GSRJ Conference Workshops Led by CRCDS Faculty
Saturday, April 2nd
Time: 3:00 PM, Eastern
You can access the workshop meeting links on pages 5 & 6 of the conference program book
HERE. Reading with Sexual Violence Victims: Intersectional and Restorative Readings of the Bible
Description: Sacred texts are accorded authority in faith communities. These texts contain stories about sexual violence against women. They are rarely identified as rape stories and do not appear in lectionaries. In sermons and popular imagination, sexual violence in the Bible is transformed into stories of marriage or love or justified as part of God’s master plan. This workshop is an invitation to believe sexual violence victims in the Bible. The workshop explores theological and ethical responses to the texts and readings that blame and retraumatize sexual violence victims and survivors. Additionally, participants will engage intersections of race and class reading these texts. Finally, they will be encouraged to share resources and strategies to promote restorative justice work in communities.
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Instructor: Dr. Jin Young Choi
Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at CRCDS
Baptist Missionary Training School (BMTS) Professorial Chair in Biblical Studies
Talking about Gender, Sexual, and Racial Justice in the Age of Social Media
Description: This workshop explores resources and sites for engaging gender, sexual, and racial justice utilizing internet and social media-based resources. In doing so, I locate social media as a site of meaning-making and engagement of cultural phenomena. This workshop will discuss using social media for pedagogical purposes, sharing resources, and combating injustices. This workshop will be interactive. I encourage participants to bring resources that have helped them or are valuable to share with other participants.
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Instructor: Professor Shatavia L. Wynn
Visiting Instructor of Ethics & Society at CRCDS
Hildegard's Vision: Reimagining Worship and Pathways of Healing
Description: Christianity, particularly in its Western institutional, liturgical and textual expressions, has been painfully complicit with the abuse and violation of children, women, and the creation by confirming God’s transcendence of creation, together with the superiority of human being to all other beings. Hildegard of Bingen articulated another vision of God and human being in relation to creation. This workshop will engage her generative notion of viriditas, literally, “greening greenness,” as the self-refreshing life-force in all finite beings and in the earth, water, and air. We will consider her juxtaposition of viriditas with ariditas, the deadly, dualistic force that anticipates today’s global ecological crisis, with desertification, drought, unbearable heat, and wildfires; it also anticipates the desertification of human hearts that has engender abuse. Hildegard had a keen sense of the ways in which the church of her day participated in ariditas. Her hope for the renewal of the church, of human beings, and of the earth came from the “greenness” of Spirit, i.e., the Spirit’s revival of a new Pentecost, with a realization of the interconnectedness of all things in God. We will read together some excerpts from Hildegard’s writings and ponder her illuminations, as we share stories and resources and kindle our own capacities for stirring up “greening greenness” in all beings for the sake of healing works of justice.
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Instructor: Dr. Melanie Duguid-May
Professor of Theology at CRCDS