Civil society has yet to define and accept broader human rights … The struggle goes on, building on those who went before us, for the benefit of those who come after us.

The 50th anniversary of President John Kennedy’s assassination this year is poignant for those of us who were well along in high school or had begun college when we heard the news that awful Friday afternoon. We still remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when the word came. I was in the locker room in the seminary dormitory with some classmates when a friend ran in to tell us. First came shock; then, hopeful denial. The television, however, confirmed the unbelievable reality. The next three days we rarely budged from in front of the television – not until the state funeral had ended.

Kennedy was, for many of us, the promise of our generation. His eloquence, humor, and charm captured our idealism, as certainly as his call-to-action inaugural address – “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” – inspired us to build our communities and bring our country further along the path of democracy. He urged us to reach out to the world. The Peace Corps, which Kennedy proposed at the University of Michigan during his campaign, captured our imagination.

Tragic history has a way of deadening dreams, and casting youthful idealism upon its ash heap. We strove to resist that trajectory and continued to push our energy forward in the civil rights movement, and those movements that followed … for women, the environment, and peace.

Many of my generation answered the call, and, with the help of Lyndon Johnson’s masterful implementation, and expansion, of Kennedy’s ideals, joined the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, or the War on Poverty. Others of us dedicated ourselves to other visions of civil society. Some of us were brutally tortured to death. Many were beaten bloody at lunch counters and on buses, or had snarling dogs set upon them. Terroristic violence even killed four little girls at Sunday school in Birmingham, Alabama.

We endured the pain of the unimaginable assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and strove with grit to keep the dream alive and steady the course, despite the odds set against us.

Of course, we were not alone. We were building on the shoulders of the other generations in our time, and marching with them. All of us were honoring the legacy, lives, and struggles of those who had gone before us and now rested in peace. But it was Kennedy’s clarion voice that called us younger folks forth.

I myself ended up in the farm workers movement, following the leadership of César Chávez, and eventually moved into broader human rights efforts.

As I look back fifty years, I have learned that the struggle is so much more difficult than what we had seen through our idealistic-tinted glasses. I still cannot bear to watch the anniversary replays of President Kennedy’s assassination, and this year is even worse.

But there is never a moment that I don’t feel a stirring deep within my heart when I watch his inaugural address or listen to his speeches calling upon our “better angels,” as another assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln, did a hundred years earlier.

It is with the same stirring of heart that I watch the next generations so passionately pick up the struggle to make the dream real.

When I look back, I also see other formative people and events that helped move me in this direction. I have learned from this that everything we do well in life has a good impact on others and that we can always learn from the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Probably the person who influenced my life the most was my grandmother. She was an intensely devout Christian, who practiced every day what she believed. She gave her money to the poor, visited people in the hospital, doted on her grandchildren, helped my parents support our family of six kids and send us to Catholic school, and prayed and went to Mass every day. My grandmother lived a life of compassion, tolerance, and justice. In her late eighties, she was on a picket line, supporting the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott.

Another important epoch in my life was the eight years in seminary, high school and college, studying to be a priest, even though I eventually chose a different vocation to which I felt called because it offered a more activist role in human rights work; after a stint in graduate school studying philosophy, I went on to become a lawyer.

But my time in the seminary gave me a good liberal arts education and taught me discipline, spirituality, philosophy, and grounded me in Catholic social justice teachings. It was the era of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. Pope John was much like John Kennedy: he “opened the windows” of the Church and challenged us to bear witness to the Gospel in community life in new ways; to help build civil society, in effect.

And, in my later years, coming to know and work with people in the Hizmet movement inspired by Fethullah Gülen gave me yet a broader, more ecumenical vision of the world, and offered the opportunity of collaborating with people of the Islamic faith to help build civil society. This experience further deepened my own spirituality.

Few of us involved in human rights, I venture to say, are without a spiritual basis for our work. Like all generalizations, mine is surely excessive; but it does capture the point that very many human rights advocates remain in their work because of their spirituality, which comes in all shapes and sizes. As the Christian monk and mystic Thomas Merton warned, without spirituality, we find ourselves caught up in the frenzy of activism and overwork, which overwhelms us.

While in law school, I worked summers with migrant farm workers in Michigan, the vast majority of whom came from the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas, along the border with Mexico. It was the era of César Chávez, who galvanized the country around issues of justice, decent pay and working conditions for field laborers.

