‘One Year Later’ event scheduled this fall will engage Syracuse University community in discussions about what has been learned since Sept. 11

‘One Year Later’ event scheduled this fall will engage Syracuse University community in discussions about what has been learned since Sept. 11April 26, 2002Jonathan Hayjhay@syr.edu

“One Year Later,” a series of events designed to provide coordinated and integrated reflective learning experiences for the students of Syracuse University a year after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, will be held on the SU campus Sept. 10-15, 2002.

“In the wake of Sept. 11, the University sponsored many outstanding forums that explored our ‘head’ knowledge of how a tragic event like this could have occurred, ” says the Rev. Thomas V. Wolfe, dean of Hendricks Chapel. “One Year Later” will be focused on how our lives, and the way we live, have changed since Sept. 11. Hopefully, the events can help us figure out what this moment in our history has meant to us and help us spend some time reflecting on the changes we have gone through.”

The event is aimed at providing a framework and a set of experiences that can draw the University community together by facilitating a reflective process that balances looking back in remembrance and looking forward in hope. The series is also designed to provide learning resources and experiences that contribute insight on a number of issues that include changing sense and experience of self; changing identities and experiences within faith and cultural traditions; and the changing nature of economic, political, religious, social and interpersonal relationships.

“Within an overall theme of ‘finding meaning,’ we are seeking to design a program where we may read from the ‘books of our lives’-through which we both find and re-construct meaning–in order to focus and reflect upon our critical human stories,” Wolfe says. “We are also seeking to open the ‘books of experiences’ of the larger world around us.”

Hendricks Chapel will host two “anchor events”–a speaker on Sept. 10 and an interfaith service in the main chapel on Sept. 11–but Wolfe says the involvement of the entire University community is key. He is seeking members of the University community who would like to create “satellite events” that will be coordinated around the two anchor events. Wolfe and the “One Year Later” committee hope that schools, colleges or organizations on campus will want to create events that offer diverse and thoughtful viewpoints to facilitate reflection and the finding of individual meanings in relation to Sept. 11.

“We’re really asking the whole University community to support and take part in this event,” Wolfe says. “We have already reached out to some parts of the campus community, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive and supportive.”

To contact the “One Year Later” committee about creating a “satellite event,” call Francis Spencer, coordinator of “One Year Later,” at Hendricks Chapel at 443-2901.