Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times
With Homeboy Industries as a backdrop, this talk will explore the power of love to transform the disunity that currently keeps us from each other. Loving is our home and knowing that, is to never be homesick again.
Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, and Jesuit priest from 1986 to 1992, Fr. Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights. Dolores Mission was the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles that also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city.
Fr. Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called “decade of death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1,000 gang-related killings in 1992. In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, he and parish and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.