Image
Audio file
Executive Director, Jubilee USA Network
I had the good fortune of meeting Eric LeCompte in Fall 2022 when we were fellow resident scholars at the Collegeville Institute on the campus of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. While I was researching power, Eric was researching the intersection of social action and liturgy, and he tried to live what he studied. As someone who has engaged in social advocacy around human rights for over 25 years now, Eric placed a high priority on being able to pray each day with the monks at St. John’s Abbey. Because he had a busted knee and I had a car, we made multiple trips to the abbey together and in those short trips, I realized, “Here is someone I really need to get on tape.”
Eric LeCompte cut his teeth in social activism with SOA Watch – an organization committed to ending the U.S.’s role in state-sponsored violence in Latin America. He is currently the Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network—a coalition of more than 750 religious organizations who share a common concern around international debt relief. He has spoken at the United Nations on multiple occasions and regularly appears in such media outlets as the Washington Post, National Public Radio, the Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, MSNBC, and the Associated Press.
Our lengthy, freewheeling interview covered terrain I’d not covered in other interviews and helped to illumine for me how our socio-economic and racial identities might make us look at such power markers as business attire and titles in very different ways. That part of the conversation has been highlighted in this short snippet of our interview.