Pop Quiz: What Is UAP #4?
If you said, “Caring for our Common Home,” you're partially correct. There's a second part to the preference, equally important: “Collaborate, with Gospel depth, for the protection and renewal of God’s Creation.” It's a reminder that, collectively, we're able to accomplish more when we collaborate together, and our Global Network of Jesuit Schools is the perfect platform in which to do so.
One recent example is the “Caring for Our Common Home: An Ignatian Perspective” framework, a collaborative effort created by the Secretariat Task Force on Caring for our Common Home. Representing all six of our global regions and Fe y Alegría, the Task Force’s fourteen members brought multiple lenses from our diverse schools, as well as varied roles (faculty, provincial assistants, Jesuits, and lay). Through those lenses we prayerfully analyzed our core Ignatian documents to create the Caring for our Common Home Framework and its accompanying Action Poster. Intended to encourage us to examine our individual and collective actions and habits, the framework also contains key reflection questions and suggests practical actions we can take to heal our earth.
These documents are meant to be used! Each section is directed to constituent groups who play a role in our school communities, from students to parents and alumni. Each section is framed in the IPP and includes quotations from core documents to set context. Within each section we provided a series of reflection questions and action items.
We pray the conversations that come out of your use of this document will be fruitful and insightful.
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Global Identifier #4: Care Of All Creation |
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Last June, the Secretariat for Secondary and Pre-Secondary Education along with Educate Magis hosted the webinar "Our Mission of Love for All Creation," dedicated to Global Identifier #4: Jesuit Schools are committed to the Care of All Creation. Keynote speaker, Pedro Walpole, SJ led a discussion on the topic, inviting us to open our hearts and minds to carry out this mission in our schools.
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Student-led Environmental Auditing
The Laudato Si' Initiative of Boston College High School is a collaboration of three friends and scholars, juniors Will Hartford, Danny Moylan and Jack Reardon (pictured). These are environmentally conscious and thoughtful young men whose intentionality is social justice in our school community.
Inspired by presentations from speakers and knowledge ascertained from the 2022 Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice (IFTJ), Jack, Danny, and Will dove into the daunting task of identifying, researching, and presenting information on the school’s consumption practices, which rely heavily on fossil fuels. They targeted energy use and materials consumption, and attempted to account for areas in which BC High was both succeeding in the areas of environmental consciousness and aspects in which the institution could improve.
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As with any multi-layered institution, there were significant communication obstacles presented in collecting the data. Furthermore, collating and articulating this information in an approachable manner was no less challenging. In addition to the demands of their classes and extracurricular activities, these young men spent six months compiling interviews, invoices, data, and internal reports into a single environmental audit. This audit presents an overview of the school’s ecological impact, from electricity use to the quantity of plastic recycled. The hope of this initiative is to open the door to conversation about our values and our obligation to the earth and each other, as outlined by Pope Francis’ Care for our Common Home.
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In Care Of All Creation (GI #4), We Journey With Youth At Boston College High School
In a recent JSN Virtual Coffee Shop, William, Daniel, and Jack shared their environmental auditing project at BC High with Jesuit educators across the globe. Their passionate and professional presentation showcased our youth as change makers, as they identified and addressed the importance of Care Of All Creation in their school.
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Care Of All Creation: Growing A Hope-Filled Future Through Student Leaders
At Bellarmine Prep in Tacoma, the student Sustainability Representatives are busy - you might even say busy as bees. This group of 100+ students work to promote initiatives and educate their peers and the greater community in the area of caring for our common home. Since the start of the Sustainability Rep group in 2020, these dedicated young people embody the directives Pope Francis challenged us within the Laudato Si' - to bring about an ecological conversion.
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They’ve eliminated single-use plastic water bottles on campus, established composting in our Campus Center, cleaned up the stands after football games, taught lessons, and created newsletters to promote sustainable actions. Every Sunday, reps can be found working in the greenhouse - cultivating the newly established Kateri Habitat, tending to the diversity garden, caring for the bees in our beehives, feeding the fish in the aquaponic tanks and generally getting their hands dirty with love for the Earth.
