms, as I interacted with very polite, eager and often shy students, I felt a strong sense of respect for them, the very same young people who had shown such remarkable intensity and courage only months before in the Monday demonstrations. They had been fully aware that the demonstrations in China earlier that year had resulted in the massacre at Tiananmen Square in which the military had brutally intervened, resulting in 2,500 deaths and thousands wounded. They had been fully aware that their own government was allied with and supported the actions in China.

There had been military preparations in Leipzig as the demonstrations grew in intensity and size in 1989. Many were convinced that it was only a matter of time before the East German military would follow the Chinese example in dealing with protesters. Many said a (potential) last goodbye to friends and family before going to the demonstrations. On Oct. 9, 1989, the stage was set for a catastrophe as 100,000 took to the streets once again. Due to a number of factors, however, the military did not open fire, and in Leipzig, as in East Germany as a whole, the revolution proceeded and ended without violence.

On Nov. 9, 1989, the wall in Berlin was opened. Free elections were held on March 18, 1990, and the ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party, lost its majority. On Oct. 3, 1990, East Germany joined and was assimilated into the unified Federal Republic of Germany. In 1991, the German parliament voted to establish the capital of the new republic in its historic location in Berlin. (During the Cold War, the West German capital was located in Bonn.)

2009: 20th-Anniversary Celebration

During the early ’90s, I returned several times to lecture at the University of Leipzig and the University of Freiberg in the east, as a participant in integrating easternuniversities into the united German university system, and I took great pleasure in working with students at those universities.

During the first week of November, I will be pleased to support and join with students at the University of St. Thomas in a project organized by our German Club in remembrance and celebration of the 20th anniversary of the opening and end of the Berlin Wall and in remembrance of the courage and determination of East Germans whose personal risks and actions succeeded in bringing about a new way of life. The event, “Freedom Without Walls,” is part of a national program in this anniversary year and is supported by the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Celebrating Freedom Without Walls by Meran Kreibich ’11, St. Thomas German Club president

“This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” This spray-painted quite caught President Ronald Regan’s attention when he first gazed upon the Berlin Wall in 1987. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall will be celebrated November 2-9 on the University of St. Thomas campus and all over the world.

The German Embassy in Washington, D.C., has created a national celebration, Freedom Without Walls, designed specifically for college campuses. St. Thomas is one of only 30 universities nationally and the only Minnesota institution to receive a grant from the embassy, thanks to Paul Schons, Modern and Classical Languages Department.

The Freedom Without Walls Celebration at St. Thomas will be sponsored by the German Club. Activities will include a re-creation of the Berlin Wall, a gala and a YouTube contest in which students can create videos impersonating speeches made by world leaders at the time of the fall of the wall.

The gala, with a traditional German meal and remarks by people who were affected by the fall of the wall, will be held at the Germanic-American Institute, 301 Summit Avenue, St. Paul. The gala is open to the public.

The German Club aims to connect this historical anniversary event to the present -day issues through education and celebration. As Reagan said, “We welcome change and openness, for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”

For more information about these events, visit the Facebook sire for “Freedom Without Walls” and search “events, ” or send an e-mail to mgkreibich@stthomas.edu.

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The Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James) is a series of pilgrimage routes that begin in different places and follow unique itineraries, though all have as their destination Santiago de Compostela, a city located in the Galicia region in northwest Spain. It is here, in the cathedral, that the remains of St. James, the first martyred apostle, are believed to rest. Nearly a quarter million travelers make the pilgrimage along this UNESCO World Heritage Site annually.

An exhibit titled “Sacred Steps on the Camino“ – April 14-May 29 at St. Thomas – depicts travelers’ experiences specifically along the Camino francés, or French Way, the route which is both most historically significant (with clear documentation dating from the 12th century) and most followed today. Traditionally beginning in France, this route enters Spain through the Pyrenees, passes through Pamplona (where there’s no need to run from bulls), crosses the winemaking region of La Rioja, continues to the cities of Burgos and León with their renowned Gothic cathedrals and traverses the fruited Valley of the Bierzo before finally stretching on to Santiago. Though travelers may join the route at any point along its approximately 500 miles, those who cover the final 62 miles on foot or the final 124 miles on bike or horseback receive an official compostela certificate.

