Professor and Chair, Department of English, University of Dayton
"Education for peace, justice and transformation do not come without risk. It is popular today to talk about the need to take risks, to risk failure, to fail fast if we are going to fail so that we can learn from what we tried and what did not work and what did work. I think about risk from the perspective of our Marianist founders who worked in a total horizon of peril. The world, it can seem, was against them. Marianist education presumes a horizon of risk, has always presumed it, is born from it.

"I can imagine the temptation to hide, to find a place to wait out the peril, to defer risk until it is less risky. We are lucky in that our founders and their heirs have taught us some ways to incorporate risk and peril into the work of our days. Leaning on each other, seeking mercy in each other, creating places where mercy is part of our graceful living and working together. Marianist education offers to our world a way to bring mercy into the very structures of our days and can help us to leverage our risks and our failures toward the justice and peace we long for."

Posted in Marianists Change Lives