About Us

Center for Ministry and Spirituality

Inspired by the heritage and values of Saint John Baptist de La Salle, Lewis University has established the Center for Ministry and Spirituality to provide educational programs that serve the local faith community, particularly ministries in the Catholic Church.

The mission of the Center for Ministry and Spirituality is to respond to the educational and formational needs of individuals engaged in Christian pastoral ministries, to provide quality learning opportunities that are accessible and affordable as well as experiential, and to promote a dynamic and collaborative educational environment combining theoretical study with practical application in a community of faith.

For additional information, please send an email to: cms@lewisu.edu

9/4, 12:30-2:30 p.m., pre-symposium colloquium
“Beyond Partisanship: Exploring Deeply Held Values in the Public Sphere”
Dr. Stephen M. Colecchi, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Respondents: Dr. Laurette Liesen, Lewis University, Political Science, Dr. David Carroll Cochran, Loras College, Political Science

Stephen M. Colecchi, D.Min., Director, Office of International Justice and Peace, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Washington, DC, will lead this examination of the U.S. Catholic bishops' 2008 election-year document, "Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call for Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States" (November 2007). Dr. Colecchi will explore the proper role of the Catholic Church and its official ministers during elections, articulate the principles upon which the Church's involvement in society is based, and summarize the bishops' guidance to Catholics in an election year. He will also briefly review the specific issues of concern to Catholic Church leaders in this election.

9/23, 7-9 p.m., principal lecture
“An Exposé of Wonder: Conversion toward Ending Poverty While Preventing Global Climate Change”
Dr. Dawn Nothwehr, OSF, Catholic Theological Union

As recent as the G-8 Summit in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan, July 7-9, 2008, the world's most powerful nations were--again--unable to garner the political will to take the necessarily stringent and enforceable actions to reduce carbon levels, while making good on their prior commitment to reduce world poverty. (This year marks the halfway point in reaching 2015's eight Millennium Development Goals [MDGs] set by the UN General Assembly in September 2000 to halve the number of people in poverty, achieve universal primary education and cut infant mortality by two-thirds.) Dawn M. Nothwehr, OSF, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Ethics, and Chair of the Department of Historical and Doctrinal Studies, Catholic Theological Union, will address this reality with a three-part paper. First, Dr. Nothwehr will give a brief review of key data describing the current state of affairs concerning world poverty and global climate change. Second, she will bring to high relief three critical dimensions of Franciscan theology of the environment as resources for empowerment and for developing the needed moral fortitude and political will for change. She will conclude with recommendations of practical measures each person can take toward change.

9/24, 1-3 pm, colloquium
“An Ethic for Exit from Iraq”
Gerard F. Powers, University of Notre Dame

Iraq presents one of the most difficult moral conundrums faced by U.S. foreign policy in a generation. An adequate ethical analysis of the current dilemmas must distinguish between the ethics of intervention and the ethics of exit. The central moral issue is not the nature and timing of U.S. military withdrawal but rather the nature and extent of U.S. responsibilities to the Iraqi people. We must be clear about what the U.S owes Iraq if we are to have moral clarity about when and how the U.S. exits Iraq. Gerard F. Powers, Director of Policy Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

9/24, 7-9 p.m., principal lecture
“A Catholic Peacebuilding Agenda”
Gerard F. Powers, University of Notre Dame

Respondent: Sr. Pauline Acayo, Catholic Relief Services Peacebuilding,
Northern Uganda

This second principal lecture of the just peacebuilding symposium takes up the symposium's central ambition: shaping a 2008 American just peacebuilding agenda. At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Catholic bishops outlined an agenda for peacemaking in "The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace" (1993), their tenth anniversary reflection on the peace pastoral. Now on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the peace pastoral, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response" (1983), Gerard F. Powers, JD, Director of Policy Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, will suggest that terrorism, the Iraq War, nuclear proliferation, and numerous other threats to international peace pose serious challenges to Catholic teaching on war and peace. Despite pressures to embrace a permissive ethic of force, a Catholic approach must combine a restrictive interpretation of the just war ethic with the development of a theology and ethics of peacebuilding that can match the sophistication of Catholic thinking on the ethics of war and peace. Professor Powers is also coordinator of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, which links scholars and Catholic leaders from countries torn by war in an effort to enhance the study and practice of conflict prevention, conflict management, and post-conflict reconciliation.

