The Joan and Ralph Lane Center
The Lane Center promotes teaching, research, and action inspired by Catholic social thought and the Jesuit commitment to justice.
Pierless Bridges
The Joan and Ralph Lane Center for Catholic Social Thought and the Ignatian Tradition
An annual publication of the Lane Center, Pierless Bridges highlights research and praxis that connects social analysis with theological and ethical reflection. It presents the Ignatian tradition and Catholicism in conversation with contemporary experiences. And it explores faith’s public dimension as it intersects with culture, politics, and society.
Volume 2: 2021
Encounter, Discern, Respond: Enacting Catholic Social Thought Amidst COVID-19
The storm exposes our vulnerability and uncovers those false and superfluous certainties around which we have constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits and priorities.
Ignatian Discernment in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Saint Ignatius of Loyola was known for his skills in spiritual discernment. These skills enabled him to find God in all things, particularly in times of confusion, difficulty, and hardship, like the one we currently face.
Peace Education: A Model in Africa by Africans
Peace education is key for establishing a consensual and sustainable peace in the world. Nothing replaces the value of peace education in families, schools, universities, churches, temples, and mosques.
Women’s Experiences and the Jesuit Mission: Discerning the Next Ten Years
In 2019, the Society of Jesus presented the fruits of a two-year discernment responding to the needs of the Jesuits and the Church. The results are the four Universal Apostolic Preferences (UAP): Showing the Way to God, Walking with the Excluded, Journeying with Youth, and Caring for Our Common Home.
A Workers' Blessing
In the spring of 2020, University of San Francisco Faculty Union (USFFA) president, Sonja Martin Poole, asked Kimberly Rae Connor, the Lane Center Faculty Chair for Mission Integration and its liaison to the USFFA, to create a blessing that USFFA members could share before their meetings.
A Reflection on Healing, Anti-Black Racism, and Cura Personalis
As we mark the one-year anniversary of COVID-19’s deadly emergence and the murder of Breonna Taylor, I’ve been reflecting on a passage from The Salt Eaters and its implications both at the personal and societal level. I’ve been asking, what must we take up and what must we let go as we fight against anti-Black racism and toward racial equity? How do we let go of the pain and hurt or perhaps, the unearned privilege and resources to allow wholeness and racial justice to come in?
Colorism and Economic Opportunity in Nigeria
Airah Balogun and Mutiu Fakorede are two Master’s students in USF’s International and Development Economics (IDEC) Master’s program who have had an unusual first year. Both are Nigerian, and due to the COVID-19 pandemic have been based in Lagos for the first year of their studies at USF.
Encouraging User Action on Environmental Justice Through Virtual Environments
Inspired by Laudato Si and the Universal Apostolic Preference to show care for our Common Home, the goal of my research is to affect user action on environmental justice through the means of an online, desktop, virtual environment. In this virtual setting, users embody first-person perspective, virtual scenarios that demonstrate the effects of environmental pollution and degradation.
Quarantine Connections: A Student Postcard-Making Project to Build Empathy & Community
As Lane Center Faculty Fellows this year, we had the opportunity to collaborate around Jesuit traditions in generative ways that eased the isolation we felt during the pandemic. As faculty members in the Department of Art + Architecture, we wished to respond to the unique challenges of 2020–21 through an art-making project that would bring together the department’s five programs and its faculty, staff, and students in a shared and mutually supportive enterprise.
Attention, Reverence, and Devotion: Inscribing Our Mission
During the remarkable 2020–2021 academic year, as the USF community adapted to the rapidly changing and unfamiliar environment, it also returned to its roots and undertook the task of creating a new mission statement.
Historical Threads in the Mission Statements of the University of San Francisco
The mission statements of the University of San Francisco form a tapestry, whose threads stretch back to the sixteenth century when Ignatius of Loyola sent his followers throughout the world to establish educational institutions and to promote Jesuit ideals.
The Spiritual Exercises and "The Creation": Work That Matters
Among the most enduring Africanisms that animates African American culture is the concept of nommo, the generative power of the word. Derived from the Dogon people of Mali, nommo calls on ancestral spirits to bring into existence all that is seen and unseen.
The Creation: A Negro Sermon
AND God stepped out on space, and He looked around and said: “I’m lonely — I’ll make me a world.”