welcome to Jesuits WEst core
We long for change - for the conversion of hearts and minds to the demands of love and justice, the work of truth and reconciliation, and the building of beloved communities of mutual belonging and universal kinship. This change we long for begins in encounter.
The desire for a toolkit on work for racial justice grew out of the Faith Doing Justice Discernment Series (FDJDS), an experiment in community organizing across the Jesuits West province. After months of intentional encounters across different works and regions of the province, participants in the FDJDS asked for a toolkit. Then, we co-created it. In doing so we sought to ask a simple question of ourselves, our schools, our parishes, our universities, our spirituality centers, our social service and community works: do we own the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the excluded in our midst? Are we making enough progress as followers of Christ and the Ignatian tradition? Are we risking enough? What would help us to make greater progress in our personal and institutional lives? What would embolden us to risk even more for the sake of love and justice? We wanted for change. We began in encounter. We created this toolkit.
Encounters across difference - even in the complex dynamics of affectivity within the depths of a single human heart - are often disruptive and difficult to navigate. Like the manual of Spiritual Exercises authored by St. Ignatius over half a century ago, this toolkit is intended to support those committed to such difficult work so that the disruption of meaningful encounter might lead to creative reimagination and prophetic action for lasting conversion and deep vocational commitment at every level of our personal and political lives - fully human lives lived in the love and service of divine intimacy and creative universality.
This toolkit is not complete. It is living and breathing, and it needs your help!
If you have a resource you can add to our toolkit please add it here.
Resources for Institutional Change
Resources for Personal and Interpersonal Formation
why we made the toolkit
The members of the Jesuits West community, ordained and lay, staff, volunteers, students, parishioners, and benefactors, are heirs to a bold theological framework which speaks with moral clarity to our moment in time. This robust theological foundation supports a practical and progressive humanistic spirituality of ongoing discernment and committed action for the service of faith and promotion of justice. We ought to drink deeply and confidently from our own well.
But there are other wells from which to draw nourishment and wisdom. We find today a rich plurality of wisdom when it comes to the deeply personal and broadly institutional work of anti-racism. Some in our province-wide community will carry with them the narratives of sacred scripture and religious tradition; some will hold a humanistic sensitivity to the Ignatian story or spiritual practice; while others are steeped in the psycho-social dynamics of intercultural dialogue, equity and inclusion work, or anti-racist praxes. In each case, it is in the encounter of these pools of wisdom where the strongest currents of change begin to churn.
Inside of each section, you’ll discover materials and methods to do the work of racial justice in your context. Every response across the province will not, cannot, look the same. In fact, we’ve learned hard lessons as a spiritual community about painting with too broad of a brush, insisting everyone get on board with one ideology, or just retreating completely from the tension. But there is good work for you to do toward racial justice, adapted to the “joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties” of your community, that you can, and should start on, now. Everyone needs a different kind of push.
This toolkit is not complete. It is living and breathing, and it needs your help!
If you have a resource you can add to our toolkit please add it here.
Resources for Institutional Change
Resources for Personal and Interpersonal Formation