Center and Chair for Religion and Civic Engagement

The Center

As a Jesuit institution Fairfield is committed to an active role in promoting social justice. The institution and its academic community's priorities parallel and match those of the Society of Jesus and require a sustained program attending to the issues of social justice.

To concretize this commitment, the Center for Religion and Civic Engagement has been established. The Center's focus will be to:

Train a new generation of students, religiously motivated or not, to seek just solutions to cultural and social problems
Coordinate faculty and faculty/student research in this area
Address the issue of the appropriate role Fairfield has in raising awareness of civic engagement
Examine how religious groups work in collaboration with one another and with non-religious groups to improve the level of discourse on social problems
Serve as a center for service learning
implement initiatives to ensure that students will consider their obligations to be "men and women" for others.

The Chair

Numerous individuals across the disciplines are already involved in this work but in order to accomplish this fully, it will necessitate an endowed chair to lead an initiative to ensure and sustain Fairfield's commitment across its pedagogy, research, and action oriented programs. The University will seek a strong scholar in the area of religion and the engagement of religion with society.