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Peace and Justice Coalition
The Peace and Justice Coalition was formed in the fall of 2002. Two concerned students approached professors Jake Gibbs and Rebecca Glasscock about serving as faculty advisors. Since that time, the organization has worked to promote peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability. Students have hosted a number of fundraisers, the most recent of which was on February 13, 2008. Almost $370 was raised for God’s Pantry. The group also plans and organizes speaker series, annual peace fairs, occasional teach-ins, and voter registration events. Members of the organization have participated in a number of public rallies and protests, including the February 14, 2008 I LOVE MOUNTAINS rally in Frankfort, Kentucky and the October 27, 2007 rally in Jonesborough, Tennessee against the use of depleted uranium in munitions.
The group agrees with Maria Montessori’s statement that “Establishing last peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.” To be able to visualize – and to act upon – paths to peace, we must, as a society, learn more about those with whom we share this beautiful, but fragile, planet. We need to know more about our common humanity in order to nurture our collective desire for social justice. We need to come face to face with the social injustices in which we are enveloped – lack of health care for so many of the world’s children; workers toiling in sweatshops, producing cheap consumer goods and huge corporate profits; farmers forced off the land by industrial agriculture, and lack of clean water and basic sanitation in much of the world. We take Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words to heart – “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”
