Berkley Center

Background: This June 2010 discussion between Marilyn McMorrow and Katherine Marshall focuses on her career and the factors that motivate her mission, as well as her keen interest in justice and peace. McMorrow describes the path that has led her to focus on education and global ethics. She notes that her religious order (the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus), which is above all focused on education, has been actively engaged in movements for peace. She argues that conflicts worldwide are often fueled by religion or religious misunderstanding, and it is thus crucially important to use religion and religious teachings as a tool to guide and nurture peacebuilding. She focuses on how she approaches her central mission of teaching about social justice, which includes the issues of what constitutes peace and our ethical responsibilities in situations of conflict.

Can you describe the journey that has taken you to Georgetown, and what you teach there?

I was born in Rhode Island into a large family that moved often as I was growing up, so that I lived on both coasts. My father initially taught in Jesuit colleges, and his subject was physics. After years of teaching, he made a career shift into aerospace. As I was growing up, I admired my father for taking the risk (given his large family) of leaving a job with a company that built rockets intended to carry nuclear warheads. Instead he sought work in civilian exploration of space, under NASA, which he saw as a way to channel the scientific competition in peaceful directions. Eventually, he worked on the Apollo program and on weather satellites. He made this decision deliberately, for moral reasons, and that has always meant a lot to me. However, I would gradually realize that even though my father chose to focus on peaceful use of technology, which was NASA’s mission, the government could still co-opt NASA and use its research for military purposes. Wheat and weeds grow together, and no matter how much one does to control the weeds, you can never control them entirely. That insight is the context for how I understand my own work for peace.

I decided to enter my religious order at a relatively young age, after I entered my first year of college. My desire was to teach, and English literature was my initial subject. I spent years teaching, then was an academic principal of a high school.

I was always focused, however, on the political context of literature. I also worried that, with a traditional Western post-World War II curriculum, we were not meeting the challenge of preparing young women for the world they were actually going to live in. My school in Seattle was a wonderful institution, and the faculty extended our curriculum to include focus on the Pacific Rim. But my sense was that we needed to do more to rethink the traditional curriculum, in terms of what I called, at the time, “world order studies.” So I decided to go to graduate school to study human rights, poverty alleviation, and the nuclear threat.

So I went back to Princeton, where my subject and research was the political theory of international relations. I focused more and more on the urgent moral issues in world politics. My dissertation was on the international obligation to counteract absolute poverty.

My interests were spurred very much by the ethos of my religious order with its strong international commitment and call to global communion. As a scholar of international relations, I think of my membership in my order as “my lab,” because through the order we are truly exposed to other points of view. As you can well imagine, over recent decades that has given me a special perspective on what it means to be an American in this international system.

What inspired you to join that order? How did you come to decide on that, as opposed to other communities?

I would never have entered any other order. I was not initially particularly interested in a religious life, indeed had an almost visceral reaction against it. My family was Catholic, very much so, but my brothers and sisters had, and still have today, very different levels of connection to religion and to the Church. But when I met the Society of the Sacred Heart, I was very much taken by its central focus on making known the love of God, expressed through transformative education. That was and is the central mission of the order. It also mattered to me that the society is so international and focused on an international mission. We aim to be contemplatives in action; contemplation is the door through which the world is seen—and action or mission, the response.

The way I came to know the order was pure coincidence. My family moved often, and one year, we moved suddenly, at the end of August, from Pennsylvania to Menlo Park, California—which for me meant my third high school in as many years. I was, to put it mildly, upset and unappreciative of the move. I was obnoxious and felt rather entitled to be so—especially since the new school turned out to be not very academic. My brothers were at a Jesuit school, but mine was not at anything like the same standard. Unbeknownst to me, my parents began scrambling for a better school for me. They found a Sacred Heart school nearby that no one had previously mentioned. My mother went to visit, begging the school to accept me—and on full scholarship. The school agreed! So my mother told me to get on my bicycle to go meet the principal. I initially went to the wrong place and, despite my home rebellion, was mortified to be late. I was amazed when it was all worked out and I was back in a challenging program.

I was immediately struck by the school’s educational philosophy. I was also captured by the religious dimension, especially the dedication and the international connection. That drew me to them and to my decision to join the order.

How did you come to Georgetown University?

After finishing graduate school, I went on the job market and, very happily, found myself at Georgetown. I was delighted by the Jesuit connection. Jesuit education has long been important to my family. My father went to Boston College, when it was essentially a commuting school for Irish immigrants, and he also taught. My six brothers were all educated by the Jesuits. And the Jesuit mission and spirituality are foundational aspects of my own religious order, the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus—often described as the equivalent of the Jesuit order for women. So coming to Georgetown meant a great deal to me. It also meant that I could live near other members of my order in the Washington, D.C. area.

