by Janet Lovera, ’23

When you start college, everyone tells you that the next four years are for learning about yourself and finding your passions. Although, it’s easy to get stuck focusing on academics amidst the looming deadlines and countless essays. But now that events are once again being hosted all across campus, it is time to search for opportunities to learn more than what’s in a college textbook. This is the time to lay the foundations of who we want to be, what we believe, and what we want to fight for.

Two weeks ago, I attended the film screening of True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality hosted by the Desmond Tutu Peace Lab. I’ll admit, I wasn’t familiar with Bryan Stevenson’s work prior to watching the documentary. But learning about Bryan Stevenson’s story and the mission of the Equal Justice Initiative, along with my personal ties to the topic, sparked a passion in me. By the end of the night, I found myself wanting to learn more about mass incarceration in America and even bought Stevenson’s book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. My interest in learning more about the injustices in American’s prison system, and what I could do be doing to combat them, led me to Bryan Stevenson’s event hosted at Clowes Memorial Hall last week.

“Love mercy and do justice”

Without mercy, we continue to overlook the injustices within our society. Without mercy, we continue to fail to understand the circumstances that cause suffering for various groups of people. Without mercy, we continue to perpetuate systems that were not designed to acknowledge a person’s humanity.

This is our time, as students, to find our passions. But this is also our time, as future leaders, to love mercy and do justice.