The partnership will offer a 40 percent tuition reduction to up to 15 students who have served in a volunteer position within the organization.

“We expect that this partnership will, over the next five years, bring dozens of students to GRE, as well as offer affordable opportunities for missionaries and volunteers to advance their careers and ministries,” said Jodi Hunt, GRE’s director of admissions.

In addition to providing aid, the partnership also serves GRE’s Jesuit mission of encouraging students “to integrate academic knowledge with personal wisdom, and to serve the church and society as committed and compassionate leaders.”

“We will be able to lend support to those who have served the Church and would like to continue doing so,” said Hunt. “It increases our outreach to educating those devoted to the Church.”

The Catholic Volunteer Network is an organization that offers faith-based volunteer opportunities to people of all ages, backgrounds, and skills. CVN focuses on volunteer recruitment, training and resources, networking opportunities, and advocacy. It is currently the leading membership organization of Christian volunteer and mission programs.

The network has over 2,000 alumni eligible for the partnership’s benefits.

–Mary Awad

This is a time for the whole Fordham family to come together, to pray for healing, and to stand in solidarity with people of good will everywhere.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, SJ

Camille Tacastacas, Veronica Muoio, and Josh Voges—all of whom graduated from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on May 21—are among approximately 25 fellows selected from hundreds of applicants for the yearlong program. Tacastacas and Voges have both been offered fellowship positions in Malawi and Rwanda, respectively. Muoio’s placement is pending.

The global fellowships typically lead to full-time positions within CRS.

“This experience is helping me expand my world,” said Tacastacas, a native of the Philippines who currently is interning with CRS in Sierra Leone. “Sierra Leone is the first place I’ve worked outside of the Philippines or the United States, so I came in with certain notions of how people are.

“This has been an exercise in shattering those labels and taking people just as they are, giving them a chance to express their whole personhood and humanity.”

In Sierra Leone, Tacastacas has been doing operations research for a project that addresses acute malnutrition in young children. A graduate of the Jesuit Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, Tacastacas also served as a member of Jesuit Volunteer Corps prior to her Sierra Leone placement.

In Malawi, she will do research for Ubale (United in Building and Advancing Life Expectations), a USAID-funded project on food security and nutrition.

“The Jesuits at Ateneo de Manila inculcated in me the value for social justice,” she said. “That exposure to the least, the less, and the lonely made me want to marry my life’s work with the needs of the world.”

Voges, who is completing a CRS internship in Senegal, is a former Peace Corps volunteer who said he learned the value of economic development when was stationed in Morocco. Recently, he received a message from a basket weaver celebrating the economic success of a workshop that he, Voges, and and other villagers had built.

“He said he was spending the weekend at the beach with his family and friends celebrating, because they had been able to produce and sell a record number of baskets last summer,” said Voges. “He said they used the increase in revenue to purchase a truck so that the artisans would no longer have to pay each week to have the merchandise delivered to the markets.”

In Senegal, Voges has been designing an emergency behavior change intervention in Cape Verde in response to the Zika epidemic. He also coordinated a proposal for a $1.5 million USAID grant to support peace and reconciliation efforts in southern Senegal.

In Rwanda, he will work with CRS to develop community-based models to strengthen local agriculture, nutrition, and economies.

Helping local communities become self-sustaining is at the heart of the CRS mission, said Muoio.

A former Peace Corps volunteer, Muoio said, “The most rewarding part of the work was seeing our students and participants in the programs get really engaged and then go and launch programs and projects of their own—taking what we were doing in our center and bringing it out to the community to share with others.”

Muoio is an intern at the United Nations Development Programme, where she is working on issues related to gender equality around the world. Her CRS fellowship placement is pending, but she said it is likely she will work with Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the Middle East.

“Working with local partners is what CRS does best,” she said. “And they set a standard for other organizations—because the ideal in the industry to is to work yourself out of a job.”

But the gathering at Tuff City Styles, across the street from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, had a scholarly purpose. In keeping with the 2016 theme of the Association of Practical Theology conference, which took place April 8 through 10 at Fordham, the off-campus excursion was meant to exemplify the intersection between migration and theology, said Tom Beaudoin, PhD.

