Down by the water

For some time now, we have been discussing the possibility of reaffilating with the Lasallian Christian Brothers, the religious order that founded Trinity High School and two of our predecessor schools - Bishop Bradley and Saint Joseph's High Schools.  As part of this process, the District of Eastern North America, of which we would be a part, has invited us to attend many of their events and conferences.  Since Sunday Mr. Mailloux '72 and I have been in Narragansett, RI for a conference for campus ministers and religion teachers.  The conference is at the brother's residence and school in Narragansett which borders the ocean, it's an amazing setting.

We arrived Sunday afternoon around 3:30pm and after only sleeping about 1-2 hours in the past 36 hours, I immediately went to my room to take a nap.  Unfortunately I overslept and missed the opening Mass (good thing we had one Saturday night at Cardboard City).  I woke up in time for dinner which was followed by the opening presentation.  The theme of the conference has been "Catholic Religious Education in a Multicultural Church: Challenges and Possibilities" and the presenter has been Dr. Hosffman Ospino, a professor at Boston College.  He gave five talks on diversity focusing on how Catholic schools can incorporate it into their schools and curriculum without it coming across as tokenism.  Prof. Ospino spoke of how Hispanics now make up 43% of the Catholic Church's population and will be 50% by 2020.  The average Hispanic woman, he said, has 2.5 children while white women have an average of 1.5 children.  Demographically speaking, the Hispanic population is growing and is younger.

He framed diversity as something that is simply the different ways in which all humans experience life. We are all experiencing the same life if you will, how we go about it is just different and it's important to make sure our students are aware of the world around them so they don't go into the world completely blind and unprepared.

At one point yesterday we broke into two groups - campus ministers and teachers.  The Campus Ministers spoke of best practices, focusing on service, summer service, retreats, Lent, and liturgies.  This was very helpful and I got some good ideas to bring back to Trinity.  It was reassuring as well because I am very critical of myself at times and the work we do and to see that others have struggles or don't do somethings well was helpful (and to see that perhaps we do things better than others).  Mr. Mailloux attended the teacher's breakout session which focused on curriculum.

Each day began with Morning Prayer (I also attended the brother's Mass each day at 7:30am) and ended with Night Prayer and a social.  It was nice to catch up with some colleagues I have seen in the past and to meet new ones.  I come away more determined for Trinity to become a part of the Lasallian world again as we continue to seek to improve our mission and identity.  We have one more talk today on Educational praxis in the Lasallian world and we should be on on way home by noon.  It was a refreshing few days in a beautiful setting with some amazing people - just what the doctor ordered.