PHD Religious Studies Personal Purpose Statement Caribbean

Applying to PHD program in Religious Studies

A rich heritage is only as good as the person commanding it. Personal strength and your achievements are what make you, and your heritage then becomes your depth. Coming from Trinidad and Tobago, my family, my blood, is rooted in an acceptance and understanding of religious diversity. Trinidad and Tobago, while a tiny island nation, was the first nation in the world to have a national holiday that acknowledges Spiritual Baptists, one of two African syncretic religions on the islands, as well as recognizing Christian, Hindu, and Muslim national holidays. Growing up in Brooklyn and taking an active role in Celebrate Brooklyn for these past 30 years, has helped me to identify as a New Yorker with extraordinary pride, enamored as always with our city's great diversity.

While I have seen religious tolerance at its best, I recall while serving for several years as a New York City Police Officer, all too well, the race riots, widespread violence, and looting that took place in my hometown of Crown Heights in 1991 I remember feeling incredible sadness and intense disappointment, sentiments shared by most of my fellow officers.

I have reached a point in my professional career where I feel I have exhausted every avenue of promotion and challenges at my current academic level and need to enact changes in my life to bring my plans to fruition. I am hungry to conduct research into African religions, particularly how they became African American religions because of the slave trade, both before and after the American Civil War. I hope to have the opportunity to devote lifelong learning to the subject of African syncretic religions throughout the Americas, especially the Caribbean.

By completing the especially distinguished and creative PhD program in Religious Studies at ____ University I will be in an excellent position to learn from the renowned African American Studies department as well. In this way, I will have optimal preparation for the fulfillment of my intellectual and professional dreams. I look forward to becoming increasingly devoted to religious toleration and preserving peace through dialogue and communication among diverse religious groups that need to work together to counter hate and violence. I hope to focus on the positive attributes and resources of a broad variety of different religions present in America to promote improved relations between all religious groups, especially those that are heavily represented in the community.

I have an intense passion for teaching, born from direct contact and interaction with students, watching them grow and develop academically becoming conscientious citizens with articulate voices who do not shy away of speaking up on behalf of weak and the victimized. Throughout my professional career, I have remained engaged with teaching as well as counseling and they are quite complementary. I hope to someday design workshops that foster spirituality and spiritual camaraderie based on commonly held belief systems, for those religious groups that have experienced tension for one reason or another, most notably, strife between Black and Latino members of the community, particularly our youth.

I look forward to continuing to volunteer as a career counselor heightening awareness concerning how to overcome barriers to higher education. I have been successful in getting many of the young adults that I work with to implement novel strategies of being, that assist them in counteracting both the internal and the external challenges they face in the struggle to improve their lives.

My commitment to my academic career is evident in my holding of two graduate degrees, one of which is in Psychological Counseling. These studies enabled me to learn about and better appreciate how idiosyncratic perspectives are formed in the context of cultural experiences. While conducting a peer-reviewed symposium for the 2001 Teachers College Winter Roundtable, I had the opportunity to present my research work which consisted of an extensive literature review and data analysis detailing the relationship between religious and spiritual coping in the context of psychological distress among urban college students.

I also plan to continue my work at my church in a ministry entitled, Be Transformed. I co-facilitate a woman's group that practices adopting a psycho-spiritual approach to daily adversities and personal challenges with a psycho-spiritual approach. I am also working with the ____ organization, designing a seven-week group workshop, Spirit Speaks, which aims to provide a safe environment where students from different spiritual and religious orientations can enter open dialogue about similarities and differences in spiritual experiences. The hope is that these experiences will increase awareness of bias and lay the groundwork for greater understanding. I also volunteered for the program Police Officers Providing Peer Assistance (POPPA) in which I periodically managed a crisis hotline, which sometimes entailed meeting personally with officers experiencing crises in their lives.

Overall, I have become a very well-rounded and versatile teacher, having taught in many different educational settings and levels, with students from a multitude of backgrounds and ages, experiences which will aid me invaluably in my time at ____ University. The subject matter I have taught could not have been more diverse ranging from teaching self-defense tactics to police officers to teaching multicultural counseling to students in a community college. Combined with this has been my experience in designing original and creative educational programs, such as the ____ program, in which children from Harlem were given free karate lessons in exchange for a chance to tutor them in basic reading, writing, and math.

The Department of Religion at ____ is my sole choice for further education. I adore diversity and feel fortunate to have had the privilege to get to know many individuals from a large variety of ethnic groups, races, and cultures. I profoundly value being multilingual and look forward to fulfilling the foreign language requirement. The work that I have done in and for my church and community is solid evidence of my Christian faith. However, my life experiences and heritage have served to develop a desire to understand and a capacity to appreciate the powerful positive attributes of all religions and spiritual orientations. Diversity is what makes this society unique, and beautiful, a reflection of the tout ensemble of humankind.

PHD Religious Studies Personal Purpose Statement Caribbean