“We live in a world with boundaries and borders, which means we have to pay careful attention to who those borders benefit—who gets to have life and who doesn’t as a result of them,” said Beaudoin, the association’s president and an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Practical theology in particular has a responsibility to be part of the living experiences of the neighborhood—to find out what brings joy and pain in the local environment, and how those are connected to the larger world… This starts with symbolically and literally going outside of the gates.”

Tuff City is an art supply store and tattoo and piercing parlor that also houses a professional recording studio. Street artists from around the world are drawn to its backyard graffiti lot, where they paint over its walls on a daily basis.

“Not engaging with and serving the neighborhood—including the arts—is to all of our detriment,” Beaudoin said. “There are resources to be shared, [and]this is a relationship that could be life-giving on both sides and utterly essential to the mission of this University.”

In addition to giving association scholars from around the country a glimpse of the Bronx, Tuff City provided an apt milieu for a talk by alumna Tamara Henry, PhD, GRE ’14, an assistant professor of religious education at New York Theological Seminary.

Against a backdrop of a graffiti murals and life-sized replicas of subway trains, Henry offered an introduction to the world of hip-hop and how urban art—including rap music, DJing, graffiti art, and breakdancing—pertains to the world of practical theology.

“Hip-hop is an art form that is hewn out of hardship—specifically, the hardships of young people in the 1970s and 80s living in the throes of postindustrial economic and social distress,” said Henry, who is the youth minister at Lenox Road Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

“These art forms become a way in which young people can ignite resistance to the moral and social ills that are plaguing their community … whether it’s pervasive forms of housing discrimination, racial discrimination, unemployment, or the dwindling quality of education systems.”

Hip-hop can serve as a pedagogical resource to illuminate themes relevant to both theology and hip-hop, such as “speaking from the margins, speaking truth to power, and contesting injustice,” Henry said.

The art form can also provide religious educators a window to their students’ world, Henry said, helping them to better understand how urban adolescents and young adults relate to their social and religious environments.

“Hip-hop has become a grammar of young people all across the nation,” she said. “We can begin to view it as an equally meaningful avenue through which religious identity is being formed and through which a new approach to religious education can be engaged.”

The conference initiated what Beaudoin hopes to become an ongoing partnership with Tuff City.

“They are interested in working with students to teach them about urban art, and I’d like to find ways to support and appreciate the Tuff City artistry within our gates and to deepen the partnership Fordham has with our neighborhood,” he said.

“There is a lot to engage with, not only around religion but also other aspects— art, urban life, racial diversity and justice, and local economic issues.”

On January 7, a team of students took a trip less than a half mile away from the Rose Hill campus.

For GO New York, which lasted from Jan. 7-17, a team of ten Fordham students stayed at Our Lady of Refuge Rectory in Kingsbridge, and spent their time doing service work and visiting cultural sites around New York City. Their primary focus was the Bronx, which nine of them already call home.

For service, the team pursued several projects, including volunteering at an after-school program at St. Ann’s Church in Morrisania, helping Habitat for Humanity rehabilitate a house in Yonkers, and going on a midnight run to distribute supplies to the homeless. The group also walked the length of Park Avenue from 189th Street in the Bronx to 106th Street, to see the South Bronx up close, and attended a conference on gentrification in the borough.

Collette Berg, a senior environmental science major at Fordham College at Rose Hill, led the trip after participating in a GO trip last year in Mexico. For her, the simple act of visiting different locations every day was moving for her. The group strove to embrace global outreach’s four pillars of spirituality, social justice, simple living and community, and Berg, who chose the service sites for the trip, plans to continue to do service work upon graduation, with the Jesuit Volunteer Corp.

She said she hoped that working with a variety of service organizations would showcase the variety of opportunities for students who might not be sure what kind of volunteering they want to do in the future.

For instance, Food Bank NYC is a very structured, almost corporate operation, and they’re not religiously affiliated. Part of the Solution (POTS) soup kitchen is a lot more of a holistic, kind of community organization, and kind of religious, she said. On the other end of the spectrum, Catholic Worker is extremely social justice oriented and a lot less structured.

“There are so many ways of serving the community, and we wanted to discuss what speaks to us the most, and what we feel is lost when you do something in some particular way,” she said.

Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15, the group’s chaperone, organized cultural visits to landmarks such as P.S. 1 in Long Island City, Edgar Allen Poe’s house in Kingsbridge, and The Point, a community center in Hunt’s Point that is also home to the graffiti group Tats Cru.

