College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University
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Book Review: Violence and Nonviolence: Conceptual Excursions into Phantom Opposites
Get PDFThe reader is first struck by the immense bibliography of the author, Peyman Vahabzadeh. The author is well-acquainted with both the relevant peace studies literature and philosophy. In addition he has a section where he comments on two of Tolstoy’s short stories “Ezarhaddon of Assyria” and The Three Questions.”
The fundamental strength of this book is its character as a literature review of the topic from a philosophic perspective. Its fundamental weakness is its character as a literature review of the topic from a philosophic perspective. The book contains so many brilliant examples of people who have written and talked about violence and nonviolence that it is easy for the reader to get lost and neglect the overall thesis of the author
Memorializing the Work of Bishop Cornelius Korir in Advancing Grassroots Peacebuilding in Kenya: Perspectives on Amani Mashinani
Get PDFThis special commemoration feature of Journal of Social Encounters focuses on the work of the late Bishop Cornelius Korir in advancing grassroots peacebuilding in North Rift region of Kenya. Bishop Korir is credited for developing a grassroots peacebuilding model popularly known as Amani Mashinani (Peace at the Grassroots) which brings together warring communities to collectively participate in activities geared at promoting peace. In this context, grassroots peacebuilding is understood in the same vein as locally led peacebuilding which is “an approach in which the people involved in, and most affected by, violent conflict work together to create and enact their own solution to prevent, reduce, and/or transform the conflict, with the support they desire from outsiders” (Locally Driven Peacebuiding, 2015).
We memorialize this work in ways it embraces strategies for survival and co-existence among diverse ethnic groups, and has emancipatory potential to show “why and how locally led peacebuilding can add value and, importantly, make the world more peaceful” (Connaughton & Berns, 2020, p. 3)
Defend the Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom beyond the First Amendment
No full textA webinar presentation by Michael D. McNally, Ph.D., moderated by Barbara McGraw, Ph.D
CSB/SJU Class of 2020 Commencement Celebration
No full text“Welcome back to campus. Welcome back to that commencement ceremony you couldn’t have in 2020. Welcome back for that in-person event you deserve.”
That’s how Saint John’s University Transitional President James Mullen greeted the roughly 425 members of the Class of 2020 at SJU and the College of Saint Benedict who returned to campus on Saturday, Sept. 11 to take part in their long-delayed in-person commencement celebration.
The total number of graduates on-hand represented more than half of the full 2020 class at the two schools.
And, for many, it marked their first time returning to CSB/SJU since students were sent home in March of 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The class had to complete its remaining coursework remotely, separated and scattered across the state, nation and even the world.
“This is the first time a lot of you have been back on either of these campuses since hurriedly packing your bags in March of 2020,” CSB Transitional President Laurie Hamen said. “A lot has changed since then. But I can tell you with confidence that the heart of Saint Ben’s and Saint John’s remains the same.”
That heart shown through during Saturday’s ceremony, including in the remarks delivered by the two students chosen as speakers
“When I first was notified that I was being invited back to speak, I had no idea what I was going to stand in front of you all and say,” CSB student speaker Lauren Simonet told her assembled classmates. “The fact of the matter is the time has come and gone for congratulations. In the 19 months since campus closed, and we were sent home in the middle of March of our senior year, we’ve changed.
“We went from bright-eyed undergrads with a few months of college (still to come) to navigating a postgraduate and pandemic-wrought world as young adults waving a resume in hand.
“But we did it. We graduated.”
Simonet told her classmates to embrace the changes in the world around them, even as some things will always remain constant.
“Once a Bennie or a Johnnie, always a Bennie or a Johnnie,” she said. “Those things never change. The good stuff never does.”
Saint John’s student speaker Owyn Ferguson spoke of the unique challenges he and his classmates have faced finishing college and entering the professional world at the height of a global pandemic.
“Suddenly every plan for the remainder of the school year collapsed,” Ferguson said. “Every postgrad aspiration became insecure and the entire notion of becoming an adult became more jarring than it ever had before.”
But Ferguson praised his class’s resilience in overcoming those obstacles.
“What I find so astounding is that in the face of these difficulties, in the face of hopelessness, and in the face of the worst global health and economic crisis of our lifetime, more than 90 percent of you secured placement in jobs, volunteer corps, military service, graduate programs or even launched your own businesses,” he said
A Virtual ELISA to Quantitate COVID-19 Antibodies in Patient Serum
No full textEnzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs) are used widely in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and clinical medicine labs. At the same time, they appear to be underrepresented in chemistry and biochemistry curricula, even though their sensitivity, selectivity, and ease of use would argue for their widespread use. We describe here an online ELISA activity suitable for stand-alone use or in conjunction with an actual wet lab ELISA. Specifically, we offer real and mock data for a hypothetical ELISA to detect plasma antibodies to COVID-19 in infected patients who have had the disease. Much of the activity focuses on chemical and mathematical models to fit ELISA or any macromolecule/ligand binding data, a skill that addresses perhaps the most relevant and difficult learning goal of an ELISA experiment
Do We Image God On-Line?: The Opportunities and Challenges for Authentic Relationships in Cyberspace
No full textGenesis 1 states that we are created in the image of God. While Biblical scholars have taken a performative approach, viewing God\u27s image in our actions, systematic theologians have viewed God\u27s image in relational terms. Thus, the quality of our relationships is crucial, not only for the health of our day to day lives but for our very identity. What makes a relationship authentic? Karl Barth suggests four criteria: that we look the other in the eye, speak to and hear the other, aid the other, and do it gladly. We look first at how our authentic relationships function to make God present among us and then use Barth\u27s criteria to examine the quality of relationships that exist primarily in cyberspace. Social media, in particular, present unique opportunities and challenges for forming authentic relationships and raise fundamental questions about who we are and where God is found among us
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: A Glimpse Into the Theme of Righteousness Through the Anthropology, Theology, and Spirituality of the Psalms
No full textDescription: This paper was written for the Prayer in the Bible class taught by Father Laszlo Simon in the summer of 2016. The assignment was to compose an exegetical paper of the student’s choosing between four options. The option chosen for this paper was based on the Theological anthropology of the Psalms and to identify the ways in which the psalms resonate spirituality and theology
Book Review: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Get PDFNothing ever dies. Not the memories of war, not its trauma, not its controversies--and not the hope that we can one day extricate our present from our traumatic pasts in order to create a more peaceful future. This hope threads through Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. The book is about war, identity, and memory, Nguyen tells us. His goal is to “beat….hearts back to life.” Our hearts, the hearts of the generations wounded, in different ways and to different extents, by war