After taking a year off from teaching religious studies classes at Iona College, Director of Peace and Justice Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies Dr. Teresa Delgado is back and as busy as ever on campus.

During the last academic year, Delgado was on a fellowship leave, which is not to be confused with a sabbatical.

A fellowship leave can be taken when faculty has acquired an outside grant in order to do particular research for a project, go abroad or work overseas—all while still on full salary.

“Technically I can still request to go on sabbatical next year if I wanted to finish the work I started. I’m not going to do that though, because I like being back,” said Delgado.

Before taking her leave, Delgado had to get approval from the dean to allow her to take the year off without her job being in jeopardy as part of her application process. This was permitted, and Delgado was able to receive a grant through the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, based in Louisville, Kentucky.

“Part of what I did in order to apply for the grant was that I had to present a proposal,” said Delgado. “This particular grant was designed to help scholars who are trying to put together their first major publication—a book-length publication.”

Her proposal stemmed from her Christian Sexual Ethics class. Delgado gave an anonymous assignment to the class, “to reflect upon the way their faith tradition impacted, informed, encountered their self-understanding of their sexuality.”

There were no right or wrong answers, but with the anonymity students were able to express their thoughts freely without consequence.

“And what I found in those papers was heart-wrenching and remarkable in many ways,” said Delgado.“Students felt that the connection or encounter between sexuality and their faith tradition was one that invoked guilt, shame, troubling, discomfort. It was not a pleasant encounter. Either they were going to affirm their sexuality and reject faith tradition or affirm their faith tradition and reject their sexuality.”

Though not everyone felt this way, enough students did for Professor Delgado to think it unacceptable.

Delgado proposed to explore the sexual doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and to identify whether the foundations of that doctrine has had detrimental effects, particularly on Hispanic and African American women.

Through her studies Delgado studied human trafficking and the increase of HIV/AIDs especially in those women who sacrifice themselves to help out with family debt or have nowhere else to go.

“And that language of sacrifice has very deep Christian roots,” said Delgado. “While HIV/AIDs rates have declined in other communities in the United States, among black and Hispanic woman it’s actually increased. The dollar profit that’s made [from human trafficking] is in the billions and the number of people being trafficked now, particularly woman and children are higher than the height of trans-Atlantic slave trade.”

Delgado will also incorporate the statistics surrounding trafficking into the section that she explores about human rights in her Peace and Social Justice class.

“There’s so much value in sexual ethics that emerges out of Christian context—why is that not translating into the lives of these young people? And there was a big gap,” she said. “So there really was to me a feeling that I need to start to do some serious work around sexuality and sexual ethics because young people need resources. And perhaps somehow my work can be a part of that.”

Delgado is making continuous strides in her writing and her teaching here at Iona College.