Becoming a Peacemaker A CUAC Global Online Seminar
Blessed are the peacemakers, said Jesus, but where do we begin? Sixty four educators from nine countries met virtually in January for a 75-minute exploration of this subject – in a world torn by violence in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa, to mention only the most publicized hotspots of the moment.
What quickly emerged is that the experience of CUAC institutions varies from those where students and faculty literally have had to dodge bullets (as was the case not so long ago in Liberia) to those where violence is sporadic (directed, for example, against Christian and other minorities in India) to those where the battlefields seem mercifully far away.
A common theme was that teaching today has to take place against a background that requires lessons in containing this violence and practicing peacekeeping -- a new curriculum, so to speak, on top of the environmental concerns that already seem so urgent among the young.
Seminar moderator the Revd Dr Jeremy Law (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) said that in asking what kind of person we want to produce in a graduate – what “attributes” – becoming such a peacemaker ought to rank high. He cited the Hebrew greeting Shalom as even more resonant than the English “peace” in that it suggests “a new reality that does not abolish difference but encompasses well-being in every dimension.”
For Fenulah Hepzi G, a second-year student at Women’s Christian College (Chennai, India), studying peace education and conflict resolution has clarified the contrast between peace and passivity – “staying quiet and avoiding the problem just doesn’t work.” She warned of careless passing on of misinformation from the media because “it leads to unintended conflicts.” She deplored the number of lives lost already in Gaza, a situation where the failure to respect human rights has led to unnecessary violence.
Asked by the Revd Nita Byrd (St. Augustine’s University, North Carolina USA) who had been her greatest inspirations, she said Gandhi and the Revd Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jefferson Massah (Liberia) added that, in the absence of peace, “achievement of development to move society forward is difficult to achieve.”
Diplomat Elias B. Shoniyin, Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Director of Conflict Resolution at Cuttington University (Liberia) – an institution whose campus was destroyed in the civil wars of the 1989-2003 – said that the discussion was “personal, not academic” for him. “If you don’t address the sources, the likelihood of a return to conflict is very high.” This requires outreach to communities where the potential for conflict exists and preventive measures to end such conflicts before they can spread. Peacemaking, in other words, requires peace-building. And where there is no justice, he said, there will be no peace.
Dr Mark Gearan, who was Director of the US Peace Corps in 1995-99 and has been President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY) for 20 years, said his college’s mission was “to prepare students to lead a life of consequence.”
“We urge them to think through on a personal level what a life of consequence is, and at the heart of that is peace-making.” The fact that 60 percent of his students study abroad at some point helps them make this challenge real – in the spirit of the Peace Corps’s goal of “bringing the world back home.”
Julie Nalubwama said that peace “has to be built from the bottom up – an incremental process – one brick at a time.”
She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Otago (New Zealand) who has been studying resilience in faith communities in South Sudan, where there has been 14 years of multi-ethnic, multi-religious conflict. She recommended starting by recognizing “the need to improve inter-personal relationships in our own institutions -- charity begins at home!” Conflict is neutral in itself, she said, and we all have a right to have different opinions. The crucial point is respect, which involves trying to understand the other person.
“There are no small things in peace-building,” she said, “hence the importance of eating meals together.”
Leadership in such matters begins at the top – “the Good Shepherd who can direct and re-direct us,” in the spirit of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5). “Truth, justice, freedom, love – if these pillars are lacking,” she concluded, “it will all collapse.”
Peace, said Nita Byrd in her opening prayer, is “often a lonely traveler on a road with no end in sight.” Perhaps one lesson of the seminar is that the Anglican Communion and its CUAC institutions need to find creative ways to sustain young people on their march down that long road.
Charles Calhoun
New CUAC Chair Reflects on Her Calling
Like the heads of other CUAC institutions, Principal Lilian Jasper fills her days with staff meetings, receptions, conference calls, fundraising events, grant-writing, and long-range strategy sessions. But she also does one thing quite likely unique in the annals of Anglican higher education. She takes her Women’s Christian College faculty, students, and staff into the jungles of South India.
Far from the construction cranes of booming Chennai, she introduces them to an older India whose flora and fauna inspire her own strong environmentalism and where they can learn more about the native peoples of the Western Ghats, the mountain range that anchors the peninsula and is a biological hotspot.