So it was that I ended up in the Valley and worked there for ten years, helping to support farm worker organizing efforts and undertaking other human rights endeavors. It was an amazing way to witness that people living in poverty had great personal wisdom and an amazing sense of family and community.

Eventually, my work brought me to Austin, Texas, and the Texas Civil Liberties Union.

In 1990, two of us located free office space in a benefactor’s community building and began the Texas Civil Rights Project. Over the years, through the help of many generous people and organizations, TCRP has grown to a staff of 38 people in five offices: El Paso, South Texas, West Texas, Houston, and Austin.

TCRP handles the full panoply of civil rights issues, including: voting, free speech and assembly, economic justice, jail and prison matters, police misconduct, discrimination, and disability. For 23 years, the Texas Civil Rights Project has been a tireless advocate for racial, social and economic equality for low-income people, through its education and litigation programs.

Some of the achievements of the TCRP staff include:

• Handling more than 3000 legal cases for poor and low-income people
• Developing a vigorous VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) legal program for abused immigrant women in rural Texas that includes our unique “Circuit Rider” component and counseling and support services provided by a MSW supervisor and social work interns
• Publishing twelve Human Rights reports on issues such as hate crimes, Title IX rights of girls in high school, and the death penalty, and seven “self-help” legal manuals, on matters like veterans rights, disability laws, and prisoner rights
• Conducting community and lawyer trainings for more than 50,000 persons
• Publishing more than 400 opinion editorials in Texas newspapers
• Giving more than 500 speeches and talks on civil rights to diverse groups (such as school conferences, law enforcement trainings, and senior citizen organizations)

Due to the tireless advocacy of many TCRP employees, jails in Texas counties now do much more in preventing inmate suicide, providing interpreters for deaf prisoners, protecting vulnerable inmates from sexual assault, and administering HIV medications.

TCRP set the national model in ballot accessibility for blind voters and has led more than 30 regional compliance campaigns in Texas under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Thanks to our intrepid staff, businesses, churches, and courthouses in Texas are much more accessible to elderly and people with disabilities, as are government programs.

TCRP’s Title IX programs on sexual harassment and equal sports opportunities have helped make rural middle and high schools more hospitable for young women, and respectful of them, and opened up the prospect of athletic scholarships to college for them. Our Safe Schools project works with community groups on anti-bullying programs for students and our “Equality under the Law” campaign addressed “benign” discrimination against African Americans and Hispanic Americans in banks, restaurants, motels, and other public accommodation.

Efforts to help South Asian, Muslim, and Arab citizens, permanent residents, and students who fell victim to post September 11th discrimination included filing a suit against a major airline and enlisting Texas attorneys to represent, on a pro bono basis, individuals who were questioned by the FBI.

TCRP worked with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) to help create single-member school board districts and assisted in redistricting the Texas Legislature and congressional districts so as to protect the voting and representational rights of minority citizens.

We assisted the NAACP is persuading the U.S. Department of Justice to audit the Austin Police Department and make more than 200 changes, including its use of force practices in the city’s minority communities.

TCRP joined with the American Jewish Congress in one of the first court cases in the country to challenge the constitutionality of government funding of a religiously-orientated job training program that used the Bible as an employment text and proselytized its trainees.

And we are a leading voice in raising questions about the fairness of Texas’ death penalty scheme, and the possibility of executing innocent people. So, too, are we an intrepid advocate of traditional civil liberties, such as free speech and assembly, due process, and equal protection under the United States and Texas Constitutions.

Our work that I’m proudest of dealt with:

• Ending secret collection of and research on blood of all babies born after 2002 
• Directing 480 suits under the Americans with Disabilities Act and related enforcement campaigns
• Challenging grand jury discrimination against Mexican Americans, women, and poor people
• Eliminating the statutory exclusion of farm and ranch laborers from the Texas workers’ compensation and unemployment compensation laws
• Extending the Texas Equal Rights Amendment to minority voting and redistricting
• Establishing a habeas corpus mechanism to review claims of innocence for persons sentenced to death
• Winning the right of blind voters to cast secret, adapted election ballots 
• Banning mandatory polygraph testing of state employees (and establishing privacy as fundamental right under the Texas Constitution)
• Protecting United Farm Workers Union members from retaliatory employment termination
• Securing the right of blind people to use dog guides in public accommodations 
• Seven McAllen police brutality class actions suits that reorganized the department

The most recent and profound personal development, as mentioned earlier, was coming to work with hizmet. It started with one of the movement’s interfaith dialog trips to Turkey and eventually led to writing a book on the eight-year-long political trial of Fethullah Gülen, which ended successfully and actually helped the process of more deeply democratizing Turkey.

