Instead of studying the slanted rights given between different ethnicities or cultures and global poverty whether materialistically or spiritually through textbooks, the School of Education is bringing those off-campus live experiences up close and personal to students.

The second annual Justice, Spirituality, and Education Conference will take place on March 16, the day after Missions Conference. The conference, hosted by Biola’s School of Education, is extended to students, alumni and faculty. It is a day dedicated to serving the attendees with recent knowledge of the spheres of justice, spiritually and education and how they are interconnected through numerous people in those fields, according to the event’s website.

Goal of conference is to show the meaning of justice in Scripture

JSE was started by Fred Ramirez, a professor in the School of Education, who wanted to create a forum where people of faith could talk about the issues of justice and all disciplines — that’s the education piece, making an impact to the world, according to recruiting and community relations coordinator David Costillo. The goal of the conference is for Christians to really show what the Scriptures say about justice, he said.

“We have a lot more practical presentations [this conference] … as opposed to academic papers,” Costillo said.

Over 30 speakers include Biola alumni

There are more than 30 conference speakers presenting topics like “A Christological Missional Ethic of Immigration: Reflections on Hebrews,” by Andy Draycott, a professor of theology at Biola, and “Helping the Needy Through Education: Examining the Links between Poverty Research and Orphan Education,” by Calvin G. Roso from Oral Roberts University.

Chase Andre, a Biola alumnus and co-founder of Pacifist Fight Club, an online community which seeks to fight and overcome chaos in the world with peaceful discussions, attended the JSE Conference last year. At this year’s conference, he is presenting “Agapic Empathy: Engaging Perspectives Amidst a Culture War.”

“I love this conference because it seems to represent what we’re trying to do here at Biola so well,” Andre said. “We see our spirituality and our faith integrally tied … hopefully we live it out justly and that the decisions we make and the way we live our lives and the causes we support and back, call the world around us in a more just picture of the kingdom of God.”

Keynote speaker Stephan Bauman, the CEO of World Relief and an alumnus of the Cook School of Intercultural Studies, is coming to the conference to invite students into places of material poverty, social poverty and spiritually poverty and show them how they can be a gateway of justice.

Conference seeks to link justice with education

“Without education at the heart of the justice movement, we will not see deep and lasting change. We must change as we also seek to change the world,” Bauman wrote in an email. “I'd love to see a stronger relationship between the practitioner world and the academic disciplines of spiritual formation and education.”

The price of the conference is $129, but for undergraduates it is only $10, which includes breakfast and dinner. JSE is seeking to help the attendees as much as they can by supplying them ample amounts of invaluable information from well-established speakers at an affordable cost, Costillo said.