FOR SUCH A TIME AS THIS: Conversations on Race to Call forth Solidarity

With a goal of opening our hearts and minds to discussion and discernment about how we can actively stand in solidarity together against racism, bigotry, and inequality, Canon Dale Grandfield of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity is facilitating an eight-week course “For Such a Time as This.”

The COVID-19 Pandemic has only highlighted long-standing inequalities. This is a time for us to join together in raising awareness, in listening to the truth, expertise, and stories of People of Color, to equip and enlighten ourselves through study, and through non-judgmental conversation, to empower ourselves to be changed ourselves and agents of change in our world.

This work together is intentionally intended to be discomforting, with hopes that in our discomfort we will really feel empathy which leads us to be resolved, and engaged anew, and fierce in our commitment to working to dismantle systemic racism.

Thursday evenings, June 11 through July 30, from 7pm to 8:45pm, we will gather virtually. In order to facilitate a coherent dialogue in safe space, participants are expected to commit to all (most) of the sessions. A set of short readings will be part of the expected preparation for the course sessions. Our topics will be:

  1. Myths of Anglo-Saxon and White Superiority
  2. The Racial Contract and Implicit Bias
  3. Whiteness, White Space, and White Fragility
  4. Black Personhood, and the Black Body
  5. Anglicanism as Historical Global Broker of Whiteness and Blackness
  6. Being Black in the Lehigh Valley and the “Dregs” down from Nativity
  7. COVID-19: Hotspots, Comorbidities, and Inequities
  8. Dreaming of God’s Equitable Reign

Sessions will include a brief interview; a time of learning; and a time for facilitated, open discussion.

Canon Grandfield will conduct and present interviews with important leaders in this conversation such as Esther Lee, President of the Bethlehem NAACP; Dr. Sirry Alang, Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University; Bishop James Tengatenga, retired bishop of Southern Malawi, once chair of the Anglican Consultative Council, and current Professor of Global Anglicanism at The University of the South; and the Rev. Emily Ann Garcia Livingston, Pastor of St. John UCC in Allentown, among others.

If you have any questions or would like to register, contact Canon Grandfield  at 484-892-7659 or dgrandfield@nativitycathedral.org.