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With the global challenges we face regarding destruction of our common home, hope grows from the passionate optimism of these students.
Future plans for the Sustainability Reps include sponsoring our school-wide Justice Summit, initiating a JSN Bee-Keeping Certificate, and any collaboration with our fellow Jesuit institutions. If you have ideas or questions, let us know!
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SLUH Sustainability
2023 has seen new adventures for sustainability at SLUH! Our Waste Team partnered with Rubicon to collect and recycle Halloween candy wrappers, and our Farm to Table Team has plans to evaluate our cafeteria food during the fourth quarter. As a school, we started an advisory program and now have protected time for curriculum on a variety of topics from college counseling to DEI and sustainability, all developed through the lens of Ignatian spirituality.
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We measured our carbon footprint with resources found on Educate Magis, freshman partnered with senior advisors to quietly observe and identify organisms in a particular campus biome, and our seniors hosted and enjoyed a “Sustainability, the University, and You” panel showcasing Dr. Ness Sandoval, the Assistant Director of St. Louis University’s GeoSLU, as well as Ellie Heinrichs and Sabrina Hu, two college seniors from local universities.
Looking ahead, we're excited to celebrate a Laudato Si' Career Day on April 4. If you're interested in sharing your story that day regarding how you or others at your institution are holistically working to integrate UAP #4 or would like to network with others in this line of action, please contact Anne Marie Lodholz at amlodholz@sluh.org with your contact info and title. We're looking to develop a shared database.
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Ignatian Inquiry Podcast Episode 5: Developing the Ecological Self with Dr. Karin Botto
On a recent episode of the JSN’s Ignatian Inquiry Podcast, we welcomed Dr. Karin Botto, who serves as the Senior Human Resources Business Partner at Syracuse University, and also teaches individual and collective discernment at the masters level at Le Moyne College. In 2015, Dr. Botto co-developed and published a model of Ignatian Leadership in the Journal of Jesuit Business Education, which became the backbone for several leadership development exercises across the United States. She completed her dissertation research at Creighton University on the Fourth Universal Apostolic Preference entitled, Developing the Ecological Self for Sustainability Leadership in Jesuit Higher Education in the United States.
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Our podcast conversation focused on the story of one leader’s journey into the connection between ecological conversion and Ignatian leadership, of understanding how to support and develop individuals to activate their leadership around environmental sustainability. Dr. Karin Botto’s concept of the ‘ecological self’ is an important one for the Universal Apostolic Principles that are at the heart of so much of our work in Jesuit secondary and pre-secondary education. Her curiosity and foundation in research around the ‘conversion of self,’ of ‘being’ that leads to ‘doing’ is interesting and relevant to the daily efforts of teachers and leaders within our schools.
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Care Of All Creation
Through Healing Earth
“If you are doing the right thing for the Earth, she’s giving you great company.” – Vandana Shiva
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Healing Earth, a prestigiously recognized free-access online interdisciplinary textbook, is celebrating its ten-year anniversary! Developed by the School of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago, Healing Earth addresses six pressing ecological challenges of our time from a unique pedagogical approach designed to be suitable for courses in sciences, humanities, social science, theology, religious ed, and more for secondary schools, universities, and adult education programs.
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Presented in five languages, Healing Earth’s integrated lens calls upon its readers to build empirical knowledge about environmental challenges related to biodiversity, natural resources, energy, water, food, and climate change. Using Catholic social teaching as part the textbook’s environmental ethical framework and linking it to Loyola’s mission as a Jesuit institution, readers are invited to reflect upon their own relationship with the natural world to act in a way that cares for creation using the knowledge, reflections and perspectives gained from the diverse examples throughout the text.
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The Committed Person – Ignatian Spirituality and an Ecological Vision, The Long View
The SIPEI vision statement defines the committed person as, “A person of commitment is one of courageous action. Through our openness to the guidance of the Spirit and companionship with Jesus, he or she will be able to discern the urgent needs of our time, so that our ways of serving will be as rich and deep as our ways of loving. We realize that an ecological commitment to the reconciliation and healing of the earth, hand in hand with the commitment for social justice, are urgent needs as they affect all persons everywhere on the earth.”
