April 22, 2010 | Session Three: Healthcare and Immigration Issues

How do immigration and health care issues intersect? What are the challenges that must be faced?

Panelists: T.B.A.

April 15, 2010 | Session Two: Perspectives on the Relationship between Healthcare and Financing

How do reimbursement practices affect models of care? How would you re-envision the future?

Panelists: Dr. Ed Hett, family practitioner; Lynette RauvolaBouta, Senior Vice President, Mission Integration, Via Christi Health; other panelists T.B.A.

April 8, 2010 | Session One: Whose Responsibility Is Health? Whose Responsibility Is Healthcare?

What are the relationships between individual responsibility and social responsibility with regard to health and healthcare? What are the advantages/disadvantages of single payer and multi-payer systems?

Panelists: Beverly Gossage, Director of HSA Benefits Consulting; Msgr. Robert Hemberger, Vicar General, Diocese of Wichita; Chris Fox, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Newman University

Paula Huston

Huston will link her reflections on forgiveness to current debates about capital punishment. Her lecture is the latest in a series of presentations sponsored by the Gerber Institute on the theme “Reconciling Differences.” Click on the link to the right to see all related events and posts.

In Forgiveness, Huston asserts that Christ’s injunction to forgive without measure is central to Christianity, and is not merely an option but a requirement. Copies of Forgiveness and other works by Huston will be available for purchase at the reading, courtesy of Eighth Day Books.

A popular speaker and retreat leader, Huston often appears at conferences, bookstores, churches, and other venues to speak on the topics of forgiveness, simplicity, and prayer, and the practice of the virtues. She has been a Newman Lecturer for several universities and has appeared on public radio stations and cable TV. In addition to Forgiveness, she is the author of The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life, a personal narrative about her struggles to incorporate into her life some of the practices of a contemplative monastic community in Big Sur, California.

Therese Bangert, SCL

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sue Norton

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kristi Smith

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fr. James Billinger

Click here to view the embedded video.

Panelists Father James Billinger, Kristi Smith and Therese Bangert, SCL

Panelist Sue Norton addressing the audience

While the arguments both for and against the death penalty are numerous and complex, there is something about the personal testimony provided by Sue and Kristi that renders much of that logic-chopping superfluous. These are two ordinary women, placed by cruel fate in extraordinary situations, and subsequently discovering within themselves personal resources to respond to those situations in truly remarkable ways. Guided by faith, Sue and Kristi ultimately found that their own healing could not progress unless they stood before the men whose violent actions had shattered their lives–not to curse them or rage at them or blame them, but to forgive them. They did not forsee how this decision would shape the susequent course of their lives, they only knew it was something they needed to do. The fact that both of the men they confronted were able to hear their words, and express genuine remorse, paved the way for what eventually became an experience of reconciliation for both women with the perpetrators.

It is perhaps this last point that struck me with the greatest impact as I listened to their remarks. Many opponents of the death penalty focus–quite rightly, I believe–on concerns about the possibility of erroneous conviction, about the injustices inherent in our judicial system, about the oxymoron entailed by killing to show that killing is wrong. But to the ears of those who argue in favor of the death penalty, these claims too often sound like taking the side of the convicted murderer. What of the victims’ families? they ask. What of the victims themselves? Do they not deserve more consideration than those who committed such heinous crimes?

In the stories told by Sue and Kristi, however, I heard something that I had not considered before–something that raises the discourse about the death penalty far above the false opposition between victim and perpetrator. Kristi Smith said it explicitly (I paraphrase): “It took me over 13 years before I was ready to talk to my father’s murderer. If the state of Kansas had put him to death, I never would have had the chance to forgive him in person. I never would have become reconciled with him, and the nightmares I had up until then might never have stopped.”

Much, much more was said Tuesday night that I found both moving and profound. But I wanted to highlight this one point in particular, because of the way it helped me to see the entire question in a new way. Something is lost when we put a murderer to death, something more than a life, and that is what may in the end be the best possible chance at healing for those among the living most affected by what happened.

Whether you attended or not, your thoughts and reflections are most welcome. Please post your comments and let us know what you think. (Please be patient. As this is a moderated forum, comments may take a few days to appear.)

7-9 p.m. – Free

Dugan-Gorges Conference Center, Newman University Campus

Speakers

• Sr. Therese Bangert, SCL
• Fr. James Billinger
• Sue Norton, member of Murder Vicitims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR)
• Kristi Smith of Kechi, Kan., member of MVFR

Panelists will each provide 10-15 minutes of remarks, followed by a moderated discussion incorporating both prepared questions and questions from the audience.

Ron Hansen has written several award-winning books, including Exiles, Atticus, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction. Hansen has received many literary awards and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships in literature from the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations. He has held numerous teaching positions at prestigious universities around the country, and been awarded honorary doctorates from several Catholic colleges, institutes and schools of theology. He earned a master’s degree in Spirituality at Santa Clara University, where he is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities. In 2007, he was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose.

Biography

Ron Hansen was born, with his twin brother, Rob, in Omaha, Neb., on Dec. 8, 1947. Educated in English literature at Creighton University, from which he graduated in 1970, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., then studied under highly respected writers John Irving and John Cheever at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, where his classmates included T. C. Boyle and Allan Gurganus. Iowa awarded him an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1974.

While traveling Illinois as a textbook salesman for Random House, Hansen began work on his first novel, Desperadoes, writing much of it in motel rooms at night, and finishing it under the guidance of John L’Heureux at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. Hansen was a Jones Lecturer in Writing at Stanford when Desperadoes was published in 1979, and has since held numerous teaching positions at universities around the country while publishing his subsequent work: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), a children’s book, The Shadowmaker (1987), a book of stories, Nebraska (1989), and the novels, Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), Atticus (1996), Hitler’s Niece (1999), and the screwball comedy Isn’t It Romantic? (2003). He has also edited two short story anthologies, You Don’t Know What Love Is (1987) and You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (1994). A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, his first book of non-fiction, was published in 2001, and his most recent novel, Exiles, about Victorian-era priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the 1875 shipwreck of the Deutschland, was published just last year.

Hansen has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships in literature from the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations. Twice a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner Award, for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Atticus, he was also a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Atticus. Mariette in Ecstasy won the fiction prize from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Exiles was a finalist for the same award. Hansen’s novels and stories were recognized with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1990.

Married to the writer Bo Caldwell, and the step-father of two children, Hansen has been awarded honorary doctorates from Spring Hill College in Alabama, Le Moyne College in New York, the Saint Thomas Aquinas Institute in St. Louis, the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, Loyola College in Baltimore, Md., and the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, Calif. In 1995 he earned an M.A. in Spirituality at Santa Clara University, where he is now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities. On Jan. 13, 2007 he was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose.

UPDATE (1/28/10): Dr. Anders has resigned his fellowship for personal reasons.