When I was applying to colleges in my senior year at Avalon I had my sights set on becoming a Computer Science major. But in one of the online enrollment forms for CSB/SJU there was a place to put a second major, and so I looked through the list and selected Peace Studies because what I understood at the time it entailed was interesting and thought it would provide a decent second major, or even a decent choice as a single major. However my sights were still set upon Computer Science.

Now, most Computer Science programs in existence today are based on a solid mathematics foundation. But that isn’t, as I can attest to with my knowledge of OS X/iOS software development and having a hard time with advanced math, the only approach schools can take if they so choose. There is also, as my dad has put it, an art approach. This is one where you would go off of a creative baseline instead of a mathematical baseline.

Every freshmen (and transfer student) at CSB/SJU takes First-Year Seminar, a course that ultimately felt like a homeroom of sorts to me last academic year. Probably because of my interest in Peace Studies I ended up in an FYS taught by a professor in the PCST department. I also ended up enrolled in the Intro to Peace and Conflict Studies course that Fall term of 2010. After failing the required (given my low math score on the ACT) quantitative skills inventory necessary to register for a required (for what CSB/SJU calls the Common Curriculum, course areas, attributes they’re officially called, we all need to take on top of major requirements, let alone possible Computer Science courses) math course I knew that actually majoring in Computer Science wasn’t really in the plausible picture. So, with my only heightening interest in Peace Studies as a major I dropped the Computer Science major from my records and fully became a Peace Studies major.

Each individual Peace Studies major has to focus their goals within the major in order to graduate successfully and be prepared for what will come after graduation. We write this up in a formal focus statement that we turn in along with the standard major application form and our academic transcript when we formally apply to the major in the second semester of our sophomore year.

The first part of this document outlines what has drawn us into the Peace Studies major. Beyond this backstory (not actually included with my focus statement) I said that what has drawn me into the Peace Studies program at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University is the increasing importance that peace education and awareness plays in our global society. I feel that my inherent strengths fit well with what is needed for a successful major in Peace Studies. The interdisciplinary aspect of the program helped draw me as it means that not only will I have a little more control of my education, but also unlike most majors as a Peace Studies major I will be getting more of an education that incorporates, and indeed relies on, the interconnectedness of many different disciplines. This interconnectedness wasn’t necessarily a major draw for me to the department, but is certainly a nice piece of it.

We then have to explain what our specific focus will be. I started by mentioning that another interest of mine, and an area where I’m learning a lot on my own, is in software development (just look at Tenseg for some examples). As such, the intersection of modern technology and peace building with a special focus on that technology’s influence on nonviolent means is in many ways at the heart of my intended focus for the Peace Studies major. This will incorporate my more casual interests and strengths in computer programming with the education I’ll get in the Peace Studies major. Throughout the past few years two things of become clear to me: The first is that violent warfare isn’t an appropriate or final answer to any conflict; The second thing that I’ve come to understand is be it for better or worse as a race we humans are increasingly relying on technology to survive. My particular focus in the Peace Studies department aims to begin to merge these two tracks. My goal is to learn about nonviolent means and history so that I can bring that knowledge into perspective with regard to what technology today and in the future can offer those means given how our modern society is designed and operates. In the peace studies terminology, that means much of the actual PCST courses I take will be tied to nonviolence, movements related to nonviolence, and conflict resolution. Much of the technology side will be my own independent informal explorations partially based on staying current in the social media and computer programming spheres. Courses from other social science departments will deal with that last third of my goal by hopefully teaching me about society and its functioning today.

The last piece of the focus statement that I’ll reproduce here is the part where we state what formal concentration (out of humanities, social science, and natural science) we will be in. I stated that in terms of formal concentration for the major, this means that I’ll go down the path of the Social Sciences concentration. Some of the key courses are within the Peace Studies department itself, but other may fall more within the POLS and SOCI departments. A few of the appropriate courses (or required prerequisites thereof) I’ve already taken.

So there you have it. Something that resembles a direction for my undergraduate education at CSB/SJU to go in. We’ll see how much this is in fact the direction I went down come graduation in a little over two academic years.

As the final paper for my Religion in Latin America course we had to pretend that we were a poor Catholic in Nicaragua in the 1990s and write a response letter to our parish priest on Cardinal Ratzinger’s (now, of course, Pope Benedict XVI) first instruction on the “Theology of Liberation”. In doing so we had to tie in some of the history of Liberation Theology in Nicaragua and Latin America more broadly. For this I largely used Gustavo Gutierrez’s Notes for a Theology of Liberation. I hope that you enjoy reading this paper of mine. In all likelihood this is the last assignment of the Fall 2011 semester that I’ll be posting to my blog, as all I have left are two exams (one Monday afternoon and one Tuesday afternoon) to study for and take.

