For the second year in a row, college senior James Souder has a summer job that wins him friends from dozens of countries. They are men and women aged 20 to 90 who do things on behalf of peace and justice like mediate between warring soldiers and live among suffering refugees in camps. Souder is one of four 1990-born undergraduates at EMU who are “community assistants” in the ...More
Amina Hassan and Samson Sorobit looked at one another across the room at Park View Mennonite Church with a mixture of surprise and recognition. Could it really be? In 2008, the two had worked together for several months to resolve an armed conflict between rival clans in Mandera, a region in extreme northeastern Kenya along the Somali and Ethiopian ...More
Little more than six months after alumna Leymah Gbowee won the Nobel Peace Prize, Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) has hosted its first participants in a program designed to train more women for leadership roles in peacebuilding. The first group of students in the ...More
Togar Tarpeh had hardly started school when, in 1989, the civil war in Liberia reached the capital, Monrovia. His family fled the city before he’d finished second grade, and they didn’t know when they’d return. Because Liberia’s educational system fell apart during the war, Tarpeh spent the rest of what should have been his elementary years working in cassava fields and rice patt ...More
In the eight years since first attending the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) at Eastern Mennonite University, Ala Ali, an Iraqi-Kurdish civil society activist and peacebuilder, has put the lessons she learned then to extensive practical use. Now the program development manager for the Iraqi Al-Amal Association, a development, human rights an ...More
On the week that Bill Goldberg welcomed 67 people from 27 countries to the first session of the 2012 Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI), he pondered the changes he has seen since his arrival at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) 14 years ago. “Probably 80 percent of the people wh ...More
Courtesy Peacebuilder, Des Moines Register In March of 1994, in my former role as Bureau Chief in the Criminal Bureau of the Polk County (Iowa) attorney’s office, I read a troubling police report. A few days earlier, members of the Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Des Moines awoke to find neo-Nazi graffiti scrawled on the side of their synagogue. There were no immediate suspects b ...More
Courtesy Religious Herald, Apr. 10, 2012 A concentration in justice and peacebuilding will be available to master of divinity degree students at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond (BTSR) beginning this fall, in a collaborative effort a seminary spokesman said ...More
Hurt people hurt people. For 10 years, Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience — the STAR program at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) – has been helping to break that cycle. A February celebration at EMU marked a decade for this program that emerged at EMU’s Center for Justice a ...More
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program (known as STAR) at Eastern Mennonite University will host a time of reflection and look towards the future on Monday, Feb. 20, at 4 p.m. Founders of the program will reflect on its early years and Elaine Zook Barge, director of STAR, will share a vision for the ...More
