“Our hope can only be as deep as our lament.” —Cole Arthur Riley
Previous Talks.
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Wonder & Beauty
“Perhaps, the most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold.”
-Mako Fujimura
What does it mean to engage in rituals of beauty? How does the discipline of wonder keep us from despair? What does beauty do to the soul?
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Dignity, Justice, Lament, & Solidarity.
“When God had made The Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over. Some angels got jealous and chopped him into millions of pieces, but still he glittered and hummed. So they beat him down to nothing but sparks but each little spark had a shine and a song.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
What is our story and where does it begin? How can you practice justice and reconciliation in the mundane and in the systemic? What does it mean to exist in solidarity with another?
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Embodied Faith.
“For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed.”
-Julian of Norwich
What does it mean to take hold of an embodied spirituality? In what ways do we neglect our bodies? What systems benefit from our disembodiment and how can we resist them together?
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Rest.
“I think just the sight of seeing a Black body at rest is radical, is liberating. It’s freedom… I think seeing that in this culture where Black bodies are looked at as a problem, where Black bodies are looked at as something shameful, something that wants and needs to be ended, and the violence of trauma that’s happened to our bodies, to see us in a rest state, to see us relaxing and laying back is really, really powerful.”
-Tricia Hersey
What does rest have to do with freedom? How does the body serve as a site of liberation? In what ways have our idols of utility and productivity infiltrated our concepts of the divine and calling? How do I honor a calling that includes work, without reducing it to only work?
