The Observer, April 4, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 23
Hallinan Project farthest thing from hate-brokering
To the Editor:
In response to the column authored by frosh student Caleb Posner, I would like to correct the record in regard to the Hallinan Project for Peace and Social Justice, which the columnist characterizes as "bring(ing) in some of the most vile, intellectually corrupt, and dishonest brokers of hate to our university." Our mission is to bring to the university eloquent, brave voices that we feel deserve a wider hearing than they receive in the mainstream media. These people represent refusal to accept the status quo in the areas of international nonviolence and social justice. Each of them sets an example of how one speaks truth to power. Since 2001, the Hallinan Project has supported activists and scholars as varied as Susan Faludi, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and recently, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, a book nominated for the National Book Award. We had a full weekend workshop on visual media and activism with feminist visual artists The Guerrilla Girls, who have educated the public with humor, facts, and outrageous visuals about the lack of female representation within museum and gallery collections. We have brought Elizabeth McAlister, cofounder of Jonah House, a faith-based nonviolent resistance community in Baltimore, to talk about peace activism and nonviolence; Nobel Peace Prize nominee Kathy Kelly, the founder of Creative Voices of Nonviolence, who lectured about her year in Iraq and in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan; and Art and Peggy Gish, members of the Christian Peacemakers Team, who have set examples of nonviolence living among the victims of war in Baghdad and in Hebron. In the fall of 2006, Loyola University professor and attorney Bill Quigley spoke of his work with Katrina victims whose houses were condemned. In February 2007, Hallinan brought Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jeff Halper, founder and director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, to share his work in rebuilding demolished Bedouin houses, and Felicity Heathcote, Irish author of Resting Place of the Moon, a book based on the conflict in the occupied villages and towns of the West Bank, written in a form inspired by the Sufi poem "The Conference of the Birds" by the 12th-century Persian philosopher, ud-Din Attar.
What these diverse speakers have in common is their concern with justice for all people. In their own creative and very different ways, each of these people reveals the understory, the subtext, the overlooked. The Hallinan Project will continue to offer the university the opportunity to have dialogues with people whose life work is to fight for human rights, emphasizing the worth of all peoples of the earth. We invite you to join the dialogue.
Alice Bach
Director, Hallinan Project for Peace and Social Justice
