Christian Theological Seminary and Butler University Announce Creation of The Desmond Tutu Center

Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary (CTS) announced today that they have joined together to create The Desmond Tutu Center—North America’s first and only academic center named for Archbishop Emeritus Tutu. The center will focus on leadership development in social justice and reconciliation, international relationships, and interreligious bridge-building.

The news was announced just prior to Archbishop Emeritus Tutu taking the stage at Butler’s Clowes Memorial Hall on Sept. 12 to a full-house of more than 2,100. 

South African cleric and anti-apartheid activist Allan Aubrey Boesak, a longtime friend of Archbishop Emeritus Tutu’s, and the Desmond Tutu Chair for Peace, Global Justice, and Reconciliation Studies at Butler and CTS, will serve as the center’s first director. The Dungy Family Foundation is a founding partner of the center.

The center’s mission is to honor the Archbishop Emeritus’ legacy of justice and reconciliation, Boesak said, “making it vivid and accessible to people around the world and generations to come.”

Guided by this mission, the center will focus on the following efforts:

•  Initiate and encourage vigorous scholarly engagement through research and exchange, to broaden and deepen discourse on global issues.
•  Engage local religious communities, community organizations, and academic institutions, as well as those committed to issues of peace and justice in our communities and across the world, in endeavors toward understanding, peace, and justice; and create opportunities for these groups to share, learn, teach, and engage practically with each other.
•  Engage students and youth through conversation with a view to enhance their understanding of global issues such as peace, justice, and human dignity, based on the values of our common and intertwined humanity, love of education, ecological justice, and the ethics and practice of responsible citizenship.
•  Create nonviolent responses to situations of violence, conflict, and injustice; and foster engagement in honest—albeit difficult—conversations and the building of local and global alliances toward the creation of communities of reconciled diversity.

Read the rest here