Devaka Premawardhana

                                April 5, 2004

 

Statement of Purpose

 

Brazil's population, like that of many countries in the developing world, is marked by two characteristics: high levels of spirituality and low levels of materiality. While many have been denied access to wealth and even basic, vital resources, those same people tend to remain deeply faithful and committed to their religious traditions. Karl Marx thought he understood the relationship between religion and economics when he characterized religion as an opiate of the people, as a tool of oppression that convinces workers to accept their lot and patiently fulfill their duties in this world in exchange for rewards in the next. Religion thus serves to legitimate the status quo.

 

In Latin America, however, and particularly in Brazil, the relationship between religion and poverty has for the past 40 years especially been addressed differently. Religion is not a tool of oppression, but a means of liberation. Latin American theologians are not offering stale and comforting answers about life after death, but asking hard and demanding questions about life after birth. In the words of Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, "Our function is to create a society where it is less difficult to be sisters and brothers to one another one where love is less difficult."

 

Seminário Teológico Batista de Nordeste (STBN), in Bahia, Brazil's poorest state, trains its students to put their faith into action, to make their religious beliefs relevant and responsive to the needs of the poor people in their midst. In the methodological spirit of liberation theology and the pedagogical spirit of Paulo Freire, praxis is prior to theory, action prior to abstraction. This means that everything the students learn in the seminary classroom is formed directly out of their experiences with economic and political struggles in the community. My intent this summer is to engage in those experiences, and to enter into those struggles. 

 

In the way it trains Brazil's future ministers and community leaders, STBN ensures that strides toward liberation for the many who suffer in Bahia will not have to wait until long in the future, but is a part of the present context. The seminary curriculum has a field education component that connects students to community development and social service efforts, thus putting the students in position to make valuable contributions even before entering professional ministry. Currently, the many projects of social uplift with which the students are involved include: Tents of hope, a mobile health fair that sends doctors and health care professionals to rural villages for a day to offer free medical care; seminary-sponsored work around literacy and childhood education at the primary school on campus; and, finally, well-drilling services to villages otherwise lacking ready, year-round access to clean water.

 

In accord with the social service aspect of the seminarys mission, my chief goal during the eight weeks I expect to spend in Brazil is to affiliate myself with one of its projects. Professor Allen Callahan, the STBN faculty member with whom I will work, has proposed the well-drilling project as a particularly exciting project for me to engage in. That is where I plan to focus my energies. I consider this is one of the most dramatic ways the seminary, using its own well-drilling equipment (thus minimizing overhead costs), shows its commitment to Brazil's impoverished communities. The seminary recognizes that its students come from and, after receiving their education, return to such communities, which is part of why it is committed to this important service. I am committed to such service as well, and am eager to contribute to the fulfillment of Brazilians' basic needs, like that of clean water.

 

I also am eager to learn, and expect that I will receive far more than I will be able to give. Community development and social service projects are always unique to the particular context, and so it will be an educational experience to learn about what the particular needs are in poverty-stricken Bahia, as I work to help address those needs. From those with whom I will work - the students and faculty within the seminary, those agencies and people outside the seminary that will also work on the project, and the families that will benefit from the projects completion - I expect to learn a great deal. I will learn not only about their particular development strategies, but also about their culture the perspectives that shape them, the values that drive them, and the hopes that sustain them.

 

In addition to concrete internship work, a secondary goal of mine is more intellectual in nature. I plan to read the scholarly literature and dialogue with the scholarly minds that speak to the matters of religion and social activism. This is why it is appropriate to base myself at an educational institution, where resources will be available for me to achieve my intellectual goals. However, because the seminary is rather isolated (over an hour from the nearest city, Salvador) I will occasionally need to travel outside the seminary. By taking advantage of contacts that Professor Callahan and others at the seminary have to development strategists, theologians and activists in places like Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, I will enable myself to return from this trip well-prepared to consider Brazilian approaches to social and economic justice to whatever contexts of professional work I eventually engage in.

 

Intellectual conversations, readings and, most crucially, hands-on work in the poorest state of Brazil will help me achieve some of the most important personal objectives of my overall program at Harvard Divinity School: to gain a global perspective and to equip myself with the skills and knowledge necessary for a career devoted to the pursuit of peace and justice.