This eagerness to explore is just one facet of the leadership skills of this extraordinary woman who at the Melbourne Triennial last July was named Chair of CUAC ‘s Board of Trustees. Modesty and reticence are other features of her character, though she was persuaded to tell the Board something of her own life story. Her Indaba – defined as “a serious talk about an important subject” – began with a prayerful evocation of Hebrews 13:20: May God “equip you with everything good that you may do His will.” It is God who equips the call, she insisted, not yourself.
“I’m from a very conservative and traditional South Indian family. They are people who wanted me to be a teacher or a doctor, then get married and raise children,” she explained. When she persisted in her graduate studies, her father asked “What on earth is she doing?”
“Fortunately my mother was very progressive and wanted me to explore the fartherest I could go and that is how I managed to complete my Ph.D. when I was 30 years old.” Her thesis was on game theory – not bad training for a college president!
“I gave birth to my second child the same year I completed the Ph.D. I was rocking the cradle with one hand and writing my thesis with the other.”
A United Board fellowship in 2007-8 allowed her to study higher education in the Philippines and at Randolph Macon College in Virginia as well as attend a three-week leadership training program at Harvard. Other leadership forums followed in China and Singapore.
Well prepared for running a college with a global perspective, Dr Jasper in 2017 became WCC’s Principal, its chief executive officer. “God was preparing and molding a reluctant person to head this institution! I’m a very diffident and retiring person who enjoys working in the background.”
She said she finds her strength in her memories of her grandmother and great-aunt who headed Christian institutions in the 1960s, a pioneering decade for Indian women in the professions – “they were a great influence on my life.”
Interviewed more recently by Zoom in her Chennai office, Dr Jasper discussed some of the challenges facing Anglican higher education today.
Asked about a New York Times article (Jan. 30, 2024) that American students are feeling anxious and disillusioned, with a recent survey revealing that only 15 percent of them said their mental health was good, she said she did not think the situation was that bad in India. Still, students there do seem “more fragile, liable to become upset more easily, lacking in life skills.” There’s pressure to excel in India’s burgeoning economy and in some instances less family support, which means the college needs to provide more services.
That India now has a prosperous and growing middle class “doesn’t mean there aren’t any poor.” In fact the demography of students has changed from the days when they were mostly upper middle class, she said. “Today there are many students from extremely difficult circumstances. These students know their families’ hopes are placed on them. They will be the first college graduates in the family.”
Dr Jasper finds a sustaining hope in her favorite academic subject – eco-literature. Taking students to the wild places of South India, she says, teaches them things they won’t find in the traditional texts, things that could change their lives. Charles Calhoun
Trinity University of Asia
Breaks Service-Learning Record
Prof Divino L. Cantal Jr reports from Manila: 54 students from eight different CUAC institutions across four countries in Asia participated in CUAC’s annual two-week International Service-Learning program, February 5-16, hosted by Trinity University of Asia (TUA) – the largest number of participants to date.
Students from Japan comprised the biggest number of attendees, with Rikkyo University sending 14, St. Luke’s International University nine, and Momoyama Gakuin University of Education four. Sungkonghoe University (South Korea) sent ten participants, while Women’s Christian College in Chennai (India) sent six. Easter College and Brent Hospital and Colleges in the Philippines sent two each, while host university TUA sent seven students.
We attribute the eagerness of overseas partner schools to join the program to the successful promotion and marketing efforts of Dr Gisela Luna, TUA President, and Herbert Donovan, former CUAC – Asia Chapter president, during CUAC’s recent Melbourne Triennial.
Lifting of restrictions imposed during the pandemic, such as presentation of vaccination records and mandatory wearing of face masks, helped made the program more attractive.
The two-week program kicked off with a “Parade of Nations” where participants displayed colorful national attires. A Thanksgiving Service was followed by opening ceremonies where participants presented cultural performances. The Revd Richard Burnett, CUAC Secretary General, sent his well wishes through a recorded video. President of Momoyama Gakuin University of Education, Dr Mitsuhiko Nanako, also attended, among representatives from other participating universities.
