Then a catastrophic surfing accident on the New Jersey shore in September 2013 shattered his life in an instant. A wave slammed him headfirst into the ocean floor, fracturing his neck in five places. His heart stopped. Emergency workers resuscitated him on the ambulance ride to the hospital.

When Keenan awoke, he was paralyzed from the mid-chest down. His prognosis was bleak. Doctors weren’t sure he’d ever be able to breathe on his own.

‘I Cried to God for Mercy’

Five years later, Keenan visited Fordham’s Westchester campus in West Harrison to speak about his recovery, and how he clawed his way back to once more live a fulfilling life. It was a steep climb for the Fordham ROTC grad, who served as a U.S. Army platoon leader in Honduras in 1992.

“My grief was so profound I couldn’t sleep,” recalled Keenan. “I lay there, listening to the sound of the ventilator. I cried to God for mercy, and mercy meant a peaceful passing. I felt I could be of no good, of no service, only a burden to my children, my family, and my friends.”

What changed Keenan’s attitude was a conversation he had eight weeks after his surfing calamity with former New York City police detective Steven McDonald, who’d been living with quadriplegia since 1986, when he was shot three times in the line of duty. McDonald told Keenan that God had a role for him, that life would return.

Gone were many of Keenan’s joys: playing guitar and tin whistle with the band, Summer Wind; competing in sports; and teaching history to teens in the high school classroom.

“I had a huge decision to make: Do I allow the darkness to consume me and beat me down and defeat me?” he said.

Keenan chose life.

Four months after he broke his neck, Keenan was off the ventilator. He learned to maneuver a motorized wheelchair with the “sip and puff” technology that lets him steer it with inhalation or exhalation.

Among Keenan’s friends is James J. Houlihan, managing partner of Houlihan-Parnes Realtors, who knew Keenan’s father.

“I can’t imagine going through a small piece of what Billy has gone through and still remain positive,” said Houlihan, GABELLI ’74, a Fordham trustee who helped bring Keenan to campus to share his story. “He did not choose to go to the dark side. He did not give up.”

‘A Message of Hope’

By 2015, Keenan was teaching again at North Rockland High. Almost two years later, however, he was hospitalized for two weeks and almost died from an infection that ended his teaching career.

Keenan said he faced that recurring question: “Do I sit in a room feeling sorry for myself, getting lost in self-pity? That didn’t happen. I realized I wasn’t strong enough to teach five days a week, but I was strong enough to speak one or two times a week, to share a message of hope to people who feel beaten down.”

Keenan’s mind remains sharp, his voice strong, his will unwavering.

“I want you to remember the man in the wheelchair,” he said at the Fordham event.  “You are able-bodied and able-minded. There is absolutely nothing you cannot do. Imagine what you can achieve, the adversity you can fight through and withstand. In the end, the decision is yours.”

After the speech, several attendees gathered around Keenan to thank him for his inspiring words. One woman was so touched that tears streamed down her face from the realization that she’d be happier if she appreciated what was good in her own life.

“Don’t be sad,” Keenan instructed her. “I’m not.”

—David McKay Wilson

For Guy Consolmagno, S.J., it has been both, perhaps in equal doses. In a talk on the Fordham campus on Feb. 26, Brother Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, said that religion and science enjoy a long partnership in humans’ endeavor to understand the world in which they live.

“Studying science is an act of worship,” said Brother Consolmagno, a graduate of MIT, former Peace Corps volunteer, author, and research astronomer. “You have to have faith in the questions you are asking.”

Delivering the John C. and Jeanette D. Walton Lecture in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Brother Consolmagno drew parallels between an unlikely pair: Galileo, a Renaissance man who created the telescope and changed science forever, and Pope Francis, whose concern for climate change’s effects on the world’s poor is aimed at reinvigorating the Catholic mission.

