Just Like Me

Wednesday 10 January 2007

Tonight, Megan Heeney and I spoke on Social Justice with 115 SLU students who are Resident Advisors in the various dorms. Were were invited by the ever vivacious Mollie Mohan to join the students this evening as part of the Res Life’s Winter Workshop, the theme of which is “Making a Difference…Every Day!!” It was a pleasure to chat with former students like John Carroll, Samantha Howard, Megan Kinney, Nani Makia, Kelly Hartman, and Sara Bronder. Megan H spoke for the second time in her life about how she got involved in anti-death penalty work, and befriended and was befriended by Donald Jones, who was executed in Missouri two years ago this April. With her usual humility and candor, Megan recounted this journey into the awareness that, just like you and me, Donnie was a person. So simple, right? But there are some whole groups of people we write off, like death row inmates, like Arabs, like Muslims, like gays. I hope Megan continues to find ways to tell that story of awakening–we all need to hear such powerful yet gentle examples of how change occurs and how community is born, in the seeming most unlikely of places. See her letter to Sister Helen Prejean and a letter to Donnie here.