This month, The Beijing Center attended the IAJU 2022 Worldwide Assembly at Boston College. What a week! The International Association of Jesuit Universities was started in 2018 and approved by Fr. Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Society of Jesus – who also played a big role in TBC’s participation at the conference. After all, it was Fr. Sosa who personally recommended our Executive Director, Simon Koo, be a member of the Task Force on Peace and Reconciliation.
Since TBC was coming to the USA for this conference, we took the opportunity to meet with friends both old and new around the United States, before and after the Assembly. But more on that in a different blog post.
We can’t talk about everything that went on at the Assembly’s four days of programming in one blog post, but we’ll show you the highlights!
The Assembly officially opened with a Eucharist celebrated by the Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley at the St. Ignatius Church in Boston. As you can see from the picture, it’s a beautiful church.
Photo credit IAJU News. See more from their gallery here.
Most of the Assembly was Plenary Sessions with different Task Forces presenting their topics and finding – from Peace and Reconciliation to Global Citizenship, Solidarity with Migrants & Refugees to Environmental & Economic Justice, the Plenary Sessions had a lot of interesting information and insight into what other Jesuit universities were doing around the world.
Dr. Koo participated in the Task Force on Peace and Reconciliation. At that Plenary Session, a paper co-written by TBC Staff Jessica Xi, Queenie He, Sylvia Wang, and former Research Assistant Moritz Kuhlmann, S.J., was featured, since it had recently been published in the IAJU Best Practices program. You can read more on that in this press release here, which also has a link to read the paper.
Fellow Task Force on Peace and Reconciliation members included (but we certainly not limited to) Jacques Haers, S.J. from the Netherlands and Elias Lopez Perez who represented IAJU.
In addition to listening and learning of the work the Jesuit higher education community, TBC staff met with lots of fellow attendees.
For example, we ran into Thomas Poon, who is on the TBC Board of Directors and the Executive Vice President and Provost of Loyola Marymount University, as well as Timothy Snyder, LMU President.
And we caught up with Roberto Yap, President of Ateneo de Manila in the Philippines. It was really good to see him!
All in all, the weather was quite hot, but there was still lots of laughter. And although Simon met with Fr. Sosa in Rome in July of this year, it was still a great privilege to see and to learn from him and the fellow Assembly attendees and participants as they discussed the future of Jesuit education. TBC is certain that that future is as it has been since the days of Matteo Ricci and beyond: global.
The past few weekends have been some of the most exciting of the entire semester, full of trips to the zoo, mountain hikes, ancient parks, and more! Our first trip out of many was a visit to the Beijing Zoo. I had mentioned earlier in the semester that I wanted to see some pandas, since I was in China after all, and our TBC friend Andy made it happen.
Spending a whole semester in Beijing, I knew I had to make the trip down south and check out Shanghai, and the city certainly lived up to the expectations. Everyone describes Shanghai as this super futuristic metropolis, and after spending a weekend there I understand why it has this reputation.