Each semester our program offers colleagues the opportunity discuss a common text with themes relating to vocation, faith or spirituality. These discussions aim to engage colleagues in the intellectual exploration and spiritual integration of their work at the College.

Fall 2008 faculty/staff book discussion
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace
. . . One School at a Time 

The book selected for the Fall 2008 Faculty and Staff Book Discussion is Three Cups of Tea, the story of Greg Mortenson, a young man who found his life's calling after getting lost while coming down a mountain. That unplanned detour redirected his life and dramatically impacted the lives of thousands of others. As the author relates, "After a failed 1993 attempt to climb K2, Mortenson arrived in Korphe, emaciated and exhausted. In this impoverished community of mud and stone huts, both Mortenson's life and the lives of northern Pakistan's children changed course. One evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who'd lost his way, and one morning, by the time he'd shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots, he'd become a humanitarian who'd found a meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life."

The hospitality and kindness he received from strangers who had so little not only nursed Mortenson back to life, but also permanently changed him. Upon leaving the village of Korphe, Mortenson makes them a promise to return and build a school for the children there. But unlike so many lost mountaineers who had made the people of Korphe promises before, Mortenson keeps his. He returns to Berkeley and while, living out of the back seat of his car and working part-time at a hospital, looks for ways to raise the money he needs to enhance the lives of the people who saved his. Within a year he returns to Korphe with the money he needs to build the school. Still, no dream is easily achieved and Mortensen, in his quest to help people in need, encounters more obstacles, discouragement, and adversity than any looming mountain ever presented him. But he perseveres and is drawn so deeply into his mission that after building his first school, promised to return to build many more. Back-and-forth, from Berkeley to Islamabad, he goes, year after year, so that by the time of the book's publication in 2006, Mortenson and the foundation he began were responsible for more than fifty schools, primarily for girls, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Along the way Mortenson is kidnapped, shot at, and slandered. He struggles with intense loneliness, discouragement and, not surprisingly, moments of terrible fear. But as with anyone who allows a calling to take hold—to seize their heart and turn their life upside down—Mortenson can’t look back. His vocational journey takes him deep into the cultures of Pakistan and into the world of Islam. The son of Christian missionaries, Mortenson becomes beloved by the persons our post 9-11 society regularly teaches us to fear. As David Relin, author of Three Cups of Tea, observes, “In a part of the world where Americans are, at best, misunderstood, and more often feared and loathed, this soft-spoken, six-foot-four former mountaineer from Montana has put together a string of improbable successes. Though he would never say so himself, he has single-handedly changed the lives of tens of thousands of children, and independently won more hearts and minds than all the official American propaganda flooding the region…Greg Mortenson…is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted.”

Three Cups of Tea is an unforgettable, inspiring, and challengingly hopeful story of a man not afraid to scale whatever mountains might confront him as he looks for ways to use his passion and his gifts in response to the world’s pressing needs.

Review by Paul Wadell, Professor of Religious Studies, St. Norbert College

Next Discussion:

The Program of Faith, Learning & Vocation provides each participant with a copy of the selection upon receipt of registration.

Please register online or call DeEtte Radant at the Office of Faith, Learning and Vocation at (920) 403-3155. Please register even if you have a copy of the book. A separate registration is necessary for each book discussion.

If you have suggestions for future selections, please e-mail Paul Wadell or call him at (920) 403-3084.

Archive of past selections