Presented November 3, 2009
By Rev. Kevin Burke, S.J.,
Acting President of Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley


Watch the video of this presention

A native of Wyoming and a Jesuit of the Missouri Province, Fr. Burke entered the novitiate in 1976. He lived and studied in Central America and the Philippines between 1992 and 1994, before returning to doctoral studies in the fall of 1994.

In 1996 Fr. Burke spent a semester in El Salvador doing research for his dissertation on Fr. Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., the president of the University of Central America assassinated by Salvadoran soldiers in 1989. His dissertation was later published as The Ground Beneath the Cross: The Theology of Ignacio Ellacuría (Georgetown University Press, 2000.)

As a faculty member of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Fr. Burke led delegations to El Salvador on several occasions, including a student delegation from St. Joseph's University (Philadelphia) for the 20th anniversary celebration of the U.S. women missionaries (2000), and delegations from Weston Jesuit for the tenth anniversary of the UCA martyrs (1999) and the 25th anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Romero (2005).