Wednesday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. in the Susquehanna Room commenced the 2021 Peace Fellowship Lecture. This annual tradition is rooted in Elizabethtown College’s peacekeeping heritage and serves to facilitate student engagement with diverse scholarship related to the values of the College.
The Peace Fellow is a scholar or significant actor in the realm of peacebuilding who is voted on from a list of candidates. This voting takes place outside of the direct sphere of the College, being one of the most significant continued projects of the Elizabethtown College Peace Fellowship (ECPF). ECPF is an external group made up of students, faculty, alumni and community members interested in peacebuilding and promoting peace-related efforts on campus.
In the case of the Peace Fellowship Lecture, ECPF collaborates directly with the campus’ Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking (CGUP) in the financing and promoting of the event. While the director of CGUP does not have a voting role in the selection of the Peace Fellow, CGUP and ECPF work closely together to organize the lecture and accommodate any needs of the Fellow while on campus.
“Collaboration [with ECPF] allows me to be a part of their conversations about this type of work and to keep them apprised about what is going on on campus,” CGUP Interim Director Dr. Shannon Haley-Mize said.
For the past two years, Haley-Mize has been re-modeling and re-shaping CGUP in order to better align the organization with its values of equity and social justice. Haley-Mize has also been working to further establish opportunities to uplift and sponsor scholarships related to peace and social justice. The Peace Fellowship is one of many events CGUP has planned for the year and one of many ways it plans to engage with the campus community.
This year, the Peace Fellow is Religious Scholar and Director of Online Learning and Digital Pedagogy at Hesston College Rebecca Barrett-Fox. Fox earned her PhD in American studies at the University of Kansas and the majority of her scholarship focuses on issues of bias and marginalization within the church. Previous publications have focused on the impacts of misogyny in Christian spaces.
To this end, Fox visited two classes related to Gender Studies during her time on campus this week. Her presentation on Wednesday, however, focused more specifically on the issues of bias and hate in the religion, as well as on how these issues manifest in the church. Fox explores how American churches weaponize the Bible and its impacts on marginalized people. In addition to being a scholar of religion, she is also a scholar of hate and the various forms it can take.
Haley-Mize expressed enthusiasm for Fox and her work, especially as it relates to the values of the College.
“It’s an important conversation for us to build on as we work not only towards peacebuilding but for human rights across the board…it’s important to remove barriers to access for those [marginalized] groups,” Haley-Mize said.
Fox’s presentation also ties in with ongoing work being done by CGUP to address racism and bigotry on campus. The Peace Fellow Lecture on bias and hatred in the church ties in well with CGUP’s ongoing Forum on White Supremacy and Global Colonization and related topics occurring on campus this month.
The CGUP web page describes the lecture as follows: “The activities and events in the Forum are designed to promote peace with a focus on the examination of how white supremacy and colonization have functioned in various contexts across the globe and individual empowerment to circumvent cycles and systems of oppression–which is essential to the peacebuilding process.”
For more information on CGUP and future events, visit the organization’s calendar through the following link: https://www.etown.edu/centers/global/calendar.aspx. Questions should be sent to Haley-Mize at mizes@etown.edu.