Over the two weeks, students were deployed to TUA’s partner communities where they helped in elderly care, pre-school education, children’s health, nursing, and small-scale business development. They were also required to attend sharing and reflection writing sessions to process what they were gaining from their experience.
To complement experiential learning, guest lecturers spoke about Philippine society, service, and the Christian faith, and how Service-Learning helps develop 21st century skills.
Participants also visited some important historical sites in Manila, including the old walled city of Intramuros and the monument to the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal. They also went to SM Mall of Asia, one of the biggest malls in the world, where they enjoyed ice skating, bowling, laser tag, and amusement rides and capped the night with all-you-can-eat hotpot buffet.
This was the seventh CUAC-sponsored Service-Learning Program. The program started in 2015 but was cancelled from 2020 to 2022 due to COVID-19.
Divino Cantal, TUA Assistant Professor of Media and Communication, was the program’s 2024 chairperson.
Research Fellowship in Japan
Distinguished Fellow Herb Donovan at Rikkyo University in Tokyo reports that applications are open for the Nippon Sei Ko Kai's Bishop Williams Memorial Fund Visiting Researcher Program in Japan. Available to graduates in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America, it's an opportunity for a year and a half visiting research fellowship in Japan, with the first six months being devoted to Japanese language training. He notes that "this is especially a very good young faculty development opportunity." Previous researchers have come from Madras Christian College and Cuttington University: Application for Participation in The Visiting Researcher Program of The Bishop Williams Memorial Fund
Report From the Road
One of the most important and for me most enjoyable aspects of the work of CUAC's General Secretary is engaging in site-visits to member institutions and network leaders. While similar to the pastoral visits I've offered ever since my first year in divinity school, these seem different in a few key areas. First, my goal as General Secretary is to be prepared to imagine with higher education presidents/vice chancellors hosting me, and with the chaplains who welcome me so well, some new and sometimes more sustainable interests in global networking. And, with such imagining, to invite the institution hosting me to consider equally innovative ideas that will respond to the needs (and even dreams!) of other Anglican colleges and universities.
In other words, I "hit the road" in order to 1) learn about our members and 2) provide occasions for strengthening the core purposes of CUAC, one visit at a time.
Since the new year, I have visited several campuses, parishes, and an annual Episcopal Church conference in order, as I often put it, "to tell the CUAC story more widely."
Here are three snapshots of such visits:
☆ Two days in Gambier, Ohio, visiting one of the oldest Episcopal Church (and, for that matter, American) colleges, Kenyon College, this year marking the Bicentennial of its founding in 1824. I was welcomed graciously by their new president, Dr Julie Kornfeld, an epidemiologist from Columbia University, who will be inaugurated in the picturesque Collegiate Gothic setting of Old Kenyon Hall on April 13. We wish Dr Kornfeld and her husband Fred, Kenyon's Chaplain Rachel Kessler, and the whole College community every blessing at this storied home of liberal learning in the United States. ☆ From central Ohio, I headed to Houston, Texas, to attend the largest conference of lay leaders and clergy in The Episcopal Church, joining 750+ participants at the Episcopal Parish Network (EPN). Because 2024 is a year for the Church's General Convention to meet, I had a wonderful time roaming the conference (often in academic garb!) with CUAC literature and making arrangements for significant future parish visits and relating with friends, old and new. EPN is a natural habitat for CUAC, and I urge others to follow the lead of CUAC trustee Dr Rob Pearigen, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the South (Sewanee), who joined several representatives from that CUAC institution and hosted an alumni dinner one evening!
☆ Recently, I joined a delegation from Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City, led by their Rector, the Revd Dr Phil Jackson, and CUAC's General Secretary Emeritus Jamie Callaway, on a most memorable site-visit to Voorhees University in Denmark, South Carolina. Voorhees President Dr Ronnie Hopkins gathered key staff and student leaders in areas ranging from campus life and student services to alumni relations/ development, property management, and financial assistance in what for me was a most impressive introduction to one of The Episcopal Church's two Historically Black Episcopal Colleges & Universities.
Over the next months I will give talks about CUAC at several Episcopal parishes, beginning at St Bartholomew’s Church in New York City on April 14. Please say a prayer for these times of connection and outreach; they matter in multiple ways because they exhibit the essence of what a strong and fruitful network is meant to be about: RELATIONSHIPS!
