USC Dornsife College Of Letters Arts and Sciences

University of Southern California

Archive

Archive

Tom Catena: Choosing Joy Over Happiness

This article was originally published by Religion Unplugged, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality. GIDEL, Sudan — The media is filled with articles on how to achieve happiness, including in …

Witness as Ministry: Serving God and Refugees in Beirut

Beirut, Lebanon has been wrecked by war and strife for many decades. More recently, there has been a flood of refugees from Syria and, in 2020, much of the city was leveled …

Jean Bouchebel: Retired From World Vision, but Not From Serving God and Refugees

This article was originally published by Christianity Today, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality. When Jean Bouchebel retired at age 70, he was not ready to simply relax. …

Why Genocide Survivors Can Offer a Way to Heal from the Trauma of the Pandemic

This article was originally published in The Conversation. The pandemic has been a period of acute trauma at many levels. More than 3 million people have died globally from COVID-19, including over …

Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe: A Skeptic’s Take On A Nun’s Vocation To Serve The Poor Regardless Of Risks

This article was originally published by Religion Unplugged, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality.  ATIAK, Uganda— Studying religion all of my academic career has made me into a bit of …

Ida Puliwa: How A Stranger’s Kindness Transformed A Village In Malawi

This article was originally published in Religion Unplugged, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality.  In my last international trip before the pandemic, I had the chance to interview a young …

Will Our Sense of Solidarity Fall Victim to the Pandemic?

I recently argued in a piece for Religion News Service that the pandemic is leading religious institutions and our moral perceptions through a process of creative destruction, one in which an increasing …

Faith, hope and creative destruction: religious responses to COVID-19

This article was originally published in Religion News Service, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality.  (RNS) — In France, a hip female rabbi has improbably developed a large interfaith …

Jean Gakwandi: Rwanda Ministry Brings Genocide Survivors Hope

This article was originally published in Christianity Today, with the support of CRCC’s global project on engaged spirituality.  It was raining ferociously, causing the women and orphans to move away from the …

USC Institute of Armenian Studies: Unpacking Armenian Studies with Dr. Donald Miller

CRCC’s Donald E. Miller appeared on New Roads, a podcast by the Institute for Armenian Studies at USC. He talks about the oral histories of Rwandan and Armenian genocide survivors, as well …

VOA News: Rwandan, Armenian Genocides Remembered in April

April 7 marks the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwanda Genocide. To mark the day, Voice of America featured Donald and Lorna Miller’s new book, Becoming Human Again: An …

Can Religion Help Survivors Regain Their Humanity? A Reflection on the Rwandan Genocide

The following article originally appear in Tui Motu InterIslands Magazine, a New Zealand publication. One of the first survivors that I interviewed in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide told me that his …

Becoming Human Again: An Oral History of the Rwanda Genocide against the Tutsi

Becoming Human Again: An Oral History of the Rwanda Genocide against the Tutsi By Donald E. Miller with Lorna Touryan Miller and Arpi Misha Miller (University of California Press, 2020) Genocide involves …

A Cultural Tipping Point: Reflections of David Brooks’ Two Mountains

We are at a cultural tipping point. Hyper-individualism, postmodern rhetoric that relativizes every truth and narcissistic political posturing exhaust us. More people are dying annually of drug overdoses than in the Vietnam …

Arab News: Miller on Remembering the Armenian Genocide

April 24, 1915 marked the beginning of the brutal Armenian Genocide where up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire. Now over a century later, the Turkish government continues …

Countering Pessimism and Despair: An Encounter with Two Spiritual Exemplars

As we enter 2019, two emotions seem to be dominant: political pessimism and personal anxiety. These feelings are rooted in the dysfunctions of government and economic instability, both of which are legitimate …

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Denis Mukwege Keeps the Faith in the Face of Violence

I had the privilege of interviewing 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner Doctor Denis Mukwege in 2017 in the small country of Armenia, where he was a finalist for the Aurora Prize—a $1 …

500 Years After the Reformation, Religion Is Undergoing Creative Destruction

Five hundred years ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. He aimed to protest the Catholic Church’s practice of issuing indulgences and other abuses of …

Embodied Religion: Reassessing the Role of the “Senses” in Religious Research

We often make the mistake of identifying religious vitality with assent to particular beliefs. In this process, we forget that intellectual assent to beliefs is merely one element of religious experience. I …

A New Post-Election Religious Alignment

This post originally appeared at On Faith. After a long election season in which it seemed that religion, for once, wasn’t the big story, we found out that eight out of 10 …