Coltin had traveled abroad before, to Alaska in 2013. The immersive nature of the trip made the biggest impact on him, as the group turned off their phones and limited their engagements to each other and their destinations for the day.

“I was riding the same subways that I ride every day to go to work, out to eat, and visit my friends, but even something as basic as riding the subway was totally different when I was on this trip,” he said.

“I didn’t have any work on my mind; it was a time to talk with people, or sit quietly and reflect and look at the other people on the subway. That’s something I never do. It helped me see different perspectives.

For Connor Mannion, a communications major from Philadelphia who was the lone team member from Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the trip was a way to learn more about the history and culture of city that he hopes to stay in upon graduation.

“All the time I’ve been at Fordham, I’ve had this vague feeling that I’m a tourist, and I’m not engaging with New York the way I should be if I’m living here,” he said.

Photos by Connor Mannion

Bemer, a 2015 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate and one of the first students to major in Humanitarian Studies, is headed to Mlali, Tanzania, next month to work at the Queen Elizabeth Academy.

She was chosen by San Francisco-based Mama Hope for a nine-month fellowship to help the academy raise funds and build a boarding house for students. The group is covering travel and lodging expenses, but Bemer is raising funds on her own to support the project. She’s already raised half of the $20,000 goal, and plans to raise the rest after she returns.

The Queen Elizabeth Academy, which was founded as a shelter for destitute children in the immediate area, has grown to the point where administrators would like to build housing to accommodate children from the nearest town three hours away. This will enable the school to attract students who can pay and therefore subsidize more children who cannot afford the cost; for every paying student, one will be admitted for free.

For Bemer, the fellowship is both a natural extension of her scholarship (she wrote her senior thesis on how climate change will affect food security in Tanzania) and an opportunity for personal growth. When her mother died from brain cancer in December 2014, she spent the spring of 2015 staying focused on graduation. Now that enough time has passed, the moment seems right to try something big, she said.

“I’m excited to do something for myself and take a chance to be inspired by a community of people I’m working with. My mother always pushed me to keep going, and I feel like she’d be really happy that I decided to just go for it, to figure it out while I’m doing it,” she said.

Her interest in international humanitarian affairs exists in part because it’s a relatively new field, she said. There are still active debates about which approaches work best, she said, and programs that were started 20 years ago are only now beginning to yield measurable affects. Having gone through a boot camp of sorts in preparation for the three-month stay, Bemer is both excited and nervous about being part of the developing field.

“Since I’ve learned a lot about being involved in development as an outsider, I’m nervous about understanding my role in the community without overstepping my boundaries. Its something I’m really conscious and aware of. I hope to learn a lot from them,” she said. But neither will she be “too shy.”

“The community also appreciates an outsider’s point of view,” she said.

(See a slideshow of activity at the Queen Elizabeth Academy in Tanzania.)

“When it comes to the materialistic part of the holiday season, I can’t handle it,” she said. “I’ve changed.”

Lightburn recently flew into New York from Haiti, where she is helping Dominicans of Haitian ancestry who have been pouring over the border into Haiti from the Dominican Republic. In 2013 the Dominican government ordered that the group must prove Dominican lineage with ancestral birth certificates dating from before 1929, or be expelled. An estimated 200,000 people may become stateless.

Lightburn said that the mere act of traveling home for the holidays has taken on a new meaning.

On returning to New York, Lightburn sat on a panel held at Fordham to discuss the crisis. Before the event, she checked in with colleagues from the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA), where she is pursuing her master’s degree, and then met with her mother, Anita Lightburn, PhD, a professor in the Graduate School of Social Service and director of the Beck Institute on Religion and Poverty.

The two discussed their shared interest in helping those in need—Professor Lightburn through social work and Kara Lightburn through humanitarian aid—though Professor Lightburn continually deflected attention from her work to that of her daughter.

“Being on the ground and doing the work that Kara does is a whole different thing than me organizing people to understand social justice issues and respond,” she said.

While she has seen her share of human frailty over the years, the professor recognized that her daughter’s experience in Haiti is distinct. Kara began going to Haiti to help out after the 2010 earthquake. That year, she founded Social Tap, a New York-based nonprofit providing services through Haitian partnerships.

“She’s like her father in that she really goes out on the edge, has a vision for what could be, and then she goes ahead and does it,” Lightburn said. “She’s never taken a salary, never funded herself. Everything she gets she gives away.”