“Galileo Would Have Been On The Colbert Show”

Had he been born in the 20^th century rather than the 16^th, Galileo would have been world-renown, “a media star … just like Carl Sagan,” said Brother Consolmagno. “[He] would have been on The Colbert Show, the Tonight Show.” Although Galileo’s notoriety landed him in some trouble with the church in his day, said Brother Consolmagno, his important scientific discoveries set in motion a revolution on how scientists make assumptions about the universe. It moved science from the Golden Age of celebrating book knowledge of the past, to the scientific revolution of seeking knowledge for the future.

“Galileo was special because he had the telescope and was able to see and understand what he was seeing . . . the moon’s craters . . . the Orion Nebula,” said Brother Consolmagno. “And he was seeing things that were not in any book.”

“He understood why it mattered, and he knew it was important to tell the world.”

Laudato Si’: What Pope Francis Sees

Brother Consolmagno called the pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, an entreaty that doesn’t settle scientific questions but draws on today’s scientific research to conclude “the environment is reaching a breaking point that will cause a change in humanity that cannot be fixed by technology.” Francis says these ecological problems are symptoms of much deeper social justice issues, “symptoms that come out of personal sins” and our detachment from God.

“The pope is [offering]new assumptions, just as Galileo saw a new set of assumptions in how the universe works,” he said.

The pope’s call to action, said Brother Consolmagno, is for human beings to develop a new set of ethics, “a new idea of what is wrong” in the human relationship to nature and human ecology. Nature, like the human, is a creation of God; therefore it is mankind’s to care for like a sibling, not to own.

Nor are humans gods who can fix ecological degradation through technology, he said. Technology advances over time, but human ethics tend to waver: a technologically-advanced society may not necessarily solve the earth’s problems.

“Ask yourself who had better ethics: Nazi Germany? Or Socrates?”

By calling for a change in our humanity, the pope’s encyclical does much to demonstrate why science needs faith, said Brother Consolmagno.

“How do we know what change will be for the better? Ultimately, the Jesuit answer is, if it brings us—human beings who will never be God—closer to God.”

Their goal was to emphasize the dangers associated with the unrestricted Web, especially pornography and gender mixing. Rabbinic leaders discussed the internet’s encroachment on ultra-Orthodox Jewish values in an age they dubbed “a crisis of emune (faith).”

Nearly five years later, Ayala Fader, Ph.D., an associate professor of anthropology, sees this challenge in the ultra-Orthodox community as a critical moment of cultural and religious change. She said the internet has amplified existing tensions among the ultra-Orthodox. There is a sense that more and more ultra-Orthodox Jews are leaving their communities or losing faith, but continuing to practice publicly— living what they call “double lives.”

As a result, Fader said, the internet has become a nexus for these concerns, with leadership trying to control its use and those living double lives using it as a lifeline to connect with other religious doubters.

“I don’t know if so many more people are leaving than a decade earlier or if they’re just louder, more public, and more well-organized, but I think there’s a sense in the communities that this is a moment when they need to start thinking about how they’re going to move into the 21st century,” said Fader, author of Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (Princeton University Press, 2009)

Fader has been awarded a $50,400 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her forthcoming book, Double Life: Faith, Doubt and the internet, which examines the community’s contemporary struggle to define authentic ultra-Orthodoxy.

“I was thrilled to be awarded the fellowship. It will give me sustained time to just focus on writing the book,” said Fader, who has been conducting research on this topic since 2013.

Fader first began the project by connecting with ultra-Orthodox Jews who had, during the mid-2000s, been active on the J-blogosphere, a Jewish blogging community. After interviewing members of various forums and Jewish blogging sites, she learned that the internet gave ultra-Orthodox Jews living double lives an opportunity to explore secular knowledge and activities, like going out together, and learning to bicycle and ski. It also provided a space where they could anonymously critique their communities and their rabbinic leadership.

“There are a lot of reasons that led people to lose faith in the kind of ultra-Orthodoxy they were living,” said Fader, who noted that the community had adapted to other types of technologies in the past—from newspapers and radio to television and books—without as much difficulty. “The internet is problematic because people need to use it for business. You can’t throw out the internet and you can’t keep it out. It’s also easily accessed, privately.”

Watch Ayala Fader discuss the ultra-Orthodox community’s response to “kosher” cellphones. 

