Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology and around. My guest today is Dr. Kurt

Verbeek, who is the co-founder of the Association for a more just society, ASJ. And he has taught as a

professor of sociology for Calvin University, where he directed the Honduras Justice Studies

semester with his wife, Joanne, for 20 years. He is the author of Call for Justice, co-written

with Christian philosopher Nicholas Woltersdorf. And he is the subject of a recent book,

Bear Witness, The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, written by Ross Halperin. And that latter book

is sort of the subject of our conversation. We talk a lot about his work in Honduras and addressing issues of

violence, which was honestly so fascinating to hear of his very courageous work that he's

been involved in in Honduras. So really a fascinating conversation, appreciated Kurt's

just the work that he's doing is just really remarkable.

So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only, Kurt Beerbeek.

Welcome to Theology and Raw, Kurt.

I'm excited to talk to you as I told you offline. I came across your work on short-term missions years ago and was really deeply impacted by it. It was one of the things where you experientially and academically confirm some things I was thinking. But why do we start with your start at the beginning. What brought you

to Honduras and what is the work you at the beginning we're engaging in? Thank you, first of all,

for having me and very nice to be here. So we were young. My wife and I were early 20s, just graduated, just got married. We're applying for jobs,

a bunch of places, and we offered an internship in Costa Rica, which we didn't even know where

it was. My wife had never been on a plane. I had only flown once, so this was in, I'm 61, so this was in

1986, and we moved to Costa Rica to kind of just thought it would be fun and exciting.

And we fell in love with Central America, with Spanish, with culture, and two years later, they had a job, a full-time job for each of us in Honduras. And they asked us to move there. So we moved there in 88. And we have been there pretty much ever since. I did a PhD, Cornell in the middle, and a few other things. But most of the last 40 years we've been in Honduras.

What kind of work have you been engaged in?

So our first work, the first six, eight years was, they would call it community development.

I always think like World Vision kind of work is an easy way to describe it. So helping poor neighborhoods,

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