International human rights law had always been a passion, and it was an honor to write on a subject that no one else in the world had written on. In subsequent trips, I met so many people in hizmet and was always singularly inspired by their good deeds, hard work, amiability, and commitment. It reminded me that people from all walks of life and faiths are struggling for democracy and human rights.

There remains much to do, of course. Human rights is a life-long struggle; it is painstaking to build civil society. As Eugene Debs, the renowned American labor organizer, said, every struggle for human rights is lost, and lost, and lost, before it succeeds. Indeed, many people have given their lives over the years, and suffered enormously to help make the world a better place for its people.

Civil society has yet to define and accept broader human rights, such as the right to employment, the right to a social and economic safety net, the right to medical care, the right to participate in community’s cultural life, the right to adequate standard of living, and the right to an education. The struggle goes on, building on those who went before us, for the benefit of those who come after us.

Eleanor Roosevelt put it well in her remarks at the United Nations in 1958:

Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to home – so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.

Such has been the journey of those of us inspired by John F. Kennedy all those years ago. It has been an incredible blessing to “labor in the vineyard” with so many good and decent people; they have contributed to my own growth as a person. I hope and pray that I have given back to them a portion of what they have given me. That, after all, is what living in the human community is all about:

We make a living from what we get.
We make a life from what we give.
What we have done for ourselves dies with us.
What we have done for others and for the world is immortal.
MaryAnn Evans

Harrington is founder and director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit foundation, promotes civil rights and economic and racial justice throughout Texas, for low-income people. He is author of Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey: The Political Trials and Times of Fethullah Gülen.

Today, many grade-school children do not know that milk comes from cows and eggs come from chickens. They think it all comes from the refrigerator. And if it is not there, it comes from mom—and she brings it home from the car. The Texas Nature Project in Mason, Texas, is a program initiated to help such students develop a better relationship with nature and understand that bounties do not come from mom’s small kitchen but rather, the generous kitchen of the All-Merciful and All-Providing, one as broad as the earth. Kelli Angelone interviewed Dr. Sherra Theisen on this project. Since locating to the 100-acre Northpoint Ranch in June of 2006, the project has provided hands-on programming for over 10,000 college students and their families on site, and over 100,000 young Texans through outreach programming. Dr. Theisen also has a book published online The Thoughtful Child’s Book of Rhymes with Reason that guides caregivers in helping their children aged 3-12 or so, to work through the kinds of moral dilemmas they already face. Book proceeds support programming for Texas Nature Project. Poetry by Jan Schultz, Illustrations by Sherra Theisen.

“Oak trees always make acorns. How do they know? They don’t have to know, but somebody does!” Dr. Sherra Theisen gestures to the landscape just a few hundred yards away. The two of us lounge on the porch behind her big country home in Mason, Texas. My travelling companion drifts comfortably back and forth in Dr. Theisen’s porch swing and our photographers alternate between exploring the property and photographing our conversation. Millie the Beagle can’t decide whether she should lie in Dr. Theisen’s lap or continue making friends with the photographers traipsing around in her yard.

Millie’s yard is big enough for all of us. It extends for a hundred acres, and she need not worry that the nice young men might ruin the grass. Most of her ‘yard’ is forested land, with rocks, a stream, cactus, and even a herd of deer that pop in every evening, right behind the fence that separates the house from the wilderness. Dr. Sherra Theisen, doctor of philosophy, is a one-woman (pacifist) army out on the front lines of the war between community and apathy, justice and chaos.

She and Ms. Jan Schultz organized the Texas Nature Project in Mason, Texas, a program through which they help high school and college students to have a better relationship with nature. They live in a house on the edge of Texas wilderness, inviting students to visit and learn about nature and, by extension, about themselves. The Texas Nature Project was born out of the Saint Augustine Program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. After designing and implementing the St. Augustine Program to introduce incoming freshman to nature, God, philosophy, and service learning, Jan and Dr. Theisen realized they could be offering a more intensive program that reached out to students of all ages. In addition, they hope the Texas Nature Project will soon be able to offer college credits.

As a former student of Dr. Theisen’s, I was thrilled to learn about her new program and the philosophy behind it, which was surely similar to the St. Augustine Program, but much more exciting in the wilderness setting. The University of St. Thomas is located in the middle of Houston, Texas—not quite as breathtaking as the beautiful scenery around us in Mason.

K.A: What do you hope students will take away from the Texas Nature Project in relation to the environment?