To better influence their constituency to resist the lure of the internet, many rabbinic leaders are working closely with ultra-Orthodox schools.

“If you don’t agree to sign a contract when your children begin school [pledging]that you won’t have the internet at home, [and]that you won’t have a smartphone, then your kids can be denied access to school,” said Fader. “There are people who have left their communities—not because they didn’t have access to smartphones but because they didn’t feel they could continue to live these kinds of double lives.”

In recent years, there have been a few compromises allowing for some use. In 2013, the cell phone company Rami Levy Communications began selling “kosher smartphones” or rabbi-approved mobile phones that filter and block content considered immoral. Samsung, one of the world’s largest tech companies, debuted its first kosher smartphone specifically for ultra-Orthodox users last year.

Yet, despite efforts to permit some access to the Web, there is still a push to position smartphones as dangerous or contaminating objects, said Fader.

“There is a movement to not carry smartphones out in public, and an effort by educators in particular to create a sense of shame in having them,” said Fader.

She said the constant tug of war between the internet and religion isn’t limited to the ultra-Orthodox faith. It exists in many insular religious communities around the world.

“For religious communities that attempt to control their members’ access to the wider world, the internet is both an incredible tool and a dangerous piece of technology,” she said.

It was an important reminder during dark, perilous times. Hartmann participated in the D-Day landing at Normandy and several other brutal battles with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. His Fordham heritage, he wrote, had become “an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war.”

Hartmann’s son, Alfred Hartmann Jr., M.D., FCRH ’63, discovered the letter among his father’s things after his death in 2000 at age 89. “It says a lot about his relationship with Fordham, and Fordham’s relationship with the world,” he said.

Hartmann may never have had the chance to send his letter, but FORDHAM magazine is proud to share his enduring message of faith and gratitude with our readers.

The full text and an image of the letter appear below.

Men of Fordham on the Campus,

Your “Catholic Prayer Book for the Army and Navy,” via a circuitous mail route, reached me here. I want to thank you for a most thoughtful and useful remembrance. It gives a man a lift to realize that he is not forgotten, and the prayer book, by virtue of its pocketing ease, is a real adjunct to the service man.

When still on the beaches I used to ponder over such seemingly unnecessary incongruities as “good is derived from evil.” It is unfortunate that it takes a world holocaust to revive the merits of such institutions as Peace, the Home, Loyalty, Friendship and the like. It is too bad that man’s more shallow criteria of success are adequately exposed only by a global upheaval.

That “man does not live by bread alone,” furthermore, is proven conclusively only by the advent of chaos and sudden death. It takes more than finite equipment to weather the exigencies of total war. Without the sanctuary of our Faith, the multiple heartaches of the present added to the unknown and ominous forebodings of the future could drive men to the point of despair.

Fordham has always taught, teaches, and will continue to teach the true worth of human institutions, and the Faith without which mankind gropes in exterior darkness. What is more, Fordham propounds these principles even in the absence of … catastrophe. She affords to her matriculants the ability to evaluate the world about us, and to derive benefit from good times and evil times alike.

I am proud of my Fordham heritage. It is a heritage that becomes an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war. It is the intangible something-extra which always pays dividends in the heart. You too will come to the realization of this appreciation, as even now “with prayerful remembrance from the Fordham Men on the campus” indicates.

Sincerely,

Alfred A. Hartmann ’32

The annual concert, with its carols and biblical readings, has been a Fordham tradition for more than a quarter-century. But another tradition has been taking shape in connection with the concert—and it could be seen in the front pews, filled with 20 retired Jesuit priests along with the Fordham students who have been regularly visiting and assisting them.

The priests—who reside at Murray-Weigel Hall on the Rose Hill campus—have been making group visits to the concert for the past few years, accompanied by student volunteers who visit with them weekly and help them with daily tasks like getting around in wheelchairs or checking emails.

The students benefit as well. “We’re able to serve them and also learn from them,” said one of the student volunteers, Bernadette Haig.

