October 18, 2012 – 1:59 pm
EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) has long enjoyed close ties to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In fact, it exists in large part because of MCC. In the late ’80s MCC staff in its Akron offices began discussing the need to train more peacebuilders by combining practical experience in conflict resolution with the field’s ...More
August 23, 2011 – 3:06 pm
Inescapably, September 11, 2001 surfaced a question brewing under the surface of my faith and profession: How do we transform enmity? The faith I embrace and the nonviolent conflict transformation I commit to professionally rise from the life and teachings of Jesus, who measures love in the paradoxical quality of how we respond to those ...More
December 30, 2010 – 6:09 pm
Who would come from half-way around the world to enroll in a program at Eastern Mennonite University that was so new, no college catalog listed it? Sam Gbaydee Doe did. From Liberia. Initially, the plump squirrels running around campus dismayed him: They could be food for very hungry people in his war-torn homeland. He himself ...More
December 30, 2010 – 5:26 pm
Nathan Barge, MA ’99 Harrisonburg, Virginia As director of the “Welcome Center” of the Harrisonburg public school system, Nathan Barge leads the team that registers, evaluates and places hundreds of incoming students. About half of these come from households that speak a language other than English. Barge himself speaks Spanish, in addition to his native ...More
December 30, 2010 – 4:21 pm
Sandra Dunsmore, Grad. Cert. ’97 Washington, D.C. Before Sandra Dunsmore became a CTP student, she worked for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) in El Salvador. During the last two years of El Salvador’s war, from 1990 to 1992, she met with, listened to, and encouraged the leaders of labor, peasant and business organizations to ...More
December 30, 2010 – 3:40 pm
Hadley Jenner, Grad. Cert. ’97 Harrisonburg, Virginia Long-time work with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) seems to leave people with rich experiences and much wisdom, but not necessarily with credentials that translate into comparably responsible work in the US. Or so Hadley and Jan Jenner found after leaving their shared 7-year-long roles as MCC country representatives ...More
December 30, 2010 – 1:53 pm
Lina Maria Obando (Marquez), MA ’00 San Jose, Costa Rica “John Paul Lederach’s elicitive approach to learning has stayed with me through the years,” says Lina Maria Obando, who is Habitat for Humanity’s organizational learning manager for Latin America and the Caribbean. The “elicitive approach” refers to a participatory educational process often used at CJP. ...More
