I started my Masters program at Xavier University in the summer of 2005.  This summer I’ll be finishing it.

One of the reasons I applied to Xavier was the Brueggeman Center for Dialogue.  As you can see from their site, the goal is to provide space to address global issues in ways that are healthy when compared to the combative and sound-byte driven media we so often see.

The Brueggeman Center provides fellowships each year to students who then participate in the life of the Center, dialog together around literature and other materials, and individually propose and carry out research projects in their field of interest.  I applied for and received a Brueggeman fellowship this past year.  My particular field of interest was religious violence and reconciliation.

In the summer of 2007, from June 27th to July 27th, I will be traveling to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Croatia, Bosnia and France to conduct research on these issues.  My hope is to build off the work of other theologians in developing a Christian Theology of Reconciliation.  The areas I am visiting will provide great depth to this work, as they are all in very different places along the spectrum of reconciled communities.

Northern Ireland has been wracked with sectarian violence for many centuries, much of it coming to a head in the guerrila style bombings and murders of the last 40 years.  They have made great progress in the last decade, though they still bear the scars and violence still flares up now and again.

The former Yugoslavian countries suffered through the worst European violence since WWII in the 1990′s.  The fall of communist Yugoslavia led to some fiercely nationalistic entities willing to rip their land apart to assure ethnic/religious control.  The region is now at peace, though tension still remains between these once coexisting peoples.

The goal of all of this is to produce a written and visual (photographic) work representing a new era of religious peacebuilding.  It will form the majority of my thesis as well as the backbone for PhD religious studies, where I hope to begin developing an Inter-religious theology of reconciliation.

Feel free to leave comments, send emails and ask questions about the work being done here.  I’m sure many of you can add to my experience and I encourage you to do so.