Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, will be the featured speaker at this Sunday’s Thomas Berry Lecture at Sacred Heart Church in Camden, starting at 2 p.m.
The Oct. 23 event is sponsored by the parish’s Center for Environmental Transformation, which aims to educate and inspire others to practice more environmentally-responsible ways of living.
Last month, Pope Francis added the care of creation to the works of mercy, urging “simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness and makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world.”
For more than 60 years, Rabbi Waskow has taken part in public advocacy and nonviolent protest on behalf of peace, civil rights and the healing of the Earth, on such actions as calling for disarmament; opposing fracking; and focusing on climate change.
He has published Op/Ed pieces in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In a recent column called “Beyond the Election,” Rabbi Waskow decried the plight of those institutions he called “left-outs,” which included Mother Earth (“treated as a mere commodity”), the black community (“subject to mass disemployment, abject poverty, terrible schools, harassment and humiliation and sometimes unjust violence by police, and mass incarceration”), and immigrants and Muslims (“fac[ing] a wave of fear, contempt, and hatred).
He called for “major steps toward a democratic transformation of American society (with) a spiritual and cultural aspect to progressive action infusing, inspiring and transforming the electoral-political process — and going beyond it to fill the streets, the bayous, the prairies, the bridges with ‘left out’ people who can both protest oppressions and create new communities.”
Faith, school, and community groups are invited to this lecture. Tickets are available for $20; for more info, contact Cathy Nevins, board member and chair of the Thomas Berry Lecture Committee, at 856-816-6373, or at canevins@verizon.net
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