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Autumn 2007 | Volume 30, Number 2
| Features
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Kim Segall
Love your neighbor as yourself
Kim Segall has no problem articulating her responsibility as a global Christian. It is summed up, she says, in Jesusā second great commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. āBut āneighborā is a global term for me,ā she says. āItās all people of all countries. And āloveā in this context is not romanticized. Itās a hard word that means to give up, to reconcile, to overcome the bitterness that divides us.ā
And it does not escape her notice that the first part of āresponsibilityā is āresponse.ā āI canāt respond if I donāt see the need. I canāt see the need if I donāt somehow develop the empathy to respond.ā
In order to nurture empathy, the associate professor of English teaches courses ā such as an Autumn Quarter class on Middle Eastern fiction ā that include diverse cultural texts which challenge stereotypes and reveal various authorsā experiences. And she takes students on study trips, such as one to South Africa next summer for cultural study, practical service, and reconciling theatre.
āWeāll visit museums and take in the history and culture,ā explains Segall. āThen weāll spend a week helping to build five houses with Habitat for Humanity in order to learn about the history of apartheid and the transititions after apartheid from the South Africans that we work with and become friends with. At a theatre festival, weāll hear stories, listening to people work through the trauma, hurt, and desire for vengeance from their apartheid past. Finally, weāll talk about what weāve learned, and how weāll work toward a larger shalom and healing.ā
For Segall, who has lived, taught, and absorbed the human struggle in India, Iraq, and South Africa, her deepest desire is reconciliation for all of Godās people. She resists the divisions among people groups: āI believe in working toward hope, not despair.ā
This summer, she wrote two more chapters for a book sheās titled Over My Dead Body, in which she explores trauma around the world and the ways in which poets and storytellers use art to work through pain.
āReconciliation takes imagination,ā she says. āMy students learn about diverse cultures, and they also see areas we have in common, even when the authors are from a different religion or continent. I tell them that of all people, Christians understand what it means to be judged because of religion and to be misunderstood because of religious stereotypes. Thatās empathy.ā
—By Clint Kelly [ckelly@spu.edu]
—Photo by Mike Siegel
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