The concert is inspired by the beloved British Christmas tradition that began in Cambridge, England, in 1918. Christmas favorites, including “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Ave Maria,” were performed by the Fordham University Choir, the Fordham University Schola Cantorum and the Fordham University Women’s Choir with the Bronx Arts Ensemble. The women’s choir not only sang “Silent Night” but also performed it in sign language during the last verse.

Jeanne Moccia, FCRH ’76, GSAS ’78, who arranged the Jesuit priests’ excursion, has been volunteering at the retirement home for 11 years. A former banker, she became involved after visiting two family friends who retired and moved into Murray-Weigel Hall.

“A couple of years into it, I started doing some things for the men,” she said, “like taking them on walks and accompanying them to events.”

Moccia also helped expand the student volunteer program, now 40 strong, and find new ways to integrate the older and younger generations who live on the Rose Hill campus. Murray-Weigel Hall, perched near Fordham Road on the southern edge of campus, houses an average of 60 Jesuits from widely different backgrounds. Some are retired educators and administrators from Catholic colleges throughout the Northeast; others worked as missionaries around the world.

“One of the perks is that the students can meet individuals who have led very interesting and service-oriented lives,” Moccia said.

Haig, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior, couldn’t agree more. She accompanied Richard Hoar, S.J., to the Festival of Lessons and Carols this year and has been visiting him weekly at Murray-Weigel since she was a sophomore.

A Long Island native, Haig is double majoring in engineering physics and classical civilization, and especially enjoys discussing her theology and philosophy classes with Father Hoar. She said she writes letters for and reads to the 90-year-old priest, who holds a degree in physics and served as a missionary in Micronesia for 23 years.

Juliette Dixon, a Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomore, pays weekly visits to George Restrepo, S.J., who just moved to Murray-Weigel from Canisius College in Buffalo. He holds a master’s degree in film from New York University, and worked in Baltimore and Puerto Rico earlier in his career.

“Jeanne does such a great job of matching people,” Dixon said. “Father Restrepo is very interested in music, film, and dance, and I am as well. So we always have something to talk about.”

Dixon, a ballet dancer who studies communications at Fordham, also helped organize a talent show for the priests last spring. Another group of students plays music for a small group of the priests each week.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols was a perfect outing for the priest-student pairs, who seem to share an appreciation of the arts.

In his remarks after the concert, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, told the audience that among them was a very special member of the Fordham community. Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., GSAS ’68, president of Fordham from 1984 to 2003, was seated in the front row with Jacqueline Tobin, a Fordham College at Rose Hill freshman who’s been visiting Father O’Hare at his Murray-Weigel residence since the fall.

“The concert gives us a chance to put a framework around these times of transition,” Father O’Hare said after returning to Murray-Weigel. “As we end one year and begin another, this is an opportunity for all of us, young and old, to reflect. It’s a nice tradition.”

—Claire Curry

AUDIO: WFUV, Fordham’s listener-supported public media service, will broadcast a recording of the December 4 concert at 10:30 p.m. EST on Christmas Eve. And you can listen to it anytime here on WFUV’s website.

At this moment when our undocumented students are most vulnerable and afraid, I am writing to you to inform you that I have signed three documents that I hope make it clear that Fordham sees and embraces undocumented students as valued and loved members of our community, that Fordham stands with them, and that we will do all we can to be effective advocates for them. Since my signature signals not only my endorsement, but the endorsement of the entire University community of the sentiments contained in them, I assure you that I did not sign them lightly. Rather, I did so only after a great deal of research and prayer.

Because he was himself an immigrant and the victim of prejudice and discrimination both in Ireland and in the United States, and because he was the bishop of a largely immigrant community that suffered from the same discrimination from which he had suffered, Archbishop Hughes was passionately devoted to America’s immigrants. Therefore, when he founded Saint John’s College (Fordham University) in 1841, he did so to create a school that would make it possible for the immigrants whom he served to receive an education that would both confound their enemies and enable them to take their rightful place in American society.