In this article, we would like to highlight a couple of resources available on Educate Magis that can help us go deeper into the path of transformation to ecological commitment, and provide practical lesson plans for teachers to use or adapt to their context in the classroom.
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Full Scholarships Available for AMIGOS Summer Programs in Latin America
Amigos de las Americas (AMIGOS) is offering two full scholarships for students attending JSN schools to participate in its summer 2023 volunteer programs in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Panama! This is a great opportunity for students to learn how local communities in different parts of the world are working for the Care of All Creation. Students will collaborate with community leaders in service projects related to themes such as climate change adaptation, conservation, and wildlife protection. They will also learn Spanish, immerse themselves in a new culture, and develop their leadership skills.
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Summer programs are for youth ages 13-19 of all Spanish levels and range from two to six weeks long. Read about AMIGOS programs here, and register for a virtual info session to learn more. The final deadline to apply for the AMIGOS JSN Scholarship is April 17, 2023.
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Walk a Mile in My Shoes and The 2023 Speakers Tour: ‘Welcome and Protect’
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Walk a Mile in My Shoes
In our journey to identify with and feel responsible for all creation, we need to remember all our brothers and sisters forced to flee their homes due to climate change. Refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDPs) are on the frontlines of the climate emergency.
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Many refugees in camps are living in climate “hotspots”, where they typically lack the resources to adapt to an increasingly hostile environment. As part of our programs to raise awareness on refugee issues, Portland Jesuit High School hosted a ‘Walk A Mile In My Shoes’ activity lead by their students last month. The freshmen participated in nine stations where they ‘experienced’ some of the conditions refugees are facing all over the world.
At the end, the reflection station provided them with in the opportunity to process this experience. In the words of one student, the activity allowed them to “come together as a community, to walk a mile in the footsteps of refugees. It was an eye-opening experience to put ourselves into the shoes of others to learn how to uplift refugees and take steps to care for others.”
If you want to learn more about Walk A Mile In My Shoes, here is our Toolkit.
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Welcome and Protect Speakers Tour 2023
In the month of February, JRS/USA invited colleagues from JRS Romania to talk about JRS’s response to the crisis in Ukraine during this first year of conflict. From Washington, DC to Seattle, the Welcome and Protect Speakers tour visited elementary schools, high schools, universities, and parishes to help inform people about the current circumstances Ukrainian refugees are facing. They spoke to Ignatian Service Learning students at Loyola Academy and St. Ignatius College Prep students (Chicago), to St. Joseph School students (Seattle) and St. Ignatius Prep students (San Francisco). For several audience members, listening to these stories of hope and resilience has inspired them to get involved with JRS’s efforts to advocate for, accompany, and serve those forced to flee their homes.
To date, JRS has assisted more than 56,000 people with over 82,000 services as part of a three-year plan to provide the medium and long-term support necessary for Ukrainian refugees. As the second year of the conflict in Ukraine begins, JRS will continue to stand with those impacted by the war.
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2023 Youth and Young Adult Art Contest: Together on the Journey of Hope
In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the pastoral letter, Strangers No Longer: Together on the Journey of Hope, issued by the Catholic bishops of Mexico and the United States, USCCB/MRS and Kino Border Initiative (KBI) are sponsoring a migration-themed youth and young adult art contest that highlights the subtitle of the letter, which reads, “Together on the Journey of Hope.”
How to Participate:
- Read art contest rules (see below)
- Create your art!
- Ask your guardian or parent to fill out this consent form
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Email your art (or a photo of your piece if it is a painting or drawing) and your consent form to artcontest@usccb.org by May 22, 2023.
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Earth Day 2023
Earth Day will be celebrated across the globe on Saturday, April 22, 2023. As your school or organization observes the day, be sure to tag JSN on social media (@jesuitschools) so that we can repost all your Earth Day festivities and initiatives! Feel free to use the following hashtags to accompany your posts: #caringforourcommonhome #careofallcreation.
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