DR. THEISEN: Can you imagine thinking that we don’t need trees? Thinking that planting trees is some kind of luxury, or something childish? More than 50% of Americans live in urban areas. And that means that they don’t have experiences like people my age took for granted. If you didn’t live in the country, you always knew somebody who had a farm. So you would spend some time [there], and you knew how to milk cows and you knew how to pick up eggs…

Today, grade-school kids—many of them don’t know that milk comes from cows or eggs come from chickens. They think it all comes from the refrigerator. And if it’s not there, where does it come from before that? From mom. Where does mom get it? She brings it in from the car. I’m serious. This is what I do when I go to do the outreach programming [for Texas Nature Project]—letting the parents see that the kids do not know that they are natural beings themselves, that their health depends on the health of the whole planet.

Americans now spend 4% of their time outdoors. Four percent in outdoor activities. Because they’re terrified, terrified of the outdoors… Kids are more and more two-dimensional. And they have computers everywhere they go, technology everywhere they go, cell phones, video games, big screen televisions, computers, but it can have an alienating effect because what you can learn on the computer is about rainforests and everything else, and that you have no power to effect any change. So it can be overwhelming. And that’s why we’re focusing on ethics of place.

K.A: Who wants to go outside when they think their air is bad, when there is ozone depletion and it’s dangerous to go outside?

DR. THEISEN: [That] could be, but if you’re afraid, the thing is that the fear comes from what we don’t know. Like how healthy it is for us to be outdoors.

At the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic university, the mission was to try to connect and educate the entire human person. So, at the Augustine program that you were a part of, that was the goal. We knew that everything is integrated, that what it means to be a human person is to be an incredibly complex reality, a totality that has an intrinsic relationship to self, to others, to nature, and to the Divine, we would highlight each of those aspects in the readings, but also in the service.

What we found again and again was that it was the experiences in nature that were the most powerful and effective for absolutely everyone. And that is where people found themselves! Suddenly, instead of being very egocentric, students became aware of something larger than themselves that they don’t have complete control over. They encountered the world, the universe in its vastness. And that humility lets them find out who they are in relation to an entire universe, the need for more than one person in the universe.

Really understanding of the land and conversation with it, working together, that co-creative act and then [the students] start to see the Divine in just the vastness and the beauty and the order, the purposefulness, the intelligence…the evidence is suddenly overwhelming for it. From a philosophical standpoint it’s that St. Thomas approach where he says “It’s impossible to deny the existence of God, if you just pay attention.” ‘There’s this whole world—I didn’t make it, I can’t make it, I can barely understand it, but something does, and it’s bigger than me.’ And that’s opening up to the Divine.

K.A: How is the program run? Why bring it to Mason, Texas?

DR. THEISEN: That experience, [the Augustine program] after four years, was incredibly successful and continues to be: people like yourself continue to come back. We’ve developed these long-term friendships and associations, and people’s lives have changed to service-lives. What we decided to do was to do [the same program] in a more directed and serious and intensive way.

Jan was the co-creator of that program and then co-runner. Hers is more administrative and student development, mine is more academic and service maybe. And that’s the origin of Texas Nature Project.

We want to make this available to all Texas college students instead of just the ones that happen to be at ‘this’ university, we want to do it year-round, we want to be able to do it for every major, which is really a critical thing too. We don’t leave it to the experts—we recognize that there’s purposefulness in every single human life. If we didn’t need 7 billion people, they wouldn’t be here.

K.A: Do you hope to do that with the Texas Nature Project also (as was done with the St. Augustine Program)—bring in people of different faiths and different backgrounds?

DR. THEISEN: It’s about the shared experience of, well, there’s just this one planet (laughs). That we share our common humanity, that we share the planet, and people relax in nature, that’s the other beautiful thing—every architectural structure is somehow inculcating culture, right? And you have presuppositions about what is an appropriate activity that occurs in this space or that space. When you get outdoors, it’s open. And everybody kind of relaxes and breathes, and they can warm up, and it is a place to share everything in a safe way.

K.A: What role does science play in your curriculum?

DR. THEISEN: Science has a really important role. Now again we’re operating from a trans-disciplinary viewpoint. What that means to say is that it’s interdisciplinary, but frequently the idea of interdisciplinary is [the thought that] maybe I can connect 3 or 4 disciplines, but what we mean to say by transdisciplinary is (and I didn’t make up the word, it was Vartan Gregorian that introduced the word. He was president of the Carnegie Foundation) that we recognize everything is connected.

