Laura Slattery: Pace e Bene Community Member
Laura Slattery was the Program Coordinator of Engage: Exploring Nonviolent Living, Pace e Bene’s nonviolence training and education program. In Summer 2007 she made the decision to leave the Pace e Bene staff. We are tremendously grateful for her many years of service and look forward to our continuing connection.
Laura joined the Pace e Bene staff in 2000. Her past responsibilities included serving as the From Violence To Wholeness International Outreach Support Person, and the project coordinator of the FVTW Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (GLBTQ) Project. She developed and led Pace e Bene trainings in Colombia, Chile, and East Timor, and throughout the U.S.
A 1988 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Laura served three months in federal prison in 2003 for engaging in nonviolent resistance at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA, recently re-named the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”). Exhaustive research has established that soldiers from many nations have been trained in techniques of torture at the school, which is housed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Laura appeared in The New Patriots, a video about the SOA, and contributed an article to the booklet, Warriors to Resisters. Both of these resources highlight the voices of U.S. military veterans in the movement to close the SOA.
Laura’s journey after leaving the military in 1991 has included working as an international volunteer in Mexico and El Salvador, a chaplain in a hospital, a high school teacher, and a member of the Oakland Catholic Worker. She received her Masters in Theology from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA in 1998. Her thesis was entitled, “U.S. Catholic Pacifism in World War II and Its Implications for Today.”
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