Pyne Speaker challenges students to be global leaders

Groton School welcomed its 2023–24 Pyne Chapel Speaker, Kwok Pui Lan, PhD, to the Circle for two days of discussion, debate, and exploration of the role of religion in world affairs. 

The Percy and Eben Pyne Chapel Speakers Fund was established in 1999 to bring individuals to the Groton campus who are role models for thinking and acting ethically in the world at large. Dr. Kwok is dean’s professor of systematic theology at Candler Theological Seminary at Emory University in Atlanta, where she focuses on Asian feminist Christian theology and postcolonial theology. 

Dr. Kwok is best known for her scholarship that has pioneered a path for theologians and scholars of religion, especially within postcolonial feminist and Asian feminist theologies. She teaches contemporary spirituality and interfaith understanding and has written or edited twenty-three books in English and Chinese. An Anglican Christian, Dr. Kwok places oppressed people and marginalized perspectives at the center of her work.  

 

She discussed these themes during a Monday-morning chapel talk that spanned key moments in her career, beginning when she chose to focus on religion and philosophy in college.

“I wasn’t interested in money or science,” Dr. Kwok said. “I was looking for solutions and answers to profound questions.”

As her studies and career progressed, Dr. Kwok started exploring how religion played a part in politics and global issues. After the 1997 handover of her native Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, Dr. Kwok began to look at empires throughout history, and the legacy of religion-fueled war and conflict. And, upon moving to Boston, she began to notice the effects of climate change, not just on humanity, but all of Earth’s creatures. 

Such challenges, she said, call for a new breed of culturally sensitive leaders who work together across nationalities and religions to care for the world’s underprivileged: “Today, we live in a challenging time. We need to be mindful of so many people living in unstable and non-sustainable conditions.” 

Throughout the day Monday, Dr. Kwok met with classes from the World Languages, History, Religious Studies, and English departments for informal question-and-answer sessions in the Sackett Forum. In between sessions, Dr. Kwok had lunch with faculty and students from the East Asian and South Asian student alliances.

“I am pleasantly surprised that high school students read my work, and understand it,” she said later in the day. “Why? I certainly would not have them in mind when I wrote those books. But they grapple with it, especially the idea of inter-religious dialogue and solidarity. Because I think that they are fully aware that we are living in a world that is so fragmented and broken. And religion, unfortunately, plays a role in some of those conflicts. They were asking questions, asking about how we can be agents for peace building, and especially how women and girls can be participants in that important project.”

Chaplain Allison Read said Dr. Kwok was an obvious choice for Pyne Speaker because of the global perspective of her work, because she’s a woman and Asian, and because that work centers the traditionally marginalized, paying particular attention to “folks who live on the difficult side of systems of injustice and oppression.”

“The way that I understand our institutional values of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and what [Headmaster Temba] Maqubela has sought to do here, there’s congruency in that,” said Chaplain Read. “There’s congruency between who, traditionally, has not been here—who’s been marginalized, who’s been excluded from an experience like the Groton School experience, who might we listen to, whose voices do we need present on the Circle. There’s a great deal of alignment between what we’ve been trying to do as an institution and as a community and what Professor Kwok does in the world.”

Celine Ibrahim, PhD, has been teaching Dr. Kwok’s material in her Ethics classes and said that holistic worldview and interdisciplinary themes tied in well with what her students were trying to do. 

“Here, when there was an opportunity to think about the ethics curriculum in a global way, it was very important for me to infuse the curriculum with people who were thinking creatively about the future, putting forth a vision that was informed by history but that could invite us as thinkers,” said Dr. Ibrahim. “I encourage students to see themselves, not just as passive consumers of materials, but to actually synthesize for themselves their own public voice, their own views and ethical standpoints. 

“In doing that,” she added, “it’s very important for me that I expose them to many different perspectives and points of view—everything from writing on environmental theology to religion in politics and the importance of religious actors in the public sphere to be peace-building forces.” 

Dr. Kwok said the students she spoke to showed a mature understanding of the world that gave her hope for the future.

“This visit gives me a lot of hope, because these students have been exposed to different religious traditions at such a formative age,” she said. “I did not have the opportunity to study other religions when I was in high school but they have. That they can ask those intelligent questions means that they’re thinking about what’s going on in the world and that they are also looking for solutions and answers. 

“By talking to people with perspectives different than their own, they’ll discover different ways of interpreting current affairs and, hopefully, become global leaders.”