PASSAGES
News from Around the CUAC World
Bishop Heber College, in Tiruchirappali (Tamil Nadu, India), has named the chemist Dr Princy Merlin J as its new Principal, succeeding long-time CUAC supporter, Dr Paul Dhayabaran.
Dr Merlin, a veteran of 30 years in the College’s chemistry department, had been Principal-in-Charge since last fall and head of the department since 2018. She also served the College as its Dean. The author of 94 refereed scientific articles, she is an expert in data analysis, specializing in material sciences, electrochemistry, organic light-emitting diodes, and supercapacitor materials.
St Augustine’s University (Raleigh, North Carolina USA) has appointed Dr Marcus H. Burgess as its Interim President. He was most recently Vice-President for Institutional Development at Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina after a career at York Technical College (Rockhill, South Carolina), Florida Memorial University (Miami Gardens, Florida), and CUAC-affiliated Vorhees College (Denmark, South Carolina).
A native of Cades, South Carolina, he has a BS in elementary education from Claflin, an MS in education administration and supervision from The Citadel (Charleston, South Carolina), and a Doctorate of Education from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education (Nashville, Tennessee).
Dr Emily Colgan – a Hebrew Bible scholar, Franciscan, and experienced tertiary educator -- has become Manukura (Principal) of St John’s Theological College in New Zealand. A committed ecumenist, she was previously Acting Principal at Trinity Methodist Theological College in Auckland and has served as an assistant in a Presbyterian community while being a lifelong Anglican.
She has contributed to two recent publications, A Survivor of Abuse Tool Kit, which helps prepare clergy and laity to know how to prevent and respond to sexual abuse, and the Anglican eco-theology reader Renewing the Life of the Earth. She hopes to diversify the St John’s curriculum through theologies written by women and indigenous peoples of Aotearoa and Oceania.
HORIZONS
From the General Secretary's Desk
“Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor." (Letter to the Romans 12:10)
This widely used quotation from the Apostle Paul has been a cornerstone in my life and in the pastoral work in which I have been engaged for 40-plus years as a priest. Now it takes on a new resonance in my service as CUAC’s General Secretary.
This imperative is both ideal and useful: we are strongest when we follow such godly guidance in hard times as well as in more relaxed days. This, I believe, is why our Anglican colleges and universities choose to be bonded in a network for both “mutual affection” and “mutual flourishing.” The source of such a stealth bonus to Paul’s instruction comes from a trenchant 2009 resolution on ecumenical and interreligious relations offered by The Episcopal Church’s 76th General Convention, Toward Our Mutual Flourishing. (As a clergy-deputy on the legislative committee that crafted that resolution, I’m happy to say that the document was passed without editing – something rarely seen in church-wide assemblies like General Convention!)
However, this theological statement was only the beginning. In my diocese (Southern Ohio) and many others, lay leaders and clergy learned together about the need for clarity of purpose, generosity of spirit, hopeful anticipation, and renewed trust. We grew in shared efforts because we walked together with better appreciation of one another. Put another way, we flourished together by honoring one another more truly, more fully.
In my new experience in the global life of CUAC, I see such flourishing vividly, and I encounter “mutual affection” behind it in countless ways. In this issue of Compass Points, for example, we are pleased to highlight the new chair of CUAC’s Board of Trustees, Dr Lillian Jasper of Women’s Christian College in Chennai, India. Dr Jasper, an exemplar of such an ethic of mutual affection for mutual flourishing, is an esteemed international higher education trailblazer and mentor to many of India’s emerging professional and civic leaders.
Yet there is one other piece to this mosaic that can bring greater affection and flourishing together: the gift of compassionate listening. As the Revd Canon Margaret Rose put it in a 2022 essay entitled “Ecclesiology & Conflict, “Rather than attempting to convince or teach the other about the rightness of one’s own way, we strive to listen for what we can learn. Might unity, or the beginning of reconciliation, be found in seeking out and listening for the differences we take to divide us?”
