Kolvenbach and King


Both Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Peter-Hans Kolvenbach  in his speech on the “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American Jesuit Education” write about injustice and how the world is reacting to these injustices compared to how the world and how society should be reacting to these injustices. While King focuses on internal and national injustices in the immediate aftermath of his arrest after the protest in Birmingham in 1963, Kolvenbach who wrote more recently in 2000 focuses on the apathy of our Jesuit universities to the suffering on an international scale. Both of them focus on an idea that King states in his letter, “the ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never” (King 2). When as the politically advantaged elite, we turn our cheek away from what is going on around us on both a national and international scale we are refusing justice to those less fortunate than those of us born into the elite. Kolvenbach states that it is our responsibility, specifically as a Jesuit university that we respond to the gritty reality of the world that we live in and that professors and faculty should teach the students to be “adults of solidarity” in their future adult lives (Kolvenbach 35). The importance of this concept of adults of solidarity is that it will help to re-establish the empathy for others that we lost far too long ago. The fact that the world, and specifically the Jesuit university system needs two writers, almost half a century apart to remind them of their social responsibility as members of the advantaged is a sign that the world needs more empathy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spiral of Time in Potiki

Potiki is a story focusing on a Maori community fighting to maintain their autonomy from hungry land developers who are desperately trying to coerce the Maori people off of their sacred land. The author, Patricia Grace, constructs the story through a patchwork of memories, where different events, different times, and different viewpoints come together in like a mosaic.   Grace disrupts the linear narrative and describes time in a cyclical way, a never-ending spiral. Rather than segregating time the “past time” of the ancestors from the “present time” of the community, there is a new way of describing time. I found “now-time” to be a fascinating concept, where there’s this spiral temporality where past and future time are narratively experienced. The concept of “sacred time” was more challenging to understand, where the narrative of Christ and the and the ancient myth of Mäui align.   The spiral, like kowhaiwhai, signifies repetition with a difference. Toko shares q
Read more

Potiki literary analysis

In comparing  Things Fall Apart  and  Potiki,  it is evident that each culture, and even individuals within a culture, define home differently. Many of the characters in  Potiki  rely upon the geography of New Zealand to define home. Hemi particularly views home through this lens.              Hemi first demonstrates his commitment to the land when he loses his job. While he is initially disappointed, he quickly resolves that “He’d always known that one day he would return to the land, and that the land would support them all again," (60). He trusts that the land will provide for his family, which is exceptional given that he has recently become unemployed. Additionally, Hemi expresses the importance of protecting his own land. He reflects, “These days people were looking more to their land” because “They had to if they didn’t want to be wiped off the face of the earth,” (60). He then points to the Te Ope people as an example of those who had been forced to protect their land. 
Read more

Potiki Reading

          From the beginning of her novel, Patricia Grace makes her priorities clear: She will be telling the stories that have been untold, and more importantly, unheard. Potiki  begins with the story of the carver, a master storyteller, who places the history of his people in his craft. Like Grace, he is "Seeking out and exposing the figures that were hidden" (7). However, his final story is left uncompleted, because "[It] is not yet known" (10). With the death of the carver, the narrative begins, and the reader is thrown into a somewhat tumultuous world.           Unlike Things Fall Apart , there is a strong emphasis on the "hidden" nature of the story. Roimata's internal conflict is not nearly as clear as Okonkwo's. In fact, it feels almost unknowable. "As a child I lived with my father in a railway house with a small, dark kitchen... Our window framed the flying windows, flying eyes, of trains which riveted the senses, carrying them into
Read more