WNPJ Annual Fall Assembly - in Milwaukee - Oct. 4th, 2008

Saturday, October 4^th – 2008 WNPJ Annual Fall Assembly….. Milwaukee

Featured Speaker - Dan Kenney - "Blackwater - and Private Security Firms"; Peacemaker of the Year Awards; business meeting and more. All welcome!  Watch for registration materials....

 

Biographical information of Dan Kenney

Dan Kenney is an educator, activist, and investigative journalist. He is the co-coordinator of the DeKalb Interfaith Network for Peace and Justice. He is co-founder and co-coordinator of noprivatearmies.org and of the Clearwater Project to stop Blackwater World Wide. He also was a founding member of the Illinois Coalition for Peace and Justice.

 His article “Lurking Beneath The Surface of Blackwater North” has been widely published on the web. He also has been published in newspapers and journals. He has often spoken to citizen groups on the issue of private armies and Blackwater in particular. He presented this past November at the School Of Americas Vigil in Columbus Georgia and on the campus of Northwestern University.  On February 2^nd 2008, he presented at an international conference at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The conference is entitled: “The Privatization of Security and Human Rights in The Americas: Perspectives from the Global South.”

 He serves on the Board of Directors of the DeKalb Teachers’ Union Local of the American Federation of Teachers. He also is a member of the City of DeKalb Environmental Commission. His poetry has also appeared in journals. In addition to the above he is a fourth grade teacher in the DeKalb School District of DeKalb Illinois. Contact: Dan Kenney at dkenney@dekalbinterfaithnetwork.org

 

The Fall Assembly will be hosted by:

Marquette University Center for Peacemaking
Contact: G.Simon Harak, S.J., Director
Address: MU, Academic Staff Bldg, 201, 735 N. 17th St. PO Box 1881,Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
Phone: 414-288-8444 (office) Fax: 414-288-8466
Website: www.marquette.edu/peacemaking E-Mail: Peacemaking@Marquette.edu

 

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Report from the 2007 Assembly - Racine:

More than 80 WNPJ members and friends participated in the

17th Annual Fall Assembly of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice - Fall 2007- in Racine.

Program

8:30 am Registration with coffee provided by the Racine Coalition for P&J

9 - 10:00 am Keynote by Simon Harak
The Global War on Terror: Who Wins? Who Loses?

10:15 - 12 noon Plenary & WNPJ Business Meeting
Consensus on the 2008 Budget, Executive Committee and By-Laws

12 noon - 12:45 pm Anti-war Demonstration coordinated by the Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice - with Steve Burns, program coordinator for WNPJ

12:45 - 1:30 pm Lunch - Family Farm Defender Grilled Cheese and Veggie Burgers, plus potluck salads and desserts. Bring your favorite to share.

1:30- 3:15 pm Breakout Groups -

· Iraq War – Steve Burns, Joy First & Judith Williams
· Immigrant Rights - Janet Parker & staff of the Worker Justice Center in Madison
· Prison Industrial Complex - John Peck

3:30 - 5 pm Peacemakers of the Year Awards & Reception - Kathy Dakter

2007 Lifetime Achievement Award - John LaForge - Nukewatch, Luck

2007 Peacemakers: Sarah Quinn (Madison), Jim Murphy (Portage), and Sue Ruggles (Glendale).

Directions to the WNPJ Assembly site in Racine: Take Interstate 94 North from Chicago or South from Milwaukee. At the exit for State Highway 20 to Racine, go East into Racine about five miles. Highway 20 becomes Washington Avenue within the city and then becomes 7th Street going east, one way, toward the lake. Keep going East until you get to College Avenue. You will see the Courthouse and the Presbyterian Church on the right. Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church is on the left at College Ave.

Featured Speaker - G. Simon Harak, SJ 
Milwaukee, WI
gsharaksj@gmail.com

 G. Simon Harak, S. J. entered the Society of Jesus (an order of Catholic priests) in 1970, and has served as a missionary in Jamaica and the Philippines. He has a B.A from Fairfield University, an M.div from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame. He finished his Ph.D. from Notre Dame in ethics on a national fellowship and began teaching ethics at Fairfield University in 1986. He was John Early Visiting Professor at Loyola College in Baltimore, MD in 1992-3. In 1995, he was chosen “Teacher of the Year” by the Fairfield University students. In 1998, he gave the Staley Lecture for Distinguished Christian Scholars, at Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, IA, and attained the rank of full professor at Fairfield, having served 5 years as Chair of the Academic Council.

He has written Virtuous Passions: The Formation of Christian Character (Paulist, 1993), edited Aquinas and Empowerment: Classical Ethics for Ordinary Lives (Georgetown University Press, 1996), and Nonviolence for the Third Millennium: Its Legacy and Its Future (Mercer University Press, 2000), co-edited _Beyond Boundaries: Student Volunteers in the Developing World_ (JASPA, 1998). He has published numerous articles and is currently writing Vicious Passions: The Deformation of Christian Character.

He is a member of various professional organizations in theology and ethics, including the Society for Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice.

He has been active in the peace movement, and helped found Voices in the Wilderness, which was nominated in 2000, 2002. and 2003 for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has traveled to Iraq three times with VOICES, where he openly and publicly violated US/UN sanctions to bring medicine and toys to Iraqi hospitals. During one of his visits, he was the only American representative among 500 international participants at the Baghdad International Conference on the Sanctions [May 1-4, 1999], presenting 2 plenary papers, and a paper to the Committee on Humanitarian Effects of the Sanctions. He has since then made over 2,000 presentations on Iraq on TV, radio, and at different venues in the US and abroad, and to a congress of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) at the UN building. In 1998, he resigned his full professorship at Fairfield University, to work full time with Voices in the Wilderness against the sanctions.

Among his many presentations, he was honored to give the Inaugural Richard McSorley, S. J. Lecture for Peace and Justice at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the Augustana Theological Lecture at Augustana College in Alberta, Canada.

In 2003, Harak joined the War Resisters League as its National Anti-Militarism Coordinator, where he organized a National Speakers Bureau on war profiteering, and a national conference on war profiteering at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis-St. Paul in 2006. In 2006, he was named Pax Christi’s Long Island’s National Peacemaker of the Year, and Pax Christi’s New York City’s Peacemaker of the year. He has written articles and given numerous presentations on war profiteering across the country, spending July 2006 in Germany on a speaking tour. He will return to speak in Germany and Poland in the Summer of 2007.

In January 2007, Harak left his position as at the War Resisters League to join Marquette University in Milwaukee as a professor of theology and as the Director of the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking.

Committee chair: Barb Boehme at barbarab@tds.net or call 608-831-1786