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Lunch Colloquium--May 21

Monica Modi Khant, Executive Director, Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN)

Recently honored by Emory Law School for the pro bono work she and the other attorneys she supervises do on behalf of members of the immigrant community in Georgia, Ms. Khant will speak with us about the grim realities that make such work necessary, including the violence immigrants so often suffer, sometimes through the horrors of human trafficking (the subject of a course she teaches at Georgia State University).

Monica Modi Khant is the Executive Director of GAIN. As Executive Director, Ms. Modi Khant oversees, supervises, trains, and mentors pro bono attorneys who represent immigrant victims of violence and asylum seekers. Ms. Modi Khant also oversees fundraising initiatives, outreach efforts, and community relations in addition to her legal duties.  She offers a unique perspective as an advocate for immigrant rights in the Southeast.  Ms. Modi Khant received her BA from Rutgers University in 1995 and her JD from New England School of Law in 1998. Upon graduation, she was the Detention Attorney at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) where she represented detained asylum seekers. In 2000, Ms. Modi Khant continued practicing immigration law with private immigration firms in Boston, MA. In 2005, Ms. Modi Khant was appointed as the Director of Legal Services at the International Institute of Boston (IIB). With this position, Ms. Modi Khant worked extensively with victims of abuse and trafficking. She has also trained lawyers, law enforcement officers, and judges on how to work with immigrant victims of violence.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Raksha, a Georgia-based nonprofit organization for the South Asian community.  She is a graduate of Leadership Atlanta Class of 2015 and has served as Pro Bono Liaison of the Atlanta chapter of the America Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).  Ms. Modi Khant is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgia State University and teaches Human Trafficking & Modern Day Slavery and in 2017, was named one of Atlanta Magazine's "Women Making a Mark."  She is married to Sanjay, a physician with Emory Healthcare, and has three children.

Lunch Colloquium--May 7

Thomas Thangaraj, D. W. and Ruth Brooks Professor Emeritus of World Christianity, Candler School of Theology

Thomas Thangaraj, D.W. and Ruth Brooks Professor Emeritus of World Christianity at the Candler School of Theology, retired to his native India many years ago, but he is in Decatur visiting his daughter and was kind enough to interrupt his visit and address the Emeritus College Colloquium on Monday, May 7. He took as his topic "Contemporary Challenges to Christianity in India."  As he explained to begin with, 80% of Indians are Hindus and the next largest religious minority are Muslims.  Christians are a small minority with only 2.3% of the population, mostly in South India.  Professor Thangaraj, however, is a sixth-generation Christian from a small village in the far south called, somewhat surprisingly to us, Nazareth! He explained the entire community converted to Christianity many generations ago, and he proudly showed a photo of their very impressive church. With that background, he divided his talk into sub-topics any one of which could have taken an entire hour to address.  

First, he addressed the question of whether Christianity in India is a product of colonial rule.  The answer is an emphatic "No"!   There were Christians in India many centuries before the British set foot on Indian soil or even heard the gospel!  In fact, the Apostle Thomas is said to have come to India and founded churches.   A large church in Chennai (the city the British called Madras) has a tomb in the basement purportedly that of Thomas. Christianity then was just one of many Indian religions. The establishment of the Mughal Empire in the mid-1500s brought Islam and the first real efforts to promote religious unity in the country. The first wave of European missionaries was Portuguese Catholics in 1562 led by Francis Xavier who concentrated efforts mostly on the coast.  Today, half of Indian Christians are Catholics. Protestant missionaries started coming in the early 18^th century, but it was not until later, under British rule, as Professor Thangaraj explained, that the missionary enterprise took on a colonial expansionist character.   In response, as the independence movement grew in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Indian Christians were encouraged to found their own indigenous churches and mission societies.

Professor Thangaraj then turned to the second related question.  Is Christianity in India primarily "a membership drive" or a drive to convert others as the Indian nationalists say? His answer was "Yes and No."  American evangelicals like Billy Graham brought a brand of American religious fundamentalism to India, characterized by aggressive evangelicalism.   On the other hand, most Christians are not aggressively evangelical.  Many are engaged in inter-religious dialogue. Christian schools, colleges, and hospitals provide education and health care to all without efforts to convert non-Christians.  A great many of the Hindu leaders were educated at Christian schools. Regarding evangelism, Professor Thangaraj noted that the four freedoms of religion, including freedom of conscience, of profession, of practice, and of propagation, are guaranteed by the Indian Constitution and list of fundamental rights.

