Taking Up Our Responsibility for Racial Justice

with 2 Comments
Photo by Tim Pierce via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

THIS SERIES MET IN JULY AND AUGUST, 2020

Although this offering is now concluded, you are invited to view the video of the plenary presentation, and explore course materials below. 

At this critical moment in our nation’s and community’s history, we are confronted again with fresh knowledge of longstanding racial injustice – in policing, the justice system, health care, housing, education, the Church, and many other sectors of our common life. Our faith community is grappling with important questions – what do I need to learn? How should I and our church respond?

This four-week study and discussion series in summer 2020 brought the Saint Mark’s community together to confront racism—its theology, history, and presence in our lives today—and ways to move forward toward justice. The in-depth series open to all recognized the responsibility for change falls on white people. We met on four Wednesday nights, with a required advance registration and commitment to attend all sessions and read/watch articles and videos in advance, and began with encouraging participants to read ahead of time Ijeoma Oluo’s book, So You Want to Talk About Race.

Saint Mark’s has ongoing programming each season to continue the work to take up our responsibility for racial justice, and encourages each of us to continue doing our own inner work, and learning, and action. As programs at the cathedral are scheduled, details will be available on the Racial Justice resources page, here.


The syllabus for the four-session series, including required reading and viewing, may be downloaded here.


Additional resources contributed by participants in the series may be downloaded here.

PDFs of the power point slides of the opening plenary may be downloaded here..

2 Responses

  1. Curry
    | Reply

    Thank you so much for doing this series. I am really looking forward to learning and understanding what I can do to help make positive change in the fight against racial injustice. Curry

  2. Pat Taylor
    | Reply

    Henry Louis Gates wrote this:
    “Racism has been part of America’s cultural DNA since before the ink dried on the Constitution. Dominant in some and recessive in others it has mutated over time yet remains part of the inheritance weighing us down one generation to the next. The damage it has done is systemic and goes all the way down to the cellular level.”

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