Tag Archives: Justice and peacebuilding

Life Service Award: Michael J. Sharp

Seven candles were lit at an April 29 memorial service in Martin Chapel: one for Michael Jesse “M.J.” Sharp ’05 and one for each of his colleagues, some like Sharp confirmed dead, others still missing, in the Kasai-Central province area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Sharp was on a UN mission when he ...More

His Healthy Balance

Retired lawyer and judge Robert “Bob” Gillette, MA ’07 (con­flict transformation) travels a triangle within Virginia these days, from his home city of Suffolk to a mountaintop ranch in Floyd County to a soon-to-be-built-upon piece of land outside Har­risonburg, just over the hill from EMU. Each place bears a legacy of be­neficence. In Suffolk, where ...More

Just Outcomes, LLP: Recentering justice on relationships

The headlines have faded, but the years have not dulled her grief. Now the young mother sits eye-to-eye with the driver who caused the death of her school-aged child. Their conversation doesn’t focus on forgiveness or serve to expedite some criminal process. Instead, it creates a space for two human beings to express lingering emotions ...More

Kindred spirits from Kenya discover each other at EMU

Their neighborhoods in Nairobi, Kenya, were only 30 minutes apart. Yet these two students traveled more than 7,500 miles to meet for the first time at Eastern Mennonite University, where they discovered a closer connection than geographic proximity. At the end of her first EMU semester, Kaltuma Noorow had a casual conversation with Caleb Hinga, ...More

From defying death to get bread to advocating for Afghan women in Washington D.C.

For the first eight years of her life, Simin Wahdat, 31, was oblivious to the deep fault lines of history that ran through her childhood city of Kabul, Afghanistan. Kabul, praised in the ancient sacred texts of the Rigveda as “a vision of paradise set in the mountains.” On the Silk Road linking east and west ...More