Professor Thangaraj's third question was how should we understand incidents of Hindu-Christian conflict.  He acknowledged there have been many clashes, some of them very serious. Most of them have focused on Christian efforts to convert non-Christians.  He urged education and dialogue as the basis of understanding and avoidance of conflict and he suggested that evangelists must rethink the language of conversion and instead focus on Christian witness.

In the future, political leaders may change their positions, the caste system may be weakened, though he is not optimistic about that prospect, and, critically, the conversation about globalization and the resulting inequality may lead to a broader conversation about anti-minority violence in a global context. In the meantime, Professor Thangaraj hopes Christians and those of all faiths will start thinking critically about their own religious traditions. With an approving twinkle in his eye, he quoted a Jewish Rabbi who once said, "I do not care what religion you belong to, as long as you are ashamed of it."

It is impossible for anyone to fully cover the complexities of the history and present challenges of Christianity in India in just a single hour, but Professor Thangaraj's talk gave his listeners a good overview of the topic. Thank you to Professor Thangaraj for his fascinating lecture and to the Emeritus College for bringing him to us.

--Jan Pratt

Distinguished Faculty Awards

Gretchen Schulz and Katherine Mitchell

Two of our members wrote letters nominating Katherine Mitchell, Senior Lecturer Emerita in Emory's Department of Visual Arts, for an EUEC Faculty Award of Distinction.  Below, we offer you a blend of the two letters.

Gretchen Schulz began her letter nominating Katherine Mitchell for a Faculty Award of Distinction thus:

You who are serving on the Honors and Awards Committee will know that the Vision Statement of the EUEC declares that we are dedicated to advancing "the intellectual and creative interests" of our members--and to recognizing their achievements in both of these categories. It's a statement that reflects the dream of our founder Gene Bianchi that we promote the work of the artists among us as well as the work of the scholars, much oftener the object of attention and praise.  The juried art exhibitions that the Emeritus College offers to showcase retiree creativity have certainly helped us to realize Gene's dream. But in all the years since our founding, we have never chosen a visual artist as the recipient of our ultimate accolade, a Faculty Award of Distinction. I can't help thinking it is past time that we did so.  And I hope a review of the information I'll provide here (and that in the attached c.v.) will persuade you Katherine Mitchell deserves this honor.

Unbeknownst to Gretchen, Brenda Bynum was thinking the same thing at the same time, and in her letter, she began by summing up the impressive set of achievements in Katherine's c.v., emphasizing those that have accumulated since Katherine retired in 2009.

I am writing to nominate Katherine Mitchell for a 2018 EUEC Award of Distinction. She was a Senior Lecturer in Emory's Department of Visual Arts from 1980 until her retirement in 2009, while pursuing a remarkable career as one of Georgia's pre-eminent artists, having been featured in more than 100 group exhibitions, and the focus of 20 solo exhibitions in this country and Europe. She retired only from academe, having remained fully engaged in her own art work in the years since, showing in at least a dozen group and solo exhibitions from 2010 to the present. Her paintings can be found in numerous private and public permanent collections, including every major museum in the state of Georgia. Emory itself proudly owns and displays some of her pieces, and one of my favorites hangs in the Woodruff Library. And, in a way, she continues to contribute positively to the lives of thousands of Atlantans every day as, in the late 1990s, she was commissioned to design the beautiful 15,000 sq. ft. tile installation on the walls of the Sandy Springs MARTA station, making their daily commute a chance to also walk through an art gallery!

Gretchen also noted that "even a glance at her c.v." will

confirm that the quality and quantity of her work haven't diminished in the nine years since she retired as Senior Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Emory. On the contrary, it's clear that the time and energy retirement has allowed her have inspired even more and even better work than she has ever done before.  