But Kara said she learned how to organize disparate parties toward a common goal by observing her mother and her colleagues.

“Because of my mother, I was always surrounded by amazing, powerful women who were intellectually challenging,” she said. “I learned how to tap into the university systems because I grew up in them and learned how to work with multiple institutions.”

Her first time on the ground in a disaster came after a friend was killed in the Sri Lanka tsunami. She said she felt “compelled to go.” She raised money through her college classmates. Professor Lightburn recalls it as a harrowing time for her as a mother, particularly after Kara told her that gun-toting rebels greeted her at the airport.

“I called colleagues who assured me that the areas where she was going were not too violent,” Professor Lightburn said. “When she called me later she was helping rebuild a fishing village and she said, ‘I’ve never been happier in my whole life.’”

After the earthquake in Haiti, Kara Lightburn had to go beyond helping people attain basic needs, like shelter, food, and water. She also had to arrange security for women and children who were being raped amid the chaos. Among the victims was a 4-year-old girl.

“We worked with the camp leaders and organized security committees,” she said. “We also made sure the victims knew that we would pursue every line of justice for the perpetrators.”

Kara Lightburn said that while her mother’s work differs from her own, each one’s work boils down to strengthening communities.

“Community is community. It’s the same if it’s international or local,” she said.

“The other thing we absolutely share is the belief in the dignity of everybody,” said Professor Lightburn. “We’re really not that different; each of us brings different gifts.”

“But the number one thing we do in both of our professions is listen to people and walk with them,” said Kara Lightburn.

“And act with them,” added Professor Lightburn.

When she had signed up for Susan Greenfield’s course on homelessness this semester—an English course with 30 required hours of service learning—she was as ready and willing as any Jesuit-educated student to serve the community.

But when she showed up to volunteer at a Bronx shelter for women and children and was told that there was no need for her, Shilo was at a loss.

“When we fulfill a need, we feel important, we feel irreplaceable, and we feel satisfied,” Shilo, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said during Greenfield’s Friday morning class. “When . . . this need-based satisfaction was taken out of the [equation], I began to question what my motive was in doing service.

“Am I serving simply to feel good about myself, and is it okay if I am, as long as the result is the same? Am I doing it as a type of ‘humble brag,’ making sure everyone knows that I am a socially conscious, ‘good,’ and caring individual?”

Feeling conflicted about service

These are the tough questions that Greenfield, PhD, a professor of English, wants her undergraduate students to be bothered by. Her course, Homelessness: Literary Representation and Historical Reality, uses a literary approach to examine the complex issues surrounding homelessness. On the reading list are texts ranging from classics such as The Grapes of Wrath to contemporary memoirs such as Lee Stringer’s Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street.

On the experiential side, students have heard stories firsthand from formerly homeless individuals who spoke to the class. In addition, the students are required to complete 30 hours of service in an organization that serves the homeless—a fairly easy quota to fulfill when you live in a city of more than 59,000 homeless men, women, and children. (In fact, this estimate is extremely low, because it does not include the number of people living on the street, nor the number of women and children in domestic violence shelters.)

The service component, it turns out, has prompted a healthy amount of internal conflict.

In response to Shilo’s predicament, another student in the class shared her ambivalence about the idea that volunteering helps the privileged become more aware of and sympathetic to those in need. “It’s service, but you’re just ultimately serving yourself,” she said. “I don’t have an answer to that dilemma.”

That may be, but educating and inspiring those who do service can still be useful, suggested another student. “Look at an organization like Part Of The Solution (POTS),” he said. “That’s how POTS began—[the founders]had an initial experience of service and then began that organization, which really does make a difference.”

The desire to “make a difference” is often what draws students to service, Greenfield said. In class, however, as they’ve begun to consider that desire, the students are learning that “making a difference” is a nebulous goal. Moreover, there seems to be a tacit power dynamic beneath their good intentions.

“Someone needs and someone is needed. Being needed feels good; being in need doesn’t feel so good,” Greenfield said. “That idea, to me, is important. Is there a way to do service that fosters equality rather than replicating the power problem that created the situation in the first place?”

One way to achieve that is to respect the autonomy of whoever is being served, she said. “Even a simple gesture [such as]saying ‘Can I help you?’ rather than ‘Let me help you,’ is a political change. It’s a move from ‘I’m going to do this’ to ‘Do you want me to do this?’ That’s how you can make a difference on the local level.”

