Photo by Noah Lederer ’21 | The Office of Faith and Justice’s display for human dignity stands in the Octagon on Jan. 16, 2019.
By Noah Lederer ’21
THE ROUNDUP
Every year, Brophy hosts a summit discussing relevant topics amongst the community and this highly anticipated couple of weeks is coming up from February 25 to March 6.
This year, the theme is set to be “The Search for Health: Dignifying the Body, Mind, and Spirit.”
Mr. Will Rutt ’08, director of Ignatian service and advocacy at Brophy, says that Brophy chose this topic as a response to what is prominent in our community.
Mr. Rutt said, “I think more and more students are dealing with mental health issues and are dealing with more anxiety and stress [and need to] manage those things.”
“[The summit will show] what are our experiences outside of our bodies are, but then how is that connected to the spiritual and mental aspect in a holistic way,” said Mr. Rutt.
When it came to deciding on this years topic, Mr. Rutt said that a lot of parents have identified that their sons were struggling with mental health so they felt as if health was really important to address.
Mr. Paul Fisko, assistant principal for ministry, said that, through surveys, students voted for a health topic for this year’s summit and since the faculty and staff both saw this as a prominent issue, they announced it as this year’s theme.
“A while back, Fr. Eddie Reese S.J., the former president of Brophy, one year said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we did a summit on mental health?’ and many of us have never thought of it. I think he may have had a personal connection to family and friends who had been battling certain mental health issues and we stepped back from it,” said Mr. Fisko.
These words from Fr. Reese S.J. stuck with Mr. Fisko.
Mr. Fisko said, “I never forgot that because of last year, with the Stop the Stigma campaign, I am sitting there going this is very organic and I would never want to squash or not pay attention to what organically has happened.”
This year’s summit topic was carefully selected to meet what the students were demanding.
During summit week last year, Brophy placed visual components across campus such as the storage containers filled with information about human commodification and the large pink doll box with a young girl inside representing the buying and selling of human beings. Students can expect visual components like these again this year.
Mr. Rutt said, “This year the theme of the visual component might be x-ray themed, showing that we are more than just the physical things that we are.”
Mr. Fisko also discussed the ideas for the visual component and said that a few possible centerpieces could be an operating room on campus, a digital centerpiece of the human body, or large pill bottles that could depict things that people need to cope with their health issues.
Reese Cantu ’22 is very excited for his first summit at Brophy.
“With everything that we have now, technology-wise, depression and things like that seem to have become more common and more people are talking about it,” said Cantu.
Cantu said, “For me specifically, so far freshman year, I bit off more than I can chew and that has added so much stress so if we can learn some ways to cope with that it’d be great and I know I’m not the only one that feels like that.”
Cantu is excited to learn about modern-day health issues and about ways of coping with them.
With the summit being a very large event that happens on Brophy’s campus each year, many are excited to learn about the issue of health and how it affects them.