The 39 pieces of art that make up the exhibit depict much of the physical reality of the regions of Spain through which the Camino moves. Inevitably, though, the works also reveal something of the history of these lands and of the culture of their inhabitants as experienced by eight pilgrim artists. Herein lies one of the principal motivators for bringing the exhibit, administered by the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C., to the St. Thomas campus.

One of the core curricular areas in which all St. Thomas students demonstrate knowledge is language and culture, and the majority do so in the Spanish language and its related cultures. Many students, including hundreds of majors and minors, then do advanced study in Spanish civilization, culture, language and literature. This exhibit helps to illustrate concepts touched upon in this coursework and, at the same time, inspires students to explore other lands, languages and cultures. Many may feel drawn to Spain, where some 70 St. Thomas students study each year, both through programs in Seville and Málaga directed by UST’s Modern and Classical Languages Department and through affiliated programs; still others may choose one of the myriad options offered throughout the world through the university’s International Education Center.

Pilgrimage, of course, is not merely a physical journey. As the exhibit’s photos and paintings reveal, it is also an intensely spiritual experience. The installation also resonates with the university’s emphasis on faith and the Catholic tradition, another core area of all students’ coursework and a field commonly researched by St. Thomas faculty. For example, Dr. Jane Tar, associate professor of Spanish, recently spent part of her sabbatical studying and writing about the Convent of Santa Clara, founded along the Camino de Santiago in the 13th century, and about its visionary abbess, Luisa de la Ascención.

Though traditionally a Catholic pilgrimage route and maintained by thousands of Catholic laity and clergy, the Camino nevertheless offers “reassurance and transformation” to those of all faiths, says Dr. George Greenia, the exhibit’s curator and frequent traveler along the Camino (he has logged some 1,500 miles on foot and another 2,000 by bike). Greenia, professor of Hispanic studies at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., will give a talk, “Camino de Santiago: Pilgrimage, Medieval and Modern,“ on April 17 at St. Thomas. (See calendar on Page 23.) A reception to open the exhibit follows, featuring Spanish food, music, and a chance to view the artwork and speak with Greenia. All events are free and open to the public, thanks to generous support from the Xacobeo Foundation, the Xunta de Galicia, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities, and St. Thomas’ College of Arts and Sciences and departments of Modern and Classical Languages and Art History.

For more information on the exhibit and the Camino de Santiago, please visit www.sacredstepsinspain.com and www.xacobeo.es.

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In 2001 St. Thomas received a generous five-year, almost $2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. as part of a nationwide effort to stimulate a theological exploration of the idea of vocation on college campuses. As Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas, commented when the grant was announced, this initiative “will allow members of our university to consider deeply the meaning and mission of their lives.”

So far “Beyond Career to Calling,” as St. Thomas’ Lilly program is titled, has funded more than 30 different projects on campus in a wide variety of departments and disciplines. They include the vocation of professional women, life values in medicine, law students serving the marginalized, team-teaching theology “bridge courses” such as Theology and Politics, and engaging first-year students in St. Thomas’ urban mission.

“Beyond Career to Calling” differs from similarly funded Lilly programs at other campuses because its framework is decentralized, that is, faculty and staff propose, then direct, individual projects tailored to their department or discipline. “Beyond Career to Calling” is coordinated by Dr. Mary Reichardt, Catholic Studies and English departments. Here are three recently funded projects.

Vocation in Action: Design of a Breadfruit Shredder for Haiti

By Dr. Camille George, engineering, and Dr. Ashley Shams, Classical Languages

One interdisciplinary project, funded by the Ireland Grant for New Initiatives (one part of the Lilly Grant), involved St. Thomas’ engineering and French students in helping women’s cooperatives in Haiti harvest breadfruit for use as a flour substitute in making breakfast bars for school children.

