One of the last pieces of scholarship written by Dr. Julie Laible is a keynote address she delivered for the Campus Ministers' Association Faith Seeking Understanding Lecture in March 1999. It was titled, A loving epistemology: what I hold critical in my life, faith and profession.
It was ironic that she mentioned in this speech that part of the request for her to speak was "the last lecture I would ever give" considering that it truly was one of the last speeches, if not the last, that she would ever give. This makes her words even more powerful.
The last idea she covered in this speech was the importance of "traveling." She quoted from an article, Playfulness, World-travelling, and Loving Perception, written by Maria Lugones in 1987:
Knowing other's "worlds" is part of knowing them and knowing them is part of loving them...without knowing the other's world, one does not know the other, and without knowing the other one is really alone in the other's presence because the other is only dimly present to me. Through traveling to the other's "worlds" we discover that there are "worlds" in which those who are victims of arrogant perceptions are really subjects, live beings, resistors, constructors of visions even though the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant, perceive and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, and classifiable. (Pp. 17-18).
Dr. Laible adds that by traveling to someone else's world we can understand what it is to be them and even more importantly we see what it is to be ourselves in their eyes This "traveling" can be through physical movement or talking to others or reading the literature written by others. In other words, we can't sit in our "worlds" and expect the marginalized to come to us. We must "travel" and be out amongst the people to begin to understand their "worlds."
As we "travel" it will become clear that we truly are a part of each other as John Donne so eloquently expresses:
'No Man is an Island'No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