For its entire 175-year history, Fordham has kept faith with its founder’s vision and committed itself in a special way to serving immigrants and their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. To be sure, the ethnic identities of the students whom Fordham has served have changed in the course of time. Through the decades, however, the University has never deviated from its historic mission of welcoming and serving new Americans, a mission that has shaped and defined us, and a mission that has enriched us beyond measure. I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that as the grandson of four Irish immigrants and the son of a first-generation college graduate whose life was transformed by the education that he received here at Fordham, the University’s devotion to and service of generations of new Americans is especially close to my heart.

Of course, Archbishop Hughes’s legacy is not the only reason that the University has always been drawn to the service of new Americans. Far from it. Our Catholic roots remind us of the Gospel mandate to serve those at the peripheries, and to ‎treat them as cherished sisters and brothers. Our Jesuit identity places upon us the sacred responsibility to treat every student in our care with cura personalis, that is to say, we are called and challenged to treat every Fordham student with reverence, respect and affirming love.

In light of the powerful forces that have shaped us, we can never turn away from those members of our community who are most vulnerable. To do so would be a betrayal of both the ideals that we hold most dear and the sacred mission to which we have devoted ourselves for the past 175 years. We simply cannot do that. We will not do that.

Below is the complete text of the statement written by the presidents of the member schools of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), and links to the 2013 AJCU statement, the Pomona Statement, and the statement of the member schools of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

As I close, let me ask you to pray for all of our students, and especially our undocumented students. I assure you that you all remain in my prayers.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.
President

Statement of AJCU Presidents – November 2016

As Presidents of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities we feel spiritually and morally compelled to raise a collective voice confirming our values and commitments as Americans and educators. We represent colleges and universities from across our nation with more than 215,000 students and more than 21,000 faculty, and more than 2 million living alumni.

Grounded in our Catholic and Jesuit mission, we are guided by our commitment to uphold the dignity of every person, to work for the common good of our nation, and to promote a living faith that works for justice. We see our work of teaching, scholarship and the formation of young minds and spirits as a sacred trust.

That trust prompts us to labor for solidarity among all people, and especially with and for the poor and marginalized of our society. That trust calls us to embrace the entire human family, regardless of their immigration status—or religious allegiance. And experience has shown us that our communities are immeasurably enriched by the presence, intelligence, and committed contributions of undocumented students, as well as of faculty and staff of every color and from every faith tradition.

Therefore, we will continue working:

• To protect to the fullest extent of the law undocumented students on our campuses;
• To promote retention of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA);
• To support and stand with our students, faculty and staff regardless of their faith traditions;
• To preserve the religious freedoms on which our nation was founded.

As we conclude this Year of Mercy, we make our own the aims enunciated by Pope Francis: “Every human being is a child of God! He or she bears the image of Christ! We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved.”

We hope that this statement will inspire members of our University communities, as well as the larger national community, to promote efforts at welcome, dialogue, and reconciliation among all that share our land. We welcome further conversation and commit ourselves to modeling the kind of discourse and debate that are at the heart of our nation’s ideals. And we promise to bring the best resources of our institutions – of intellect, reflection, and service–to bear in the task of fostering understanding in the United States at this particular time in our history.

AJCU 2013 Statement

Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities Statement

Pomona Statement

Last year, Javontae Hawkins averaged 18 points and 5 rebounds per game. This year, he’s ready to revitalize Fordham basketball.

“We’re going to be good this year,” says Hawkins. “I can feel it. Make sure you get to a game because when you come, you’ll be seeing us win!”

Hawkins is the first student of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education who is also a competing student-athlete, having joined the Rams’ basketball team. After two years at Southern Florida University and two years at Eastern Kentucky University (he red-shirted his junior year at EKU), Hawkins decided to change the course of his graduate education.

His decision to come to Fordham was two-pronged; he desired both the athletic and the academic edge the University gave him. During his time at EKU, he grew fond of the his coaching staff. When the EKU staff members moved to Fordham, he came with them.

“It’s hard to find such a strong coaching relationship,” says Hawkins. “I wanted to keep it, but I also wanted to widen my academic prospects. I knew Fordham took academics seriously. I wanted to have Fordham on my resume.”

