Margaret Pfeil, Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame Department of Theology will present “Restorative Justice and Racial Reconciliation” at Newman University at 7 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 7 in the Dugan-Gorges Conference Center.
The event, sponsored by the Gerber Institute for Catholic Studies, is free and open to the public and is part of the institute’s 2013-2014 focus on the theme of Race and Reconciliation.
“The talk will consider a restorative approach to justice and draw correlations to the specific issues raised by racial reconciliation, using examples and inviting the audience to offer their own examples,” Pfeil said.
“For many of us, race is a difficult topic,” added Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Gerber Institute Jamey Findling. “When we hear about race in the news, it seems the news is usually bad. Although there are those who claim we should just stop talking about it, race remains a major source of tension and conflict in our society.”
Pfeil holds a joint appointment in the Theology Department and in the Center for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame. Pfeil’s research interests include Catholic social thought, racial justice, ecological ethics, and peace studies.
“Margaret Pfeil’s lecture will be an engaging, example-filled discussion of restorative justice at work in the context of racial reconciliation,” Findling said. “As a professor of moral theology at Notre Dame, Dr. Pfeil can help us understand how Catholic social teachings intersect with the cause of racial justice and orient us towards the work that remains to be done, both in our hearts and in our communities.”
Pfeil also is the co-founder and a resident of the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker Community in South Bend, Ind. The Catholic Worker houses were founded by Catholic social reformer Dorothy Day and seek to foster practice of the church’s traditional corporal works of mercy. It is a community of Catholics with the goal to feed and shelter the homeless, practice works of mercy, and oppose the works of war.
Pfeil is also a faculty fellow of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, which is considered one of the world’s leading centers for the study of the causes of violent conflict and strategies for sustainable peace.
With Tobias Winright, she co-edited Violence, Transformation, and the Sacred: They Shall Be Called Children of God (Orbis Books, 2012). With Gerald Schlabach, she is co-editor of Sharing Peace: Mennonites and Catholics in Conversation (Liturgical Press, 2013), and with Laurie Cassidy and Alex Mikulich she is co-author of The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance (Palgrave, 2013). She has also published many essays in books and articles in various academic publications.
