A Global Partnership Initiative of the Jesuit Schools Network
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ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY HIGH ROUNDTABLE ON CRISIS IN UKRAINE
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On March 10, the SLUH One World Club, a student-led club focused on examining global issues and international events, organized a roundtable discussion on the current crisis in Ukraine.
The roundtable featured six expert speakers, three of whom are SLUH alumni. Each speaker focused on a different aspect of this crisis as the goal was to educate students, humanize the situation and mobilize the community to take action for peace. After the initial presentation, there was a Q and A session for those in person, as well as for those who joined the meeting via Zoom.
The video can be used across the network to help set the context and define action steps for the crisis in Ukraine.
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To find out more about the religious landscape of Ukraine, listen to the AMDG podcast from the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States with guest Pavlo Smytsnyuk, director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. He talks about the religious makeup of the country and the religious responses to the war.
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As we recognize that chronic issues often impact BIPOC members of the global community, we are once more sadly reminded that migration, regardless of ethnicity, is impacted by war from conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, and now in Ukraine.
In our senior elective class, Global Perspectives, and our Christian Service classes, we have been learning about the stories of migrants from around the world, addressing several factors of migration as well as those most often affected by chronic conditions. We see how human migration results from conditions that impact the entire world including an understanding of how rising water levels impact impoverished communities in Bangladesh to the Root Causes Initiative and the push/pull conditions in Central America to the faces of DACA to the ecological concerns around building a wall along the Rio Grande through the cinematic documentary “The River and the Wall.”
We also watch “El Comedor,” directed by Paul Durrant, an alumnus of St. Joseph’s Prep. The short documentary details the kitchen operations of the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) operating through both Nogales, Arizona, as well as Nogales, Mexico, to feed migrants recently deported from the United States. However, recent changes in U.S. immigration policies have altered KBI’s mission to now provide food, clothing and health care for migrants arriving from the south rather than migrants being deported from the U.S. Our students learn about one such policy that was revived from the 1940s. Title 42 has largely closed the border even to asylum seekers during the pandemic, and our students are given the opportunity to learn about those changes and join a Jesuit petition to reopen the border to migrants. We follow this up with a trip for 18 students to the borderlands in conjunction with Borderlinks and No More Deaths to learn firsthand about impacts of migration through the Sonoran Desert on both the Arizona and Mexico side of the border as well as the Indigenous Tohono O’odham people in the region.
We recognize March as Women’s History Month with St. Frances Xavier Cabrini as the first U.S. born female canonized as patron saint of immigrants, as well as the upcoming feast of St. Joseph, the patron saint of migrants. We pray for those migrants in all locations of every cause. For a compilation of prayers for migrants, we have used Education for Justice for many resources.
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WALKING WITH THE EXCLUDED
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The sole focus of Jesuit education has never been academic excellence alone. Rather, combining academic prowess with action — especially in service to others less fortunate — is the goal. Merging academic achievement with this broader sense of service helps shape students who meet the criteria of the Graduate at Graduation. The COVID-19 pandemic limited some of St. Xavier High School’s best service opportunities: its mission trips and exchange programs.
As a result, I started a Fe y Alegría club and a big brother tutoring program for St. Xavier Advanced Placement Spanish Language and Culture students during the summer of 2021. The tutoring program featured virtual instructional sessions via Microsoft Teams. AP candidates were paired with Peruvian grade-school students from the Jesuit Fe y Alegría School #81 in the small, rural town of Paita in northern Peru. The Peruvian students were identified by their teachers as individuals who could benefit academically from specialized attention.
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The AP candidates experienced their course content through real-world civic engagement. The personal one-on-one service-learning approach enabled them to develop new skills, including knowledge and understanding of third-world realities and the impact of COVID-19 on the poor. They enhanced academic skills like Spanish vocabulary, conversation, cultural understanding and interpersonal connections. They applied the Spanish language and Latin American cultural knowledge they acquired in their coursework to local and global realities through innovation, creativity and critical thinking.
Jesuit Superior General Arturo Sosa said, “The universal apostolic preferences are a call to conversion. They are an invitation to rethink how we live, how we work and how we relate to the people we serve.” We Jesuit educators are called to build the connections that put those expectations for its students into practice.
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JESUIT BORDER PODCAST AND STUDY GUIDE
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Louie Hotop, SJ, and Brian Strassburger, SJ, are a pair of recently ordained Jesuits missioned to the diocese of Brownsville, Texas, to work in the Rio Grande Valley along the U.S.-Mexico border. As a pair of new arrivals, they want to share what they're learning and what they’ve witnessed in their everyday ministry with migrants. This is the inspiration for The Jesuit Border Podcast, which consists of weekly episodes that highlight stories from their ministry on the border. Fr. Brian and Fr. Louie have also created a study guide for the first season of The Jesuit Border Podcast that can easily be used in a classroom or parish setting.
