President and Professor of Education and Leadership
Education
- B.A., Florida Southern College
- M.Div., Duke University
- S.T.M., Yale University
- Ed.D., Columbia University
- Ph.D., Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico
The Work of Liberation and Transformation
I understand education as a practice of liberation and transformation—of mind, spirit, and body. In an increasingly complex and religiously plural world, my work explores how meaningful learning occurs across difference and what conditions make such transformative encounters possible.
My scholarship and teaching are deeply shaped not only by educational theory but also by my formation as a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. This historical lens grounds my work in the lived realities of colonialism, resistance, migration, and religious encounter, and it sharpens my attention to the ways power, culture, and faith intersect in both past and present. By bringing historical consciousness into dialogue with pedagogical theory and practice, I seek to illuminate how education can either reproduce systems of domination or participate in their transformation.
Intellectually, my work draws on the critical traditions of Jürgen Habermas and Paulo Freire, particularly their shared commitment to dialogical action as a force that moves beyond abstract deliberation into embodied, communal transformation. Freire’s distinction between “false charity” and “true generosity” remains especially generative for my work. As he writes, “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the 'rejects of life,' to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands--whether of individuals or entire peoples--need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”
In my teaching, I aim to form leaders who are capable of such transformative engagement—leaders who understand education, ministry, and public life as sites of critical reflection and liberative action, who seek to cultivate practices of “true generosity” so that the Church might become an agent of justice, healing, and renewal in the world, rather than a participant in the structures that diminish human dignity. In this, I am guided by the conviction that such work lies at the heart of the gospel itself and remains central to the Church’s vocation today.