Joshua Ballew, Undergraduate Student

Joshua Ballew, a third year undergraduate student at S-CAR, is double majoring in Community Conflict and Religious Studies. When Joshua was four years old, his family moved from the U.S. to the small port city of Macau. At that time, Macau had been a Portuguese colony for over 400 years and in 1999 was handed over to China as a Special Administrative Region. Growing up in this unique part of the world, Joshua was exposed to a rich blend of European heritage and Asian culture. “It’s taken for granted that you can walk down the street and see a one-hundred year-old Catholic Cathedral standing right beside an even older Chinese Temple.” Fluent in both Cantonese and English, Joshua was educated through the local school system in Macau, from the first year of kin­dergarten all the way through secondary school. “I grew up as a tall, white, Christian, male... minority. It wasn’t until I arrived in the U.S. in 2010 that I real­ized how uncommon my experience really is.” His first year in the U.S. was spent working at a middle school in Sacramento, California. Regarding his time there, he remarked, “there’s noth­ing like working with a class of middle schoolers to prepare you for the study of conflict.” This semester, Joshua is join­ing six other undergraduates, two of whom are S-CAR students, to form an interfaith fellowship on the Fairfax campus. The group is cur­rently made up of a Jew, a Muslim, a Mormon, two Protestants, a Catholic, and an Atheist, and is ready to welcome others. The main focus of the group is to build friendships through fellowship that, according to Abigail Lash, a junior studying social work, will “bridge the gap between reli­gious divisions.” The fellowship meets Fridays at 3pm and is a great place to “learn about people of other faiths." Coming from the multicultural urban environment of Macau to the diversity of the Mason community, Joshua is thankful for the opportunity to share and learn alike. “I look forward to learning a lot from the others but also from the experience itself. Hopefully what we do here will contribute to the transforma­tion of relationships across campus."