Hawkins is pursing a Master of Arts in Pastoral Care, a field he was inspired to enter by his father, Jeffery Hawkins, pastor of Prince of Peace Missionary Baptist Church in his family’s hometown of Flint, Michigan. His father has been instrumental in encouraging programs to prevent crime and violence in Flint neighborhoods, he said. He has often accompanied his father when he speaks at churches and schools in the area.

Hawkins says that pastoral counseling integrates theology and psychological knowledge into pastoral ministries, which aspects he believes crucial in providing effective care. He hopes to emulate his father’s passion and “imitate how he carries himself.”

“My father has been a pastor for about 14 years,” he says. “He is a motivator and a support system for so many. I want to be that for people, too. I want to be a role model— the positive force in other peoples’ lives.”

Hawkins says he, too, is familiar with being a role model for others: As the only graduate student on the team, he has to act as a “good example” for his younger teammates, and recently accompanied assistant coach Mike DePaoli to a Bronx high school to speak about goal-setting and following the path God chooses for us.

Once Hawkins earns his degree, he hopes to work with adolescents struggling with anxiety, mental illness, and peer pressure. Adolescence is an important time, he says, and he wants to support young adults during this difficult stage of life.

Of course, that job will come after he plays in the NBA, says Hawkins, who is looking forward to making basketball his career before turning to counseling.

“Basketball will definitely be in my future,” he says. “Whether I play in the NBA or overseas for another country, I want to play professionally. These are things you have to do when you’re young, and I refuse to miss the opportunity.”

No matter which way life takes him, he insists that he will strive to chase his dreams and help others accomplish theirs as well.

“It’s God’s call at the end of the day.”

–Mary Awad

In fact, Uwadione’s sons, ages 1 and 9, have provided the most important motivation during his years at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, where he earned a degree in organizational leadership with a minor in economics.

“I know the importance of my degree not just for myself but also for my children,” he said. “I want to live a life of exemplary conduct. I want to be able to say, ‘Well, I could do this and you should be able to do it.’”

Originally from Nigeria, Uwadione has been living in New York for 12 years. He was drawn to study at Fordham not just by its academic reputation, he said, but also because of its Jesuit traditions.

“Fordham is unique in that there are elements of faith that are part of the academic community, and that is something that you don’t find everywhere,” he said.

For Uwadione, who is of the Bahá’í faith, the sharing of spiritual life is of central importance. Each month, he hosts up to 25 people in his home for a “tranquility zone,” an evening of meditation and conviviality.

“It is a devotional gathering, a place where people of different faiths, or of no faith, will come together once a month and we eat, we pray, and we play,” he said.

This concern for the creation of peaceful communities led Uwadione to a course in philosophical ethics taught by Gerard Farley, PhD, adjunct professor in the Department of Philosophy.

The course resonated deeply for Uwadione because it examined the role of ethics in daily life, a topic of particular concern for him, he said, “coming from a country where corruption has pretty much plagued the system.”

Uwadione works in supply chain management and is the director of operations at a small logistics company. He plans to use his degree to advance in his career, but just as important, he wants to continue the community service that plays a large role in his life.

He serves as president of the regional Ndokwa Association in America, a not-for-profit cultural organization dedicated to improving education and living conditions in a region in Nigeria. Uwadione also serves as the chairman of the association’s national scholarship board, which funds African students who excel academically but who cannot pay for their schooling.

In his own education, Uwadione’s steadfast pursuit of excellence has paid off. In 2015, he was inducted into Alpha Sigma Lambda, the national honor society for adult students, and in the 2015-2016 academic year he was the recipient of the Morton Levy Scholarship.

Though he leaves Fordham this spring, Uwadione says his ties to the school University will always be strong.

“Fordham is now family. Once you are a member of the family of academics you are there forever.”

–Nina Heidig

“He was yelling into the phone, ‘Get that woman home! How dare you—she belongs with her husband! Those children belong with their father!” MacNichol said of the experience that launched her 30-year career combating domestic violence.

“I was really shaken. I call that my baptism by fire. It was a call to make it my ministry to figure out how faith, theology, and religious communities intersect with this terrible problem.”