And, of course, both Brenda and Gretchen pointed to Katherine's most recent exhibition, prepared for the Turchin Center at Appalachian State University and scheduled for display again this coming fall in the Circle Gallery of UGA's College of Environment and Design, as the best evidence that she is indeed doing "even more and even better work than she has ever done before." Gretchen's statement about this wonderful work (work Katherine shared with her fellow emeriti in one of our spring semester Lunch Colloquiums) included the following:

Since Katherine happens to be an artist who can communicate with words as well as she communicates with images, let me quote what she herself has said about this exhibition's title and theme (in a report to the Emeritus College committee that offered her a Bianchi Grant to help complete the work):

Originally the title of my exhibition was White Oak, in honor of a particular tree that inspired this work. As my focus expanded, the title became Hearing the Trees. My beloved white oak became a symbol for me of all trees, and for all of the endangered planet. I was striving to unite my aesthetic concerns as an artist with my concern for the environment, which had begun years earlier, when between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-eight I had lived in the midst of forty-four acres of deep woods.

Finally, both Brenda and Gretchen emphasized the activism with which Katherine has striven to "unite [her] aesthetic concerns as an artist with [her] concern for the environment."  Brenda put it thus:

Since her retirement, Katherine has become deeply involved in an organization called the Citizens' Climate Lobby which expresses its purpose as "political will for a livable world." She has become actively engaged in organizing Earth Day events and "polite but persistent" lobbying of both legislators and the public. For over a year she was the CCL's Congressional Liaison to Representative Barry Loudermilk and in frequent contact with him toward supporting their agenda. The CCL has been instrumental in establishing the Congressional Climate Solutions Caucus which requires lawmakers to join in bicameral pairs and now has 66 members. And this year she has been one of the chief planners for the CCL state conference which will take place [and now we can say did take place] on January 27.

And Gretchen noted, "[t]he extent to which she is an activist on behalf of trees and the whole of the 'endangered planet' she sees them as symbolizing is also apparent [in the fact] that she routinely donates the proceeds of the sales of her work to environmental causes," adding that it is "[n]o wonder that Citizens' Climate Lobby . . . has been so happy to welcome Katherine as one of the most active and effective members of its local chapter here in 'the city in the trees.'"

In her final paragraph, Brenda beautifully summed up the admiration for Katherine and her many achievements expressed in both of the letters nominating her for the Emeritus College Faculty Award of Distinction that we have excerpted here. Here is that paragraph:

Katherine embodies the concept of using the freedom that formal retirement provides to embrace important new work and ideas and opportunities for service, not just in her traditional discipline but across the wide field of issues which are crucial to the health of our society. She has successfully melded her art and her conscience and her passion for serving the greater good in a way that I find absolutely inspiring and that, in my opinion, perfectly reflects the true "spirit of Emory."

Note that those of you who missed Katherine's presentation on Hearing the Trees at the Lunch Colloquium of March 5 (just one instance of the multiple ways she has done service for the Emeritus College over many years now) may access the webcast of that presentation by going to the EUEC website, finding the listing for that Colloquium, and clicking on its title. Enjoy!

Faculty Activities

James W. Keller   

Professor Emeritus of Radiation Oncology 

Jim Keller and Jeffrey Bradley

Susan Socolow

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emerita of Latin American History

Susan reports:  "I recently came back from a Festschrift given in my honor at William and Mary in Charlottesville, Virginia.  At the Festschrift were several Emory students who had studied with me, and someone who is still teaching at Emory.  Some people at the Festschrift had come from Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.  Others were from Illinois, North Carolina, Kansas, California, Arizona, Utah, Texas, and Wisconsin."

Jacqueline Jordan Irvine 

Professor Emerita of Educational Studies

Karen Branan and Jackie Irvine

A recent article in the New York Times with the title "Their Ancestors Were on Opposite Sides of a Lynching. Now, They're Friends" featured EUEC Member Jackie Irvine.  The article details how Karen Branan wrote a book about one of her ancestors being involved in a lynching and how Jackie, upon reading the book, realized that one of those lynched was an ancestor of hers.  The article also features a video of both women and a surprising twist in the story.  The entire article can be read by clicking here.  If that link does not work, the text of the article can be found by clicking here.