Practicing Hope: A Guide for Allies (part of the Social Justice Events Series)

How can those of us from dominant cultures (white, or straight, or Christian, etc.) be effective allies to vulnerable communities? How we reach across the lines of power that divide us to work for the common good?  It is difficult to know where to start, what to do, and how to proceed. This event begins with an individualized self-assessment of what you have to offer as an ally. It provides six concrete strategies for allies to work for social justice, as well as guidance from activists from the LGBTQ community and BlackLivesMatter.

Dr. Shannon Craigo-Snell joined the faculty of Louisville Seminary in 2011 as a constructive systematic theologian. She earned degrees (PhD, MPhil, MA, and MDiv) at Yale University and Yale Divinity School. From 2001 to 2011 Craigo-Snell taught in the Religious Studies department at Yale University, where she also earned several Yale fellowships and professional research grants. Her students have included undergraduates with diverse religious backgrounds in the secular context of the University; denominationally diverse Divinity School students; and doctoral students in religious studies. These varied contexts have been part of her formation as a theologian.

Her writing spans a similar scope of interdisciplinary diversity. In addition to the book on which this talk is based, she has published several articles for journals such as The Ecumenist, Quaker Religious Thought, Jump Cut and Modern Theology, she has written The Empty Church: Theater, Theology, and Bodily Hope (Oxford University Press, 2014); Silence, Love, and Death: Saying Yes to God in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Marquette University Press, 2008); and Living Christianity: A Pastoral Theology for Today (Fortress, 2009) with Shawnthea Monroe.