International Scholar to Address Domestic Violence

What happens in religious congregations when the subject of domestic violence comes up?

For more than 20 years, Dr. Nancy Nason-Clark, founder and director of The RAVE Project, has been writing and speaking about the "holy hush" that hovers over most religious congregations when it comes to talking about this kind of abuse.

Kent State University's Center for the Study of Information and Religion (CSIR) presents Dr. Nason-Clark and "Shattering the Holy Hush: Harnessing Information and Technology to Enable Pastors and Churches to Respond to Domestic Violence in their Communities" on Tuesday, Sept. 14, at 7 p.m. in the Kent Student Center, Room 317. The program is free and open to the public.

The RAVE Project is an initiative that seeks to bring knowledge and social action together to assist families of faith impacted by abuse. Nason-Clark, professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, is author of The Battered Wife (1997) and co-author with Catherine Clark Kroeger of No Place for Abuse (2001) and Refuge from Abuse (2004). She is co-editor of Feminist Narratives and the Sociology of Religion (with Mary Jo Neitz, 2000) and Understanding Abuse: Partnering for Change (with M.L. Stirling, C.A. Cameron and B. Miedema, 2004). She has published more than 75 articles or chapters on her research and addressed audiences in the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Australia, Asia and the United States. For more information, visit http://www.theraveproject.com/index.php.

CSIR was created in 2009 in Kent State's School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) to facilitate research on the various institutions and agents of religion and their effect on social knowledge through the use and dissemination of information. Dr. Don A. Wicks, SLIS interim director and associate professor, serves as director of the center. Dr. Daniel R. Roland, SLIS assistant professor, is the primary researcher. For more information, visit http://csir.slis.kent.edu.

Kent State offers the only Master of Library and Information Science degree program in Ohio that is accredited by the American Library Association, and one of the nation's few master's degrees in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The school is recognized by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation's top 20 graduate schools and is one of the largest library schools in the country, with nearly 700 students enrolled.