9/25, 12:30-1:45 p.m., principal lecture
“ ‘A Multitude of Oppressions’ and the ‘Right to Rise Up’ ”
Jack DuVall, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict

In his book, "A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict," and in his speeches and other writings, Jack DuVall, the president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, notes that in more than 40 countries, people's basic rights are systematically denied, while corrupt rulers steal the people's resources, imprison those who speak freely, or brutalize women and minorities. Political oppression is why the Zimbabwean economy has disintegrated, why Burmese and Tibetan monks have been arrested and tortured, and why Iranian students, women and bus drivers have been jailed and stoned. Since there can be no peace where oppression reigns, peacebuilding is contingent on its dissolution. But today ordinary people have a well-developed way to accomplish that, by using what Abraham Lincoln called "the right to rise up" -- to use civil resistance to disrupt oppression and take power with nonviolent strategies using tactics such as strikes, boycotts, protests and civil disobedience. [The "multitude of oppressions" term comes from Job 35:9]

9/25, 2-3:15 p.m., principal lecture
“The ‘Wine of Violence’ and the Reason of Resistance”

In a world in which narco-traffickers hold hundreds of innocent hostages in Colombia, gangs and militias terrorize villages in the Guatemalan countryside and the Niger Delta, and fundamentalist suicide bombers kill commuters in Madrid and families buying produce in Pakistani and Iraqi markets, violence seems out of control. But recruiting by violent groups is based on a false proposition: that violence works to achieve power -- when history teaches quite the opposite. The irrationality of extreme violence is actually proportionate to the rationality of a different form of struggle for liberation: the mass nonviolent resistance of civilians, whose campaigns and movements were the motive force behind 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarianism to democracy between 1970 and 2005. Jack DuVall will explain how civil resistance is becoming a viable way of curbing the allure of violence in societies under threat on four continents. [The "wine of violence" is drawn from Proverbs 4:17.]

9/26, 9-10:50 a.m. and 10-10:50 a.m., hearing
Interfaith Hearing on Responsible U.S. Global Leadership
Panel of Interfaith Leaders

Twenty-five years ago as the U.S. Catholic bishops wrote their groundbreaking peace pastoral, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response” (1983), the bishops consulted with hundreds of specialists and thousands of citizens over the three years they drafted the pastoral. Intending not only to honor the bishops’ peace pastoral consultation, but also to read the signs of the times before our nation today, this two-hour hearing relies on public consultation to broaden the civic discernment on directions the United States ought to be going beyond the 2008 election. More than a dozen social justice leaders will testify before a panel of interfaith leaders as to how America should use its wealth, power and influence internationally under the next President and new Congress.

Drawing from their organizations and/or constituents’ reading of the signs times, these social justice leaders will recommend which of the following should be at the top of a U.S. just peacebuilding agenda and why: strengthening global institutions; securing human rights; assuring sustainable and equitable development; ending religious violence; reducing nationalism; building cooperative security; using nonviolent conflict; or pre-venting global climate change.

9/26, 11-11:50 a.m., interfaith response and commissioning service

After hearing scholars and grassroots social justice activists testify, the panel of interfaith leaders will respond briefly and all will commit in the holy presence of God to build justice-peace together through U.S. foreign policy and each one’s loving, working, economics, and political action. This response and commitment will be the eighth major event and formal closing of the Center for Ministry and Spirituality’s symposium on faith, values and international politics—“Called to Live Justly: Shaping a Just Peacebuilding Agenda.”

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