Moved by Compassion

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As a teenager, Meghan Sweeney understood that the city she lived in was hurting. It was New York in the 1970s and ’80s: a city beset by economic inequality, racial tensions, and the AIDS epidemic. Then a high school student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Sweeney sometimes wondered how Christianity could solve the challenges she saw all around her. That was until her teacher Ann Smith, R.S.C.J., assigned her Nolan’s portrait of the man at the heart of Christian faith.

Albert Nolan, O.P., (1934–2022) was a South African Dominican priest who criticized faith-based justifications for apartheid and other forms of oppression. In Jesus Before Christianity, first published in 1976, Nolan undermines such arguments by focusing on the simple facts of Jesus’s life and ministry in first-century Palestine. In doing so, Sweeney says, he reveals Jesus to be “a person moved by radical compassion across boundaries of difference to feed people, heal people, include people, challenge people, and love people.”

Sweeney has assigned Jesus Before Christianity to her students since she began teaching in the PULSE Program for Service Learning in 2006. “Students take PULSE because they perceive injustice and suffering, and they want to make a difference in the world. Through his portrait of Jesus, Nolan shows students they can,” she reflects. 

PULSE educates students about social injustice by connecting them with marginalized populations and social change organizations and by encouraging discussion on works of philosophy and theology. Since its founding in 1970, 20,000 PULSE students have collectively completed four million hours of community service at roughly 400 partner agencies across Greater Boston.