Sister Helen, author of River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey (Random House, 2019) and Rabbi Lerner, author of Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World (University of California Press, 2019), will discuss their recent books on consecutive Wednesday evenings at 7 p.m. this coming October (October 14th and 21st).
We are living in a time of profound crisis. The term “crisis,” a Latinized form of the Greek word krisis, means a turning point in a disease. The disease could get better or it could get much worse. The etymology of the word “crisis” is particularly relevant at this time, when the current crisis is quite literally a pivotal moment in our response to a disease, namely the COVID-19 pandemic. How has COVID-19, and our responses to it, revealed the injustices endemic to our culture? How can we turn things around? And what role does religion play in confronting this crisis?
Register in advance for this event using the following link:
https://uoregon.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIucuqprzMpGtfDzLZ1xwPd9rEQUAuWgyC4
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
In the meantime, we would like to offer background information about these two speakers for your knowledge and interest, below:
Sister Helen Prejean has been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on capital punishment and in shaping the Catholic Church’s vigorous opposition to all executions. She worked as a high school teacher and served as the Religious Education Director at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in New Orleans before moving into the St. Thomas Housing Project in the early ’80s. In 1982, Sister Helen began corresponding with Patrick Sonnier, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of two teenagers. Two years later, when Patrick Sonnier was put to death in the electric chair, Sister Helen was there to witness his execution. In the following months, she became spiritual advisor to another death row inmate, Robert Lee Willie, who was to meet the same fate as Sonnier. After witnessing these executions, Sister Helen realized that this lethal ritual would remain unchallenged unless its secrecy was stripped away, and so she sat down and wrote a book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. That book ignited a national debate on capital punishment and was turned into an Academy Award winning movie and an extraordinarily moving opera. Sister Helen’s second book, The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions, was published in 2004; her third book, River of Fire, was published last year.
From the social theorist and psychotherapist Rabbi Michael Lerner comes a strategy for a new socialism built on love, kindness, and compassion for each other. Rabbi Lerner is the editor of Tikkun magazine and of eleven books including two national bestsellers, Jewish Renewal and The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. His other books include The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, and Embracing Israel AND Palestine. He received Morehouse College’s King-Gandhi Award for his work for peace and nonviolence and in 2019 the Humanitarian Award from the International Association of Sufism. The magazine he edits, Tikkun, received the “Best Religion Reporting” award from the mainstream media’s Religion Newswriters Association in 2014 and again in 2015. He was chosen by the Utne Reader as one of the world’s top 100 visionaries, and by Newsweek as “one of the most influential rabbis in America.” And he received a PEN-Oakland award for “courageous work seeking peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine.”
This lecture series is being kindly supported by the following units at the University of Oregon: The Global Justice Program; the School of Journalism and Communication; the College of Arts and Sciences; the Oregon Humanities Center: the Department of English; the Department of Comparative Literature; the Clark Honors College; the Prison Education Program; the UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace; and the University of Oregon-UNESCO Crossings Institute. We are also grateful for the support of Temple Beth Israel and First Christian Church, both in Eugene.