MacNichol, PhD, the co-executive director of CONNECT, a New-York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice, was the keynote speaker at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s fourth annual pastoral counseling conference on May 6.

The daylong conference, “Spiritual Geographies of Domestic Violence,” discussed the stark realities of interpersonal violence and the ways faith communities can better serve survivors.

Intimate partner violence and domestic violence is defined as any actual or threatened physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, verbal, spiritual, or economic abuse that impairs one’s ability to function in a “self-determining or healthy way,” said MacNichol. Abuse is often coercive and recurrent, and the intent is for the abuser to maintain power and control.

Faith-based and religious communities could be invaluable resources for women, men, and children in crisis, but lack of education and unwillingness to confront these issues cause these groups to mishandle abusive situations, MacNichol said.

“The bible is full of family violence,” said MacNichol, who was recently named one of New York’s New Abolitionists. “We need to start asking ourselves what in our theologies promotes domestic violence? What in our interpretations of scripture and communal practices allow us to turn a blind eye to, or even rationalize and directly participate in, domestic violence?”

Many people judge the severity of abuse by whether or not the victims are physically injured, but MacNichol stressed that all types of abuse can cause lasting harm. The stress of nonphysical abuse can have dire impacts on victims’ overall health. Moreover, because the damage is not visible, victims are more likely to question whether the situation is, in fact, abusive.

“There has never been a domestic violence survivor that hasn’t said to me that the emotional abuse was worse than the physical,” she said. “You can see bruises, and they heal. But you can’t see spiritual and emotional wounds, and these take a long time to heal.”

We need to become more aware and less tolerant of invisible abuses, MacNichol said, or else a wide swath violence will remain undetected and unresolved. Faith communities have the ability—and the responsibility, she said—both to lead these conversations and to reduce inflicting further harm on victims (for instance, working to save an abusive marriage at all costs, rather than helping an abused spouse who is trying to escape).

“When you’re preaching on Sunday, think about how it might sound to someone who is struggling with violence,” MacNichol said. “We have to think about [how we]can create safe spaces where people can come for help… where we can accompany them through the maze of self-doubt and shame.”

The conference also featured Jill Snodgrass, PhD, an assistant professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola University Maryland and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Her talk, “The Prison Paradox: Liberated from Abuse Behind Bars,” detailed the pervasiveness of interpersonal violence and trauma histories among women in prison and the irony that these women find safety only after landing behind bars.

Moderated by Tiffany Steinwert, PhD, dean of the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life at Wellesley College, the panel examined the ways that three religious traditions—Catholicism, Judaism, and Orthodox Christianity—deal with divorce and remarriage.

Although each tradition has customs and protocols to formally recognize the end of a marriage, there is a noticeable lack of spiritual and emotional support, especially when compared to the marriage preparation process. This problematic when the reality is that between 40 and 50 percent of marriages in the United States end in divorce, and marriage rates overall are dropping.

“Fewer people are choosing to get married, and it is increasingly difficult to sustain a marriage over the long haul,” said Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

Moreover, marriage “is increasingly a choice made by people at the upper echelons of the economic and educational system, which is interesting, because in many ways it was an institution that had to do with creating certain economic stability for the partners in it, and it seems to no longer do that for the people who we might think need it most,” he said.

Faith communities need to show more compassion to congregants who go through divorces, the panelists said. One improvement might be to eliminate shaming language used to talk about these issues—for instance, referring to a marriage “failing” when it ends in divorce.

“Take out the language of obligation from divorce, and the language of sin or right and wrong,” said Aristotle Papanikolaou, PhD, the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture and the co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

“See it instead as a moment of brokenness and loss, a moment in which God meets you where you’re at.”

Such language is not only alienating, but in some cases is blatantly wrong, said Darlene Fozard Weaver, PhD, an associate professor of theology at Duquesne University.

“There is a misconception that divorce itself is understood to be a sin, which is not true. It’s not a teaching of the Catholic Church that you’ve sinned simply by getting divorced, but [that’s] the lay understanding,” Weaver said.

