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The willingness to inflict terrible acts of cruelty on another with no remorse—It’s nearly impossible to comprehend. But it must require an ability to completely separate oneself from the humanity of the other.
Two LMU programs, on the other hand, are founded on the commitment to meet and nurture a human connection between students and those often seen as “the other.”
Alternative Breaks, a social justice, experiential-learning program of the Pam Rector Center for Service and Action, takes students out of daily life on the bluff and into settings in the U.S. and around the world where people confront issues ranging from injustice to poverty, environmental stress, or the legacy of slavery. In 2025, AB has planned trips lasting from one to two weeks to El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Belize as well as Virginia and North Carolina.
“Part of why we organize these experiences for students is that we want to humanize people who are in a community not of their own,” says Patrick Furlong, director of the Center for Social Action.
A good Alternative Break experience, Furlong explains, doesn’t necessarily provide solutions. Instead, AB “complicates your world view. … It creates a world where you have to wrestle with complexity.”
That’s an eye-opening experience, Furlong says. “We have students who for the first time are outside of their country, and their own community. I think students find themselves wrestling with reality. They’re facing the enormity of injustice.” In the end, Furlong hopes students bring their experience home with them, to continue humanizing the other where they live.
Ignacio Companions, which is a program of LMU Campus Ministry, places the experience of encounter with the other within faith, spirituality, and justice context. IC trips involve formation and reflection meetings for several weeks prior to travel, followed by a trip that may last from one to two weeks, and post-travel meetings designed for reflection on the experience. In 2025–26, IC trips are scheduled for Kenya, Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, Jamaica, and the U.S.-Mexico border.
For Marissa Papula, director of Campus Ministry, a central element is not to solve problems in the places students visit, but “to close the gap with ‘the other.’” At the heart of the Ignacio Companions program is the experience of encounter.
Students, Papula says, “might come back with more of a refined awareness of poverty, structures of social sin, and also for the good work being done on behalf of marginalized people and [with] a commitment to amplify that. In the longer term, I hope that they will expand their imagination around systems that we participate in and what we can do create the world we want to live in.”
A trip to a Honduran village as an undergraduate at the University of Scranton, Papula says, allowed her to see that despite many differences between Honduras and her hometown in New York — in economic opportunities and political violence, for example — families in Honduras, like families at home, faced similar responsibilities, needs, and struggles in everyday life.
That journey still inspires her, she says, and she sees IC as way of living out a goal described by Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., former Superior General of the Society of Jesus: “The real measure of our Jesuit universities lies in who our students become … Tomorrow’s ‘whole person’ cannot be whole without a well-educated solidarity. We must therefore raise our Jesuit educational standard to educate the whole person of solidarity for the real world. Solidarity is learned through ‘contact’ rather than through ‘concepts.’”
“I hope IC leaves students feeling empowered or inspired.”
