Sr. Angela Ann Zukowski, MHSH, D.Min.

PROFESSOR / DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES / DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR PASTORAL INITIATIVES 

“I wake up at 3:30 every morning. I love the quiet of the mornings. I like the darkness of the morning. I like to get up when there's a stillness, a kind of mystery that envelops the world in which we live. And I'm not distracted, so I can just surrender myself to that space, which really quiets me down and it becomes my inspiration and my strength as I go forward. 

By the time I do some spiritual reading and meditation around 6:30 I'm ready to do some of my creative work. I spend a number of hours working on the ideas that we have in designing new e-courses and thinking of how we could reach out to people. I’m concerned with the global perspective of the church, with diverse cultures, how you bring all those different resources and bring that dynamism to bear on the mission that we're all about here at the Institute.

But then, by the time 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon comes, it's a different story! I think my body got out of whack because of my international travel. I think I've visited about 35-40 countries giving talks in my lifetime…I know I'm almost up to 2 million miles on two airlines, you know, so your body gets all messed up with time zones. You can only go to Abu Dhabi and Dubai so many times.

I didn't intend to be in communications. Well everything we do is communications, but when I was invited to come to UD, it was to bring together the work I was doing in cable television and radio and satellite communication into the Catholic/Marianist mission. I love going back and remembering what we used to do- then I feel very ancient! I designed and built the very first cable television studio (not the whole station but the studio) in the United States, in the middle of a cornfield in a one room schoolhouse. I had a hard rock radio program on WVUD every Saturday with Sister Angela Ann. 

Anyway, when I came, the University gave me a huge amount of space (I don't know if they give that kind of space the way they gave space in the past, probably today they would say it was too loose) but I just had the vision to do whatever I thought needed to be done. And so with the virtual learning community we started in satellite communications. We put in the very first major satellite dish here on campus in C lot.  We began producing programs and we were doing video teleconferencing. We were doing audio conferencing before most of the universities were doing it in the 80s. Faculty were so upset with me because ‘What was I doing about distance learning? That will NEVER be part of a university’.      

I'm concerned in a creative way about the future of religious life, it's changing. I have a passion about how to contribute to that conversation…the courses that I teach and the work I do. I have that global attentiveness and interest. 

A while back I wanted to go into Spanish, and everyone said it wouldn't work. It took 15 proposals, 15 rejections. But we stayed the course, and now we have over 1000 Spanish speaking students in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. We are in English, Spanish, Arabic, and we are looking into French, but it's very determined by our audience. We're not just giving partners a package. The ecclesial culture is shifting all the time and that's why listening and dialogue and collaboration is important. 

I try to bring that global vision into my classrooms, to be on the cutting edge. You sort of don't really relax in a sense because you yourself are evolving and changing all the time. People who want to be part of that vision, and to contribute their gifts and to grow in that vision, find themselves animated and enthused and creative and passionate about what we're all about at the Institute for Pastoral Initiatives. Now we are in almost 90 dioceses and 26 countries with 600 sections each term. There is still so much we need to do…with our student population and the hispanic population…I have to live to be about 120 like Abraham! It's a heck of a lot of work, but it's exciting.”