John J McLaughlin
Topics: Writing | Storytelling | Spiritual Direction | Equitable Social Justice | Community-Based Change | Masculinity & Faith
John is an award-winning writer and teacher with a long history of ally-ship with people and communities of color.
Since 1997, when he first took a job there with Creighton University, John has been intimately connected to the Carribean nation of the Dominican Republic. He served as assistant director of CU’s Semestre Dominicano program during his first year there, during which time he became fluent in Spanish. During his second year, he taught English classes at Santiago’s Catholic university, and worked as a journalist for One Respe, a local NGO. John’s articles about the lives of Haitian-Dominicans and Haitian immigrants in the DR—the systematic injustices they experienced—were published electronically by One Respe and read widely in Europe and North America.
In 1999, John founded the Pentecost Project, a service-learning program in Dominican communities he has now known for ten years. It is now part of Education Across Borders, the nonprofit organization which John directs. Through this program—which is spiritually-rooted, relationship-centered, and justice-oriented—over 300 individuals from the US have had a life-changing encounter with Dominicans and Haitians in poor rural communities. The program has built over 50 houses, a rural clinic (and supplied it with medicine), a church, sanitation facilities, a park site, and many green spaces in Dominican communities living in extreme poverty. Education Across Borders also supports scholarships for talented Dominican students from these communities; at present, more than a dozen students are enrolled in pre-professional university studies, well on their way to breaking the cycle of poverty and dependency in which so many Dominican youths are trapped. EAB, in its mission to “transform communities through relationship,” sponsors Dominican-Haitian interchanges and dialog, to work toward healing wounds of racism and nationalism, both in the DR and the US.
John has completed spiritual formation programs at Seattle University, and at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM. He lives with his wife and two children in Seattle, where he is a member of St. Therese Parish; he serves on its Social Justice Commission, and volunteers in its winter overnight shelter.
