This year’s KIPCOR Peace Lecture at Bethel College is going to be much more like a fireside chat or a conversation around a dinner table.
“A Conversation with Sister Barbara McCracken” will take place March 27 at 7 p.m. in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center, and is free and open to the public.
“Living according to the gospel … it’s going to intersect with politics and economics both,” McCracken told an Associated Press reporter in 2024. “It’s just the nature of being an active citizen.”
The Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (KIPCOR) sponsors the Peace Lecture each year.
McCracken has been a member of the Order of St. Benedict since 1961, and has lived at the Mount St. Scholastica monastery in Atchison, Kan., since 2014.
She is a longtime resident of northeast Kansas, however. After teaching at the elementary and secondary school levels in Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Kansas, she moved to Kansas City, Kan., in 1970 to teach at Donnelly College, and lived for a decade at the Shalom Catholic Worker House in Kansas City, whose primary purpose was solidarity with the homeless.
Since 1970, McCracken has been an active presence in local and regional anti-war and antiracism rallies, protests and other direct action. According to other sisters at Mount St. Scholastica, “there’s not a protest she wouldn’t go to,” although McCracken, now 85, says she has had to slow down a bit in recent years.
In 2017, PeaceWorks of Kansas City gave McCracken its Charles E. Bebb Peace Merit Award, its highest award, in recognition of her decades of peace and justice work.
She taught nonviolence in formal and informal settings.
She carried out a ministry with female inmates at the Atchison County Jail.
She worked closely with PeaceWorks leadership, and directed the local chapter of Benedictines for Peace.
She published a newsletter, The Olive Branch, as a resource for teachers who wanted to teach peace and nonviolence, wrote a peace and justice column for The Leaven, a Catholic newspaper, and was the peace and justice consultant for the Diocese of Kansas City from 1990-2003.
She became assistant director of the Keeler Women’s Center in Kansas City in 2004 and stayed there, moving to associate director, until 2014, when she “retired” to the motherhouse in Atchison.
McCracken’s main action these days is helping to manage Mount St. Scholastica’s shareholder activism.
There are about 80 nuns living in the monastery. They worship together three times a day and live by the rhythms of ancient monasticism, following the Benedictine motto to “pray and work.”
The sisters pool their salaries, retirement funds, inheritances and donations to support their ministries and investments, most of which match the sisters’ religious ideals.
However, they deliberately invest some of their money in corporations that don’t align that way, in order to be able, as shareholders, to push those companies to reconsider and possibly change policies the sisters view as harmful.
For example, in recent shareholder annual meetings, they have presented resolutions asking Chevron to look at its human rights policies, Amazon to make public its lobbying expenditures, Netflix to refine its code of ethics toward non-discrimination and diversity on its board, and a number of pharmaceutical companies to reconsider patents that might raise drug prices.
On the rare occasion that resolutions like these pass, they’re almost always non-binding. But the sisters see them as tools for education and awareness-raising. And every once in a while, support from other shareholders has swung to a majority.
Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Bethel was the first Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Community Healing and Transformation (TCHT) Campus Center, in 2021. For more information, see https://www.bethelks.edu
-30-
Photo of Sister Barbara McCracken by Shelby Bland for The Leaven
