Growing up, “Catholic” and “Christian” were always interchangeable terms. I knew that my family and I were Catholics, and I knew that we were Christians, so I assumed that they must surely mean the same thing. It wasn’t until I entered elementary school and heard my peers talking about going to “Sunday school” on the weekends instead of “CCD” that something began to appear off. That being said, I went to public school all the way through twelfth grade, so religion was never something that I readily discussed with people outside of my own family. As a result, even though I came to understand th ..read more

It has, indeed, been a long and cold January for us all, literally so for far too many of us, struggling to heat homes, caught in a system full of bureaucracy and lacking in compassion. As we enter the month of February, the cold harshness of this system appropriately positions us to enter Black History Month, as we awaken to what was, what is, and what we are hoping to have and be. I’d imagine it was a cold Tuesday, February 1st in Philadelphia, when the first Freedom Day was celebrated in 1949.  It had been a long time coming, since 1941, when Richard R. Wright, Sr. organized a meeting ..read more

This year at the Center, we have been reimagining reconciliation as we prepare for our symposium in the spring. As we conversed about what reconciliation looks like in our lives, we found that forgiveness is a common theme that is commonly paired with this idea of restoration.   “I thought I had forgiven her a long time ago but now when I see her doing the exact same things she did to me to others, it just makes me so mad”, “I realized that I only forgave him for what he did to my family but not what he did to me”, “I forgave him but we aren’t friends like we were before. D ..read more

Messiah’s theme this year is “reconciliation” and as such, it’s a topic that has come up several times over the course of the semester, whether it be during class discussions, lectures, or even just normal conversation amongst friends. However, the definition of the term tends to be a little murky, especially when it is being used to conceptualize the desired mindset of an entire community. The Oxford Dictionary defines reconciliation as “the restoration of friendly relations” or “the action of making one view or belief compatible with another”. In my numerous conversations with others, I have ..read more

This week we are resharing a post written by former fellow Eve Harbison-Ricciutti, as we contemplate the importance of empathy in times of distress and discomfort. Humanities in Place Empathy: One word that many of us probably hear frequently. Empathy is simply the act of taking on and relating to another person’s feelings. Imagine what our lives, our community, even our world would look like if more people practiced this daily. Our work places might be less hostile and more patient. Our interactions with strangers might consist of less aggression and more helpfulness. The policies we v ..read more

We were dancing under the late afternoon sun. Sweaty and giggling, multiple little Haitian girls grabbed hold of me as we spun around, again and again. Afterward, we all dropped to the ground, exhausted but smiling up at the sun. Two of the girls crawled in my lap and promptly fell asleep. I held them for at least an hour, staring at the mountains in the distance, my heart full. In that moment, for one of the first times in my short 17 years of life, I felt like I was doing something real, something that mattered. I was finally sharing Jesus’s love like I had always dreamed about after years o ..read more

The other week, I was walking around the Brooklyn Museum with an artist friend of mine, she armed with her sketchbook and a pen, and I with a pencil and my notebook. We were both creating sketches and taking notes of the things we saw and admired.The entire first floor of the museum is currently art created during the 2020 quarantine and it’s absolutely incredible—if you can, I 100% recommend seeing it. As we walked up the stairs to the second floor and up to the third floor, however, the exhibit changed entirely. The artificial colors upon cork boards, canvases, plastic sculptures shifted to ..read more

How do we use monuments to shape our memory of the past? As a history major, I have studied how different people use the past and shape its memory. One of the areas that I have focused on researching is the Lost Cause of the South ideology. Lost Cause ideology is the idea that became popular during Reconstruction after the Civil War. It claims that the Civil War was over state’s rights, not slavery, and that slavery was not that bad, along with other problematic claims. It was taught by people across the United States, especially the South, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They ..read more

I have often been in touch with the importance of place. Recognizing places of pain and places of freedom. Place is important to me. But I am not always in tune, nor do I always know the significance of the places I inhabit or encounter. This summer, I reintroduced myself to a place on a street in my city I knew well growing up. Or…at least I thought I knew it well. This place holds deep historical memories. It is as sacred as a church, as holy as a sanctuary-even more so, perhaps. And to the average visitor, it’s seemingly as ordinary in appearance as a house in a neighborhood. Because it is ..read more

Virtue.  What is virtue?   I can tell you that virtue is the word I misspelled in my fifth-grade spelling bee, landing me a second-place finish. I’ll never forget how to spell it now.  Outside of elementary school spelling bees, the word gets tossed around in many circles. Recently, the idea of “virtue” often appears in the American news cycle, usually in conjunction with a politician or person of influence calling upon the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Virtue, according to many of these people, encompasses a way of life that follows the values ingrained in our nation – l ..read more