Marquette Center for Peacemaking

Making a Living, Making a Difference

Thursday, March 1, 4:00 p.m., AMU Ballrooms

Can you make a living making peace? Yes. Come learn and connect with local professionals to discuss paths and skills to build a career that contributes to the common good.

Program with Keynote Address (4:00-5:00 p.m.) Keynote speakers Bill & Terry Szymczak of Preservation Partners Development and Cornucopia Services will describe how they used managerial experience and financial expertise to rehabilitate and permanently preserve existing affordable housing for those most affected by the housing crisis: the elderly, new families and low-income wage earners.

Informational Interview Fair (5:00-5:30 p.m.) A resource fair where representatives from the private and the nonprofit sectors will share with student attendees their organization's mission and career paths in local, national and international work that benefits the public good. Discuss transferrable/desired skill sets in professions within the organization, highlight internships and promote job opportunities.

The event is hosted by the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking and Office of Student Development's Hunger Clean-Up Student Leadership Team with sponsorship from the Kohl's Career Education Scholarship and the Marquette University Career Services Center.

Soup with Substance: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Commandment to Love

Wednesday, February 15, 12:00-1:00 p.m., AMU 157

This talk will highlight the significance in the thought of colonial Latin America's most important writer, Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz (Mexico, 1651-1695), of the commandment to love one’s neighbor. With anguish, courage, humor and intelligence, this exceptional early modern writer grappled with her own situation as a woman with a literary vocation within an ecclesial and patriarchal establishment.

Imbued by a Christian and humanistic outlook, and well aware of her situation of marginality, Sor Juana puts forth the idea of obligation towards the neighbor as a space of exchange and recognition. In her writings, she establishes a relation of proximity with marginalized figures such as females, Indians, and black slaves. She strives to give voice to these traditionally marginalized groups. But Sor Juana’s vision of loving the neighbor doesn’t remain in the plane of the literary. Besieged at the end of her life by the ecclesiastical powers that led to her abandonment of her literary studies and writing, Sor Juana chooses to embody the commandment to love. This choice untimely led her to her death while tending to her sickly sisters in religion, a result of the plague that ravaged the City of Mexico, as well as Sor Juana’s convent, the Convent of Saint Jerome.

Dr. Dinorah Cortés-Vélez, Assistant Professor of Spanish at Marquette University, will lead this discussion. She specializes in Colonial Latin American literature and is interested in the literatures of the Hispanic Caribbean.

Spring 2012 Calendar of Events