But, education has come so far with specialties and sub-specialties and sub- sub-specialties that it becomes more and more fragmented in practice. And if somebody is going to specialize in biology, they can’t even do that. It’s got to be microbiology or macrobiology or plant biology.

K.A: That’s what I’ve found with my own career.

DR. THEISEN: Yes, and what you need now is a specialist who’s a generalist as a speciality. That’s what a philosopher’s always been, so perfectly natural. But, so what you do is you specialize in the connections.

Scientifically, we’re working with the LCRA, which is the Lower Colorado River Authority, in doing monthly water testing of the Llano River. So we have on this property a live spring and two seasonal creeks, and they feed into Comanche Creek, and Comanche Creek feeds into Llano river, and the Llano River feeds into the Colorado River which means that you’re serving millions of people in Texas with water.

Then you get a sense of the whole, how land use is filtering into the water that people are drinking a hundred miles away. And so again you’re seeing the interconnectedness instead of doing chemistry just in a classroom where you test a sample that you picked up somewhere.

K.A: What other philosophical leaders, or founders, thinkers, not even necessarily philosophical thinkers, have you based this program on?

DR. THEISEN: In some ways what we’re doing is not brand new. A somewhat influential philosopher in the West—Plato, [she says with a grin] in the Republic, his most mature work, says, “All education begins at birth, and it starts with a noble lie. And the lie is: The earth is your mother. And the rest of your formal education, until you are 35 years old, or 50 if you intend to be a leader, will be based on that: The earth is your mother.”

It’s noble because if you don’t understand it, you will not live in the right ways. You will not be able to defend and protect your mother earth, right? And so you get your nobility from your recognition that the earth is your mother. It’s a lie because the earth is not your biological mother and of course you have a biological mother, but so much more is the earth your mother because she is a means of providing you with food and shelter throughout your entire life, and your biological mother does not and cannot.

Up until that time, 15-1600s, everybody who went to college was a philosopher because it meant you had to know everything. In order to answer any question you had to have a view—a universal view—of how your specialty fit in. It was all philosophy, all PhDs—that’s why it’s called a Ph.D.—a doctor of philosophy. So for the last 400 years though, now we’ve got these specializations, sub-specializations, so literature is still a Ph.D., but they don’t get that they need a bigger view. So the economist, it’d be a PhD but they don’t get that they need the bigger view, and the biologist is getting a Ph.D., but they don’t get that they need the bigger view because they’re working so hard on their own specialty.

K.A: There needs to be a connection to the bigger picture?

DR. THEISEN: [She nods] Our program is integrative, trans-disciplinary. Not just integrating disciplines, but integrating theory and practice. Connecting learning and life, so what we’re connecting is people to other people, people to their communities, learning to other learning, and all learning to life—not just the practical life and theoretical life, but the day to day living. I’m sure you know that service learning is kind of a new idea, maybe a decade old in universities, because students were reporting again and again that they found their education irrelevant.

As soon as they graduated they didn’t know why they spent all that time just to get a piece of paper. They didn’t see how it connects to their life. You need to be more deliberate in not just talking about how it connects but day to day showing people. That was what the Augustine program was about, day in and day out a community of research and of education and discussion and getting the connections. ‘Interdisciplinary’ in getting the connections between, but in the end you get a universal so you always know how you fit in. And so that ethics of place is: how do I live given this is my ecosystem?

K.A: So, is there an inherent connection here between philosophy and environmental science?

DR. THEISEN: Absolutely. The number one overriding concern of philosophy and philosophers is justice. Justice is the achievement of the good for everything and everyone. And what we’re always trying to do is bridge the gap, but there is no gap. It’s one place. It’s your home. It’s all about what is the right way to live? What is a good way? A worthwhile—not ‘right’ in the oppressive way but what’s a worthwhile way for human beings to live? The worthwhile way is that I work hard to achieve your good because your good is my good.

You can find more information about the non-profit Texas Nature Project at: www.texasnatureproject.org. The website contains information regarding the program’s curriculum as well as contact information for Dr. Sherra Theisen and her co-founder, Jan Schulz. The Texas Nature Project is currently accepting donations through its website to further its goals of nature education and community involvement.

Kelli Angelone is a former student of Dr. Theisen’s. She currently works as an Air Quality Planner in the Houston area, managing grants and conducting outreach. Kelli is also working on her Master of Liberal Arts in English at the University of St. Thomas, where she previously received her Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies and minors in Creative Writing and Philosophy.