Tattoos on the body and the heart

Graduate Justice Fellow Joachim Ozonze pursues vocation of healing justice

February 12, 2026

Growing up in Nigeria, Joachim Ozonze witnessed the lingering, ghostly legacy of the Nigerian Civil War. Though the conflict formally ended in 1970, Joachim grew up in a landscape where hatred and precarity were still palpable. He saw how violence was not merely an event in the past but a pedagogy—a way of teaching people that certain lives were disposable. This violence became socialized and inscribed through communal memories and rituals that left scars on both individual bodies and the collective moral imagination.

As a child, Joachim responded to the call to become a priest, which he describes as less of a personal career choice than a divine invitation. “When people ask me why I chose to be a priest,” Joachim reflects, “I answer that the real question is why the Lord chose me to be a priest. Becoming a priest was simply my response to that call.”

As a priest, Joachim sought alternative rituals of healing for his community, which led him on a journey of discernment. His vocational path eventually led him to the University of Notre Dame, where he enrolled in the joint Ph.D. program in theology and peace studies at the Kroc Institute. Initially, his research focused on the historical trauma of the Civil War. However, in late 2021, a new crisis interrupted his academic plans. Social media began erupting with videos of “Cane Deliverance”—a ritual in Southeastern Nigeria where local vigilantes tied methamphetamine users to wooden beams and publicly flogged them.

The screams in those videos acted as a new calling for Joachim. He felt a deep vocational pull to pivot his research away from the history of the Civil War and toward the modern drug crisis that resulted from it. He recognized the cane as a ritual pharmakon—a desperate communal attempt at a cure that was itself a poison, further inscribing violence onto the very bodies it sought to deliver. Through immersive ethnography, Joachim sought to disrupt this cycle by developing a framework for what he calls healing justice.

In fall 2022, Joachim joined the inaugural cohort of the Graduate Justice Fellowship at the Institute for Social Concerns, where he experienced yet another turning point in his vocational journey. Joining an interdisciplinary community of graduate and professional students—poets, engineers, and lawyers—to explore questions of moral purpose, Joachim was able to turn the ethnographic lens inward. He began to recognize himself not just as an observer but as a site in which the multiple worlds he is researching intersect.

“I’m so glad the institute isn’t afraid to talk about vocation,” Joachim reflects. “It was so helpful for me to ask: Who am I? Why am I doing this?”

In answering those questions during the fellowship, Joachim discovered that his vocation as a priest and his vocation as a scholar are inextricably linked. When a friend heard his proposed dissertation title, “Tattooed on Our Bodies: Inscribed Violence and Performing Healing,” the friend asked if he had ever read Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart. Joachim hadn’t, but upon reading it, he found a kindred spirit. He realized that the inscriptions of the cane in Nigeria and the gang tattoos of Los Angeles were two sides of the same coin: marks of disposability that required a ritual of kinship to erase.

Joachim reached out to Homeboy Industries—the gang intervention program founded by Fr. Boyle—to learn how they rewrite identity. 

“I love the idea of tattooing as a metaphor for unpacking how violence becomes inscribed upon bodies and how they can be rewritten,” Joachim says. “I wanted to understand how the ideals of Homeboy Industries are written into the institution and the people.”

“I love the idea of tattooing as a metaphor for unpacking how violence becomes inscribed upon bodies and how they can be rewritten. I wanted to understand how the ideals of Homeboy Industries are written into the institution and the people.”

Joachim was given complete access to Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles. Throughout November 2025, Joachim lived in the local Jesuit community, worked alongside the “homies,” and interviewed those willing to share their story. He paid close attention to the daily rituals, particularly the “morning meeting.”

“Everyone—trainees, staff, and Father Greg—says the same thing: ‘The morning meeting is where Homeboy happens,’” Joachim says. He found that the ritual formed him as much as the participants. On days when he felt weary or broken, it was the desire to be in that circle of kinship that offered the strength to move forward.

Joachim spent some of his time shadowing Dr. Troy, a Jamaican-American doctor who provides laser tattoo removals. Watching the tenderness with which Dr. Troy worked, Joachim realized it was a powerful drama of reinscription. Through the process of inscribing and reinscribing, young men and women were able to say no to an old identity of violence while claiming a new identity of belovedness.

Joachim realized that this is what it means to be tattooed on the heart.

“In my Igbo language, we use the word Ifunaya for love,” he says. “It literally means, ‘I see you in my eyes.’ It means that you have entered into my eyes and become a part of me, just as I have become a part of you.”

After his time at Homeboy, Joachim updated his dissertation into a multi-sited ethnography that weaves together his experiences in Southeastern Nigeria, East Los Angeles, and himself. He now views his vocation as one of encounter with the interconnecting moral worlds he inhabits.

Joachim credits the Graduate Justice Fellowship for highlighting the significance of this proximity. “Proximity and encounter are risky because they change us,” he says. “But for me, that’s the whole point.”

“I am so grateful for the formation I experienced at the Institute for Social Concerns,” he concludes. “Being with people from different disciplines was like sprinkles of water. When those sprinkles are brought together, they can flood the ground. It’s a community.”

Interested in joining the Graduate Justice Fellowship? Read more and watch for the application for the 2026–27 cohort to open mid-spring.

Related Stories

---