Heroism and homelessness

Literature is an entryway into these kinds of conversations, Greenfield said. Many texts, such as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exalt homelessness rather than view it as a social failing.

“The characters who fall socioeconomically ultimately rise as human beings. They become even better people,” Greenfield said. “There’s a certain nobility and integrity that comes from ending up at the bottom. It becomes a kind of heroic act to have fallen.”

And yet, that hardly serves as solace for someone living the trauma of homelessness. It still overlooks the question of whether one can ever alter the power struggle in the service dynamic—or, as Shilo wondered, whether it even matters if the end result still benefits the person being served (or at least does not cause harm).

“I always find when I teach this course that there’s a place at which my brain just stops. I can’t get beyond some of these questions,” Greenfield said. “It’s not like reading literature and discussing, where you have a eureka moment and reach some kind of conclusion.”

There’s no clear-cut answer, unfortunately. Greenfield cautions her students about this upfront: “Unless we ourselves have been homeless, we cannot presume to understand the trauma,” she wrote in the course syllabus. “But we can open ourselves up to learn about it and to work toward social justice.”

Sometimes, forming relationships are the only option available. To that end, stories are a good start.

“Literature is an exercise in imagining another person’s experience and being open to it,” Greenfield said. “To bring that kind of awareness and openness to people who you might normally just pass by and not even notice, it does change things.”

In addition to serving as executive director of Santa Clara University’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education, Father McCarthy is Edmund Campion Professor in the religious studies and classics departments and assistant to the university president for mission and identity. He has brought Santa Clara’s Ignatian Center to a new visibility in Silicon Valley and beyond by stressing the integration of faith, justice and the intellectual life, and served as the university’s public voice on the importance of Jesuit, Catholic higher education in the United States. His work on this topic has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times.

“We are delighted to be bringing Father McCarthy to Fordham,” said Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of the University. “He is not only a respected scholar, but a superb ambassador for Jesuit values and a gifted teacher. As Fordham approaches its 175th anniversary, we hope to find ways for the Jesuit tradition to support not only the student experience but also the academic mission of the University. Hence we are changing the title of this particular position to vice president for Mission Integration and Planning.”

Father McCarthy entered the Society of Jesus during his undergraduate years at Stanford University. After switching to Santa Clara University, he earned his bachelor’s degree in classical languages and literature magna cum laude and went on to earn the M.A. (Oxon.) in Litterae Humaniores at Oxford University, taking First Class Honors. He taught high school in Sacramento, California, for three years before earning his master’s in divinity with distinction from the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. In 2003, Father McCarthy completed his doctorate in theology at the University of Notre Dame—attending as a Presidential Fellow—and joined the faculty at Santa Clara.

Since then he has taught everything from freshman surveys of Christian traditions to advanced seminars on the texts of Homer, Euripides, Horace, and Augustine, and his research into ancient theological traditions has appeared in Harvard Theological Review and other distinguished journals. He has been a visiting professor at Loyola University Chicago and board member at Seattle University, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, St. Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, and Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.

Since becoming executive director of Santa Clara’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education in 2011, Father McCarthy has led its five-year plan to elevate Ignatian values and ideas at Santa Clara University and apply them in the wider community. Under his leadership, the center awarded faculty research grants and sponsored institutes, seminars, and forums on the Jesuit educational tradition for faculty members; it also expanded its community-based learning and immersion programs for students. The center has led Santa Clara’s Thriving Neighbors Initiative, an educational and social service partnership with a neighborhood of recent Latino immigrants in downtown San Jose.

Monsignor Quinn served with distinction in a number of parishes in the Diocese of Scranton before accepting the position of vice president for University mission and ministry in 2009. He initially agreed to a five-year stint but extended it to six years so he could coordinate Fordham’s response to Pope Francis’s U.S. visit. He has been appointed pastor of Our Lady of the Snows Parish, effective Oct. 2.

“A saintly priest. A wise man. A good friend,” Father McShane said of Monsignor Quinn. “We will miss him more than he will ever know, and Scranton is lucky to get him back: he is the most talented and most loved priest in the diocese.”

The Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice sponsored the Urban Plunge events for more than 100 students at nine locations throughout Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. The service projects focused on local youth, the elderly, the homeless, and the environment.
(Video by Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15)

— Janet Sassi