The podcast is a mixture of storytelling, fact sharing and theological reflection, and each episode also features an interview with someone involved in the humanitarian response to the on-the-ground reality. The objective is to approach the border from a Catholic perspective and shed light on the tremendous humanitarian response through the experiences of the people who walk with migrants day after day. You can listen to the podcast and find the study guide at The Jesuit Post or wherever you get your podcasts.
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WALKING IN MERCY YOUTH SUMMIT
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The Kino Border Initiative (KBI) Education team, along with Kino Teen chapters from five high schools throughout the state of Arizona, convened February 12 at Salpointe Catholic High School in Tucson for our 7th annual Walking in Mercy summit.
The program included a virtual chat about asylum with migrants in Nogales, Mexico; breakout sessions to learn more about immigration law; trainings on how to raise awareness on campus; celebration of the Holy Eucharist; and more.
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Among the participants was Daniel Martinez Romero, a second-generation immigrant and a junior at Brophy College Preparatory in Phoenix.
“After attending my first Walking in Mercy I only wish it could’ve gone on longer,” he said. “My mother says, ‘Si Dios conmigo, ¿quién contra mí?’ Although I feel like my ear could fall off from hearing it so much, it’s true. God calls us to be agents of change. When I looked around me, I saw just that. I remember going up to share my testimony. My palms were sweaty. My hands were shaking. My knees were weak. Yet, something kept me going. Our words hold immense power. Any chance I get to project the divine, I do it. It was an honor. I ended my speech with a commitment to enact change.”
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JOIN JRS IN SUPPORTING UKRAINIAN REFUGEES
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Jesuit Refugee Service continues to monitor the situation in Europe as the countries surrounding Ukraine respond to those fleeing the war and violence. We invite you to join us in prayer, as we pray for peace during this troubled time. Please invite your community to remember Ukraine and its people in their prayers as we journey through the season of Lent.
In the meantime, as my colleagues in Poland, Hungary and Romania continue to assess needs, we are raising funds to support the work of JRS Europe and its response. Here is the most recent statement from JRS Europe on its response to accompany Ukrainian refugees. Your community can support JRS Europe by visiting this page. For further information about the situation, please visit our resource page here: Crisis in Ukraine.
JRS/USA is also urging the US Department of State and USAID to support local organizations providing relief to Ukrainians within their country and beyond. Congress should appropriate the funds needed to support UNHCR’s emergency response efforts. You can encourage your community to TAKE ACTION here.
Please reach out to Josh Utter with any questions.
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SHARING THE WHOLE STORY: TEACHING THE COMPLEX HISTORY AND LEGACY OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
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A few years ago, Dr. Katrina Thompson Moore, an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University, was helping her niece prepare for a high school social studies test on the U.S. Civil War era. Because Dr. Moore’s area of study is the institution of slavery, she could offer her niece insight beyond what she was learning in the textbook. Unfortunately, the teacher wasn’t interested in anything beyond the textbook, which referred to enslaved people as “immigrant workers.”
Dr. Moore’s niece learned a lesson that day, but she didn’t learn the truth about slavery, at least not in the classroom.
“High school students know very little about the institution of slavery,” Dr. Moore says. “What they do know is a version I call ‘Gone with the Wind’ slavery — very idealized and romanticized, but it’s not the truth. Not telling the truth causes problems. History is something to learn from. Not to feel guilty about, but to realize the complexity of humans and our history.”
To present the truth of slavery, Dr. Moore worked with Dr. Ron Rebore, the provincial assistant for secondary and presecondary education (PASE) for the Jesuits USA Central and Southern (UCS) Province, and the staff at the Jesuits’ Slavery, History, Memory and Reconciliation Project (SHMR) to come up with a program for the high schools in the UCS Province. Originally envisioned as an in-person workshop, Drs. Rebore and Moore pivoted over the summer to offer a five-week, 10-presentation virtual program called Sharing the Whole Story: Teaching the Complex History and Legacy of American Slavery.
