Social Justice Summit 2008

I was able to attend the 4th annual Social Justice Summit at CSUF this Saturday. Listening to Suheir Hammad eloquently relay experiences of New Orleans was inspiring. I am not a huge fan of poets abstractly or written poetry, but when a poet speaks it has the potential to transcend, which Suheir did.

I attended the "Student Movement for a Department of Peace," "Witness: Living a Life of Justice Through Non-Violent Civil Disobedience," and "Biking as Alternative Transportation: Raising Awareness, Building Critical Coalitions" workshops. The first one was not very well attended, but it was quite awesome. A high school student talked at length about her involvement in the Student Peace Alliance and it was quite inspiring. My favorite bit was her talking about winning over the republican vote for a proposed bill with pie. The second session was fantastic and featured Jarret Lovell and Jeff Dietrich. I think this was the highlight of the day for me. Jeff spoke about how he came to tour the world after dodging the draft and found his calling to the Catholic Worker as a servant to humanity. Finally I attended the bike workshop which was great. Leading the talk were representatives of NOCBAC and the Bicycle Tree about getting around and getting represented as alternative commuters.

The one thing that I keep coming back to is the practice of peace by looking toward the self and attaining it individually. From there one can find true compassion and look to serve compassionately. So here is a video on that:

Elise Boulding

Finished an article on Elise Boulding and her life:

Morrison, M. L. (2006). The Life and Work of Elise Boulding: Honoring Women as Peacemakers. Affilia, 21(2), 169-183.

Great article on the life of a person devoted to making and exploring peace. Based on my limited experience in this subject so far, it seems that women are at the forefront of this movement/tradition. I love the fact that she relates her experience of raising family as a microcosm of community building. What a great metaphor for what peace might look like and how it might arise. Sowing seeds of peace in children and future generations seems to be an important component for any sort of action plan for long term effectiveness.

I read this to get ready for Cultures of Peace. Still getting started with All Men are Brothers. Set up a big order for books via Powell's so that I will never run out of materials for my trip. Going to check out the Social Justice Summit on campus.

Peace on the right side of the brain...

This is one of the more moving videos I have seen. If you haven't seen any of these TED videos, they are incredible.

A bibliography for peace-making

This is a blog to mark and prompt progress toward creating a bibliography on peace-making in the 20th century. So far progress has been a bit slow and has mostly revolved around research. Currently I have read works by Thich Nhat Hanh, and a bunch of articles (currently reading an article on Elise Boulding in preperation of Cultures of Peace). I finally finished Choose Peace which was difficult to get through but was very illuminating on the subject of peace and the differences between personal peacemaking, peace education, and the more academic/research side of peace via dialog between Johan Galtung and Daisaku Ikeda. I am currently reading All Men are Brothers as well which is a much lighter read. Anyway, I figure that my year of traveling will be a good time to get the ball really rolling on this project and this blog will provide impetus. This is a public bolg per chance that someone might comment with suggestions for resources or any other sort of personal experiences to share.