Doubtless CUAC is many things to many institutions and people, but chief among them is that it creates occasions to listen deeply and creatively to difference, and in that listening we “outdo one another in showing honor” and become even more the community of learning seeking a higher common good. The Revd Richard A. Burnett
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Whales are much on my mind. Whales I’ve occasionally seen in the Gulf of Maine, whales I’ve read about in fact and fiction, whales I can only imagine, like “the great fish” that swallowed Jonah. In the coastal town where I live there was even a 65-foot whale in a schoolyard last week – rubber, inflated, but none the less awe-inspiring despite its pumped-up existence.
Moby-Dick – a work that blends fact and fiction – is the focus of my town’s annual BookFest in April, and we have been working hard to encourage people of all ages in this distracted world to concentrate on a classic which, depending on the edition, can range from 400 to 800 pages. (The big one is the Modern Library’s printing, padded with Rockwell Kent’s splendid woodcut illustrations.) To that end, I’ve been “facilitating,” as we say these days, an 8-week reading group at the local library for some 30 people, ranging from their early 30s to late 80s. Each week I worry I won’t have enough to say to fill 90 minutes; each week, I am astonished at how energized, how engaged, how full of wisdom this diverse group of adults manages to be – we are suddenly in “flow” time, swimming as smoothly as a whale through the depths of this great novel.
Part of the energy comes from Melville’s prose, which absorbs and recharges the language of the Hebrew Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Charles Dickens, Carlyle, Emerson, and the latest shipping news. It’s by turns magniloquent and low-comic…and often satirical, especially in regard to the conventional Christianity of the day. As is the fate of many great works of art, few of Melville’s contemporaries knew what to make of it. He was dismissed as a failure, only to achieve posthumous fame a generation after his death, with the near-miraculous discovery of the unpublished Billy Budd, perhaps the most deeply Christian story in American lit.
It's too often said (by me, among others) that education is wasted on the young. It would be more accurate to say that education is wasted if it ends at the classroom door. It’s not as if the human mind can hold only so much. On the contrary, it yearns for more, yet too often fails to find it. Deprived of any higher education, Melville himself was an autodidact. “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” his alter-ego Ishmael proclaims.
What if our notion of Anglican higher education did not end at graduation? A more generous view would encompass a rich array of ways of drawing older learners back into the conversation. Just a thought…but if any of you are doing it already, please let me know.
Charles Calhoun
Compass Points is published by GENERAL SECRETARY: The Revd Richard A. Burnett PUBLISHER: Julia DeLashmutt EDITOR: Charles C. Calhoun PRODUCER: Francis Rivera
Seminar moderator the Revd Dr Jeremy Law (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) said that in asking what kind of person we want to produce in a graduate – what “attributes” – becoming such a peacemaker ought to rank high. He cited the Hebrew greeting Shalom as even more resonant than the English “peace” in that it suggests “a new reality that does not abolish difference but encompasses well-being in every dimension.” 
For Fenulah Hepzi G, a second-year student at Women’s Christian College (Chennai, India), studying peace education and conflict resolution has clarified the contrast between peace and passivity – “staying quiet and avoiding the problem just doesn’t work.” She warned of careless passing on of misinformation from the media because “it leads to unintended conflicts.” She deplored the number of lives lost already in Gaza, a situation where the failure to respect human rights has led to unnecessary violence.
Diplomat Elias B. Shoniyin, Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Director of Conflict Resolution at Cuttington University (Liberia) – an institution whose campus was destroyed in the civil wars of the 1989-2003 – said that the discussion was “personal, not academic” for him. “If you don’t address the sources, the likelihood of a return to conflict is very high.” This requires outreach to communities where the potential for conflict exists and preventive measures to end such conflicts before they can spread. Peacemaking, in other words, requires peace-building. And where there is no justice, he said, there will be no peace.
Dr Mark Gearan, who was Director of the US Peace Corps in 1995-99 and has been President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, NY) for 20 years, said his college’s mission was “to prepare students to lead a life of consequence.” 
Julie Nalubwama said that peace “has to be built from the bottom up – an incremental process – one brick at a time.” 
Over the two weeks, students were deployed to TUA’s partner communities where they helped in elderly care, pre-school education, children’s health, nursing, and small-scale business development. They were also required to attend sharing and reflection writing sessions to process what they were gaining from their experience. 