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Frank Kovarik, an English teacher and the director of equity and inclusion at St. Louis University High School, attended the virtual workshop along with 40 other Jesuit educators across the country. He offered this reflection:
“Sharing the Whole Story was an amazing opportunity to sit with the profound reality of slavery and to reflect on its pervasiveness and multidimensionality. On the first day of the workshop, Steve Schoenig, SJ, talked about the ‘radiating ripples of sin,’ a great phrase to describe what this challenging workshop asked us participants to consider. We began with the ripples that, in a sense, are most immediately relevant to those of us working in Jesuit apostolates, learning about the history of Jesuit slaveholding and situating that sin within the context of how the Church itself was complicit and even culpable in the evil of slavery. From there the workshops broadened out to encompass the history of slavery in the United States and across the globe (including today’s slavery, in which over 40 million are ensnared, more than at any time in human history!). At the same time, the workshop also gave us the tools to move beyond guilt and despair. We learned about the compatibility between Catholic moral theology and the antiracist movement, we saw powerful examples of resistance and courage by the enslaved, and we were given concrete and inspiring models of how to teach students about slavery in a way that can lead them to a hope-filled future.”
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EDUCATE MAGIS INTRODUCES GLOBAL INTER-RELIGIOUS PRAYERS AND REFLECTIONS
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To support educators and students to confidently grow in faith through prayer, we introduce the new Global Inter-Religious Prayer and Reflection Page. On this page, teachers in our global community can find various prayers for different occasions. The prayers and reflections can be filtered by different languages.
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SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE VERSIONS OF "OUR GLOBAL DIMENSION" INFOGRAPHIC NOW AVAILABLE
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This graphic resource is now also available as a key tool for Jesuit schools in Latin America and Spain. FLACSI and EDUCSI have made this possible, to offer schools in their regions the opportunity to explore their global dimension and interculturality. |
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REVISION: BUILDING FIELD HOSPITALS: DISCERNING NEW DIRECTIONS TO LEARNING FOR TOMORROW'S JESUIT SCHOOLS
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The primary purpose of theological education has been to shape and mold within young people the contours of faith, a life-long process that can forge important pathways toward meaning and hope — especially during life’s most challenging moments. However, in today’s complex world, it can oftentimes be difficult for young people to find meaning and hope, particularly in organized religion and through the study of theology. Traditional approaches to learning have historically struggled to provide an adequate response to the contemporary needs and interests of its students. Offering students authentic encounters of faith through the lens of their own context has the real potential to deepen their reflection on and experience of themselves, their peers, their world, and ultimately of Jesus Christ — in and through the process of theological education.
During the Fall semester my sophomore Biblical Studies students at Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, read Old Testament accounts of Israel’s oppression in Egypt, God’s liberative justice, and the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering in the Sinai Desert as refugees in search of a land they could call their own. To gain a greater sense of the Israelites’ experience centuries ago, my class examined current experiences of migrants and refugees in Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and those at the border between Poland and Belarus. They then situated themselves at the frontlines of one of these contemporary crises by developing comprehensive proposals for sustainable emergency refugee camps, which would be presented to a Regional Director of Jesuit Refugee Service or the United Nations Refugee Agency (above). The project’s prompt — along with a competency-based rubric and resources for supporting students’ collaboration, research, reflection and revision — can be accessed here.
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Tag your social media posts with #jesuitschools and share your global journeys in & out of the classroom.
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Programs, Events and Initiatives |
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THEOLOGY OF HEALING EARTH IN ACTION (THEA) SUMMER INSTITUTE 2022 AT LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO
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“In 2017, I had the unique opportunity to gather with high school students from across the country in an innovative program centered around theology and environmental sustainability. As a first-generation college student, being part of THEA provided me with the opportunity to explore a deeper understanding of my faith while learning to care for the Earth. As a Cristo Rey alumna, I believe that this program is an amazing opportunity for high school youth to begin exploring topics that spark their curiosities and doing work that fuels their passions.” — Luz Castrejon, Arrupe Jesuit High School ’18, Loyola University Chicago ’22
The THEA Summer Institute 2022 will take place June 19-25, 2022 on Loyola University Chicago’s beautiful Lake Shore Campus. The application deadline is April 1. For more information visit our website or contact Claire Soupene.
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HEARTBROKEN: A PRAYER FOR UKRAINE
Please remember Ukraine and its people in your prayers as we journey through the season of Lent. We invite you to pray for peace with this prayer from Jesuit Refugee Service.
Our hearts are broken.
Broken by aggression, and violence, and the politics that pursue power and ignore people.
Be with the people, Lord.
Be with peacemakers.
Be with those who are fleeing to safety — mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers.
Be with those welcoming them to safety.
Lord, we ask for peace, for healing of this brokenness, for hope in a world that is strengthened by fraternal bonds.
Amen.
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The Jesuit Schools Network promotes the educational ministry of the Society of Jesus in service to the Catholic Church by strengthening Jesuit schools for the mission of Jesus Christ. |
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