At Georgetown, I focus primarily on teaching—which I consider the heart of my vocation. I have never focused on an academic career, per se, but on the students right in front of me—in any given moment. As a faculty member in residence, I also focus on community issues and student life. Increasingly, my teaching focuses on the teaching of ethics in world politics, and my service activities focus on assisting students who want to work for social justice in the here and now.

What kind of interest do you find from your students in the issues we are focusing on: gender, peace, and religion?

From the time I came to Georgetown, I’ve been on the advisory board for the Program in Justice and Peace. Students who want to minor in this program may choose to take my international relations courses because they include some justice and peace topics, but my classes also include more traditional topics in international relations like just war theory, which I see as a valid ethical tradition that students of world politics should know about. Although I am committed to non-violent resolution of international conflicts as the desired goal and teach the components of non-violent direct action as part of my syllabus, I am not a pacifist, nor are most of my students. As you can imagine, some of the most energetic debates in classes take place between students who are committed pacifists and those who think violence among human beings will always be part of reality.

With regard to gender issues in world politics, I find a real interest. For example, this past semester, I assigned two new books: Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky. I was struck by how seriously the students took Kristof’s and WuDunn’s claim that women’s issues and poverty affect international peace and security. I saw that in women students but, perhaps more surprisingly, also in the male students. That may have been in part because I was not pushing it!

With regard to the role of religion in world politics, I find great student interest. One of my classes is called Religion, Ethics, and International Affairs. To be sure, some students think—or worry—that religions are “the problem” fueling many conflicts around the world. But I find all of them are eager to probe the interreligious sources not only of conflict but also of peacebuilding.

How far have you engaged in the issues of women’s roles for peace, especially given your perspective of living with a women’s religious order?

My own approach to peacemaking comes from Vatican II and Catholic social justice tradition, particularly the social justice encyclicals, from Pope John XXIII through Benedict XVI. I take this to mean that, along with all Catholics including the members of my religious order, I am called to work for “justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.” In my religious order, we emphasize each one’s call to become “a woman of communion, compassion, and reconciliation” who “seeks justice with the heart of an educator.”

The question, of course, is what this means in practice. For some of us it has meant living among the poor or excluded and joining their struggles. For example, Filipino members of my order could stand between the People Power crowd and the soldiers in the Philippines EDSA confrontation in 1986 because they had already been involved for years with those who opposed the Marcos regime and martial law. Similarly Korean members who had worked with the opposition (students, banned labor unions, etc.) under the regime of Park Chung-Hee in South Korea were thereby well-positioned to work for democratic development and human rights when the opening finally came. Those who had been living for years in Spanish Harlem were in a position to work with religious and community leaders to avert riots in New York City after the Rodney King verdict. Religious in Colombia took the risk of putting their bodies, literally, between peasant squatters and the goons absentee oligarchs sent to evict the farmers. The hope was to prevent violence and protect the people on the assumption that police would not shoot nuns. But these religious would not have had the credibility at those key moments if they hadn’t been living there and working there beforehand.

Although I am not a pacifist, some members of my order are—and they are supported in actions they undertake through Plowshares, Witnesses for Peace, Pax Christi, or opposition to the School of the Americas.

My own approach to work for peace, however, is not through living immersed among the poorest, most vulnerable, or most excluded communities, nor through direct action in an organization like Christian Peacemakers confronting Israeli occupation in the West Bank—though I have the deepest respect for those in my order who do and try to learn from them. For as one of them, Anne Montgomery, says: “If anyone should take a risk, it should be the religious.” And she certainly risks her life and freedom time and again in her work for justice and peace.

My own approach is to make sure students in my courses learn about credible empirical examples in which individual and group agency, through non-violent direct action, has actually brought about conflict resolution and peaceful change in world politics. I want them to know peacebuilding is possible, not just Pollyanna wishful thinking. That goes against the grain in the study of international relations, so much of which is based on the premise that relations among states are inevitably a war of all against all. To counter that claim, I want them to learn the history of incremental institutionalization of respect for human rights, of negotiated settlements, of poverty alleviation, of preventive deployment...and so on. None of this is easy or guaranteed, but my concern is that students know it is nevertheless possible, if we—the international community—are willing to do the hard work, part of which includes serious study of particular and complex empirical situations and serious assessment of strategies for change.