“You take a sense of failure and then layer on top of that this perception of divine disapprobation, and that’s an extremely heavy burden to bear. That makes it more difficult to speak about divorce in ways that are compassionate and humane.”

Another misconception—which has made headlines recently, thanks to Pope Francis and the 2014-15 synods of bishops on the family—is whether divorced and civilly remarried Catholics can partake in communion. Like the conflation of divorce with sin, the issue of communion is poorly understood, said Peter E. Fink, SJ, associate pastor at St. Francis Xavier Church in Manhattan.

“You can never actually turn anyone away from Eucharist—no matter who comes, no matter where they are in their lives,” Father Fink said.

“If you have a person who is divorced and remarried, and who sincerely desires the Eucharist with all their heart, he or she cannot be denied.”

The panel was co-sponsored by Orthodox Christian Studies Center and the Center on Religion and Culture, and was inspired by a panel of the same title created by Donald J. Kirby, SJ, the Robert A. Mitchell, SJ Chair at Le Moyne College, as part of a series on forgiveness.

A memorial service for Parker will be held on Saturday, Oct. 3rd at 11 a.m. at the Church of the Highlands in White Plains.

A minister and director of communications for the United Church of Christ in the 1960s, Parker petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to deny the renewal of a broadcast license to a TV station in 1964 for its failure to serve the public interest, as required by law.

He argued that although blacks made up 43 percent of the viewing audience, the station, WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi, did not cover civil rights news or the black community, and often referred to blacks pejoratively on the air. In 1969, future Supreme Court chief justice Warren E. Burger, then a federal appellate judge, agreed.

It was the first time that a license was lifted for a broadcast station’s failure to serve the public interest, and it ushered in an era in which activists, such as Parker and Ralph Nader, monitored and challenged broadcasters both on content and discriminatory hiring practices.

Parker joined the Fordham University communications and media studies faculty as an adjunct professor in 1983. He taught well into his 90s.

He co-founded the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center in 1986 with colleague Jack Phelan, professor emeritus of media and politics. The center is dedicated to furthering understanding of the ethical and social justice dimensions of media and communication technologies, particularly how such technologies affect the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within society.

“All we’ve ever wanted to do is make it possible for people to express themselves through the system of broadcasting,” he told The New York Times in 1983.

“If broadcasters are to serve the public interest, they need to be reminded that they serve all the publics.”

Former WFUV Manager Ralph Jennings joined Parker’s team at the United Church of Christ shortly after the initial challenge to FCC and worked for him for 12 years. He based his doctoral dissertation in part on Parker’s work.

“Right out of graduate school Everett offered me a job. It was a chance to take all that idealism and do something with it,” he said.

“Because of the things that he let the staff do, because he trusted them, and he knew they would do things his way, it was great thing to work for him. He was tough, but he was a compassionate person as well.”

Gwenyth Jackaway, PhD, associate chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies, also met Parker when she was a graduate student and was becoming “disillusioned” with the slow pace of change in the industry. She recalled asking him how he managed to keep cynicism at bay as he fought the FCC and corporate media.

“The spirit of his response has stayed with me to this day. ‘We keep working towards reform,’ he told me, because there is no other choice.  Giving up the fight is not an option. Working to bring about change gives purpose to our professional lives,” she said.

“There is no question that Everett Parker saw his media reform activism as doing God’s work in the world.  He was an incredible inspiration, and was a staunch defender of the true spirit of what was originally intended by those who envisioned the broadcast media as servants of the public interest.”

Paul Levinson, PhD, professor of communication and media studies and former chair of the department, recalled that students regularly asked him how they could get into “Ev’s” course.

“He was in his 90s then, and had more energy than many faculty half his age. Fordham was fortunate indeed to have him in our midst,” he said.

Parker is survived by his daughters, Ruth Weiss and Eunice Kolczun; a son, the Rev. Truman E. Parker; seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the Emma L. Bowen Foundation, 300 New Jersey Avenue, N.W., Suite 700, Washington, DC 20001, or to the UCC’s Office of Communication, Inc.