That is the basic topic of the final essay for my Women, Men and Peace course. As with the other two essays, this essay was written ultimately as a response to the collection of articles we read for that subsequent third of the semester. I hope that you enjoy this essay.

For my third (and save for final exam last) paper for my Tragedy/Passion/Sacrifice class I wrote a paper on The Book of Daniel focusing on attaching the three endings with three core strands running through the book, and forming a meaning from those connections. The paper wraps up the run of three formal comments and three formal papers that I have had to do for this class, leaving just the slightly different thing that the final exam will be.

That is the basic question the second paper for my Religion in Latin America class gets at. Once the day this paper was turned in passes we’re ¾ of the way done with the Fall 2011 term already. Seems quite odd as it feels like we only recently began.

The book I’m currently reading for my Tragedy, Passion, Sacrifice course is The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow. The book is Doctorow’s commentary on the executions of the Rosenberg’s during the Cold War through a fictionalized story told from the perspective of one of the children of the couple. For my last comment of the term we had to find any academic article to help make some amount of sense out of Doctorow’s comments on the Cold War.

The title of this post is the basic question we had to answer in our second essay for my Women, Men and Peace course. It discusses if the basic assumption that women are more peaceful than men is both actually the case, and then if it is if those differences are because of nature or nurture. There isn’t much more I can say here regarding this essay beyond pointing you to the essay itself, it’s only three pages so you have no reason not to read it if you’re intrigued by the topic.

I just turned in the second paper for the English class I’m taking this semester. The texts we were to draw on for this paper were The Great Gatsby and Passing. Ultimately we were suggested to write a paper that compared these two books in order to generate a theory of what both books mean. I focused on how one main character from each book were similar to inherently compare the books to one another. The characters I compared were Gatsby (from The Great Gatsby) and Clare (from Passing). As the title of both the paper and this blog post suggest, the most compelling evidence I dug up about the similarities between these characters was in regard to friendships they had. As such, the meaning of these books I inferred was along the lines of telling us something about friendships (but you’ll have to read the paper to find out exactly what lesson the books can offer us).

Food is a key source of energy for any living being. Aside from a decent amount of sleep (at a bare minimum 6 hours per night for us humans) food is the only other source of energy our bodies get on a daily basis in order to function as expected. It is for these reasons that I applaud the organizers of the annual Blog Action Day for choosing food as the topic for this year.

The food we eat shouldn’t highly tax our planet, that is, eating local food is better than eating foods from another continent. Why? Because transporting that food across the planet tends to have minor side-effects on our environment in the form of emissions. Eating local foods isn’t just sustainable when it comes to the environment. It is also sustainable when it comes to our local communities. Buying local food will send the money you spend on food to local farmers, so what small amount more the food is will be offset by the fact that you’re supporting families much like your own, and keeping the money in your local economy.

Aiming to be sustainable in where and how an individual or family gets their food is a simple task. But in retrospect its the larger institutions, like hotels, college campuses, hospitals, etc. that have a larger challenge when it comes to sustainable food. In these places you’re easily dealing with hundreds, even thousands, of people yet the same basic layer of the importance of sustainable foods. There are many aspects of these issues to deal with, and it truly is a complicated puzzle. In my case, as with my fellow Johnnies, we can know that to an extent Saint John’s is considering these issues, but we’re one small spot on the map of these institutions who all need to commit to sustainable foods (and other sustainability measures) in order for our planet to have some relief from the burdens we place it under. Plus, sustainable foods are ultimately going to be healthier for us.

As a longer-term assignment for my Women, Men and Peace course we’ve each been researching someone that falls into the boundaries of the course content to write a short biography paper on. I chose to do Mother Teresa for my biography project partly because she both fit the assignment’s frame and I have family members who actually met her. As I did my research I continually felt like strands of what I was reading were interconnected with family history in some ways. Logically that makes zero sense, but it served to make working on this project much more personal and not entirely academic. That said, even if just because it happened to be the first academic assignment for which I checked books out of our library, it still had solid ties to academics. This was a fun project to work on over the past couple weekends, but I’m glad that it’s finally done and can live out the rest of its existence available to everyone from my website. Questions, comments, or concerns regarding this project can be directed to me if you have them.