As of July 1, 2013, Bill became the director of the Summer Peacebuilding Institute. He has worked at Eastern Mennonite University for 13 of the last 14 years.
Associate Director of Summer Peacebuilding Institute, CJP
August 15, 2014 – 10:56 am
In the summer of 1994, about 40 peace and development workers gathered on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University for a one-week seminar called “Frontiers in International Peacebuilding.” It was the first official event held by what is now known as the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, or CJP, which was then so fledgling it ...More
August 11, 2014 – 1:06 pm
When volunteers were solicited, nobody immediately stepped forward. It was a tough request: tell a painful personal story before an audience of maybe 40, many of them strangers to each other, and watch seven people trained in playback theater re-tell it through an impromptu performance. Yet Muhammad Afdillah – a visiting scholar with EMU’s Center ...More
August 11, 2014 – 12:23 pm
In more than 20 years of participating in interfaith dialogue, guest lecturer Dr. Mohammad Shomali has travelled widely. He is the director of international affairs at Jami’at al-Zahra, a Shi’a Islam seminary for women, as well as director of the International Institute for Islamic Studies (IIIS). He resides in Qom, Iran. “I feel at home ...More
August 11, 2014 – 12:11 pm
Farshid Hakimyar has much in common with four men he greatly admires – Mahatma Gandhi, Khān Abdul Ghaffār Khān, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Like them, Hakimyar is a man from a comparatively comfortable family background and, as a result, he is well educated and can make choices that could lead him to ...More
August 11, 2014 – 11:54 am
Angela R. Dickey spent 25 years promoting the policies of the United States while working for the U.S. Department of State in Washington DC and in a number of countries from Canada to Vietnam. Now, the former diplomat hopes that her studies at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) will mark the beginning of a new ...More
January 4, 2012 – 3:58 pm
After teaching at EMU during the regular terms and at the Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) for a number of years, this past September I began a PhD program at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, where my general area of study is Social Construction. This summer I will be teaching again at SPI, facilitating ...More
January 3, 2012 – 2:34 pm
Over the years of teaching faith-based peacebuilding I have met students who are heroes of hope. Among them were: A nurse trainer who educates student nurses from three religious backgrounds to work with patients from the same three religious backgrounds. This nurse came with a vision to incorporate peacebuilding into the education of nurses. A ...More
The sixteenth annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI) at Eastern Mennonite University came to a successful conclusion on June 17th, just over a week ago. During the course of SPI a few of my colleagues conducted sixteen interviews with students and instructors. (To my knowledge, the recurrence of “sixteen” is a happy coincidence.) Our interview subjects ...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 – 4:05 pm
Janet Evergreen, MA ’98 Charlottesville, Virginia Janet Evergreen says she was encouraged to enroll in CTP in the late 1990s by her mentor, Louise Diamond, PhD, co-founder of the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy, founder of the Peace Company, and now founder and director of Global Systems Initiatives. Janet commuted an hour from her home in ...More
