When he was at the University of St. Thomas in the early 1990s, Stephen Bauer combined his entrepreneurship major with a justice and peace studies minor, which confounded more than a few of his classmates.
"People saw these two fields as completely separate," he says. "But it seemed to me very natural to put them together."
Patrick Edrey graduated from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota with a major in peace studies in 2004, and he's worked on the issue of homelessness ever since. He currently serves as a family advocate at Simpson Housing Services in Minneapolis, where he helps families achieve stability and work toward permanent housing.
Tona Boyd graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 with majors in government and Spanish and a peace studies minor. During her junior year she oversaw the student peace conference, and after graduation she went on to Harvard Law School. She's currently a clerk on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia and will be working next year as a trial lawyer for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
For Heidi Tousignant, the faith-formation director from Minnesota, having studied peace in college relates directly to some of her most important-and unpaid-work. As a parent "it absolutely enhances my vision of how to raise kids," she says. It's influenced her family's conversations, their values, their faith life, the decisions they make as a family, and what action they take in their community.
The first Catholic college to launch a peace studies program was Manhattan College in New York, which opened its Pacem in Terris Institute in 1965, offered its first interdisciplinary peace studies class a year later, and had an undergraduate major under way by 1971. Early in the program's development, Pope Paul VI took notice and sent his blessing, along with a message to the Institute's organizers encouraging the "efforts for education for peace" that were taking place.
Want to learn more about peace studies? Here are some resources recommended by people interviewed in Will work for Peace.
Publications:
Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Revised and Expanded by Stephen Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer, John H. Coatsworth, and Richard A. Nuccio (David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies)
When he was at the University of St. Thomas in the early 1990s, Stephen Bauer combined his entrepreneurship major with a justice and peace studies minor, which confounded more than a few of his classmates.
"People saw these two fields as completely separate," he says. "But it seemed to me very natural to put them together."
Patrick Edrey graduated from St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota with a major in peace studies in 2004, and he's worked on the issue of homelessness ever since. He currently serves as a family advocate at Simpson Housing Services in Minneapolis, where he helps families achieve stability and work toward permanent housing.
Tona Boyd graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2003 with majors in government and Spanish and a peace studies minor. During her junior year she oversaw the student peace conference, and after graduation she went on to Harvard Law School. She's currently a clerk on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia and will be working next year as a trial lawyer for the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
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