Breadfruit, a naturally occurring food in Haiti, spoils quickly in that highly humid environment. With Dr. Camille George’s mentorship, St. Thomas’ engineering students designed a manual device to shred fresh breadfruit evenly. The breadfruit is then sun-dried, and the resulting dried shreds have a shelf life of up to a year.

With Dr. Ashley Shams’ mentorship, St. Thomas’ French students then created appropriate visuals for the Haitian users of this breadfruit shredder to understand and maintain that technology. The final design for the “Tommie Shredder” was produced by a graduate student in manufacturing engineering and will be delivered along with the culturally appropriate manuals developed by the French students to Haiti very soon.

St. Thomas’ mission to “Challenge Yourself (and) Change Our World” is especially evident in this project. Developing appropriate sustainable technology and helping ensure that the users can work with it effectively provided a meaningful context and objective for students in both major fields to anchor their academic learning. Most importantly, the project helped foster a theological sense of vocation in the students’ lives. The engineering students understood that their skills can be channeled toward creating a world in which every citizen has adequate food and water and access to a renewable energy supply. The French students used their language skills in an authentic service context while working alongside other professionals. For both sets of students, the experience gained from this project broadened their understanding of work as a calling as well as their awareness of cultural and global issues.

Vocation and the Christian Intellectual: A Faculty Reading Group

By Dr. John Boyle, Theology

This ongoing project, funded by the initial Lilly grant, gives faculty the opportunity to reflect on the vocation of the Christian intellectual in a small group setting and through discussion of works of literature. While participants have varied from year to year the group generally numbers about a dozen and meets weekly during the semester. So far, our discussions have centered on Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being, Augustine’s City of God, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and, this year, Plato’s Republic.

The overarching goal of the discussions is to encourage faculty to think afresh about what drew them to the life of the mind in the first place and to renew a sense of their vocation as Christian teachers and scholars. Over the years, many participants have commented on how refreshing it is to have time to discuss with colleagues serious ideas in a sustained manner – too often a rarity in academic life. Many of these conversations spill out into corridors and faculty offices throughout the week.

Some participants in the discussion group teach the books in their classes; most do not. Nonetheless, our readings affect our teaching in that they serve to give new shape to ideas discussed in the classroom and provoke us to think anew about how these ideas can be more effectively communicated.

The life of the mind ought not be an isolated affair. These faculty discussions on the vocation of the Christian intellectual have helped foster a sense of the intellectual life as a shared enterprise, one first shared with our faculty colleagues and then with our students.

Computers and Callings: The Vocation of the Computer Professional

By Dr. Carole Bagley, Quantitative Methods and Computer Science

During the 2004-05 academic year, I directed a program funded by the Ireland Grant for New Initiatives that focused on interdisciplinary computer careers and on viewing one’s computer-related profession as a vocation. I was assisted in the implementation of the program by Dr. Mari Heltne. The program invited a series of guest speakers to campus, with follow-up student discussion sessions. These events were then capped by a student writing contest.

Each invited speaker works in a field where an interdisciplinary approach to work is required, and each understands his or her job as a “calling,” that is, as work that goes beyond merely bringing home a paycheck.

The presenters and topics included Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, professor of computer science at St. John’s University, who spoke on artificially intelligent computers and their theological impact; Curt Melzer, an attorney and CIO of Dorsey and Whitney law firm, who discussed his passion for working with computers in a law practice; Greg Johnson, director of channel management at Thrivent Industries, who presented on the importance of climate in an organization and how professionals can make a difference in the world through their work; Jon Giftakis, senior scientist in neurological therapy research at Medtronic, who spoke on a model for “calling” that a company can instill in its employees; and Dr. Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Research Lab, who discussed working with passion for what you love.

A week after each guest presentation, the Computer Science Club sponsored a student discussion facilitated by a professor. These discussions were open to all students with an interest in pairing computer science, information systems or quantitative methods with another discipline of study. They focused on issues related to the presentation, and specifically on matters of theological vocation and calling in the computer field. Finally, students had the opportunity to submit essays on the topic of computer science as a vocation for a prize.