Events.....  

"Ohio Meadville District and West Shore UU Church (Cleveland) are sponsoring a day long workshop using material from the new UU adult curriculum Transforming Whiteness by Rev. Bill Gardiner. The workshop will be led by the author Rev. Bill Gardiner and co-facilitator, Rev. Melissa Carville-Ziemer of Kent Transforming Whiteness offers UU congregations, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the evolution and workings of white identity both historically, as a current agency of oppression, and as a positive identity for the future.

 

  9 AM to 5:30 PM on Saturday, April 24. The registration cost is  $25.  Limited scholarship funds are available from the OMD (see the registration information).

 

We encourage congregations to send teams and help support the registration fees for their members whenever possible.  Congregational leaders might want to use this seminar opportunity as a chance to gain an overview of the curriculum for possible future presentation in their home congregations. 

 

The Registration deadline is Saturday April 10.  Registration is limited to a maximum of thirty people from congregations other than West Shore."

LET'S GATHER A LARGE GROUP OF BRIDGE-BUILDERS TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS! Please e-mail us if you're interested.

 

Please see the OMD website to register:  http://www.ohiomeadville.org/conference/transformwhite.html

---

OMD District Assembly March 26-27, 2010

Ohio University Eastern Campus, St. Clairsville, OH, hosted by the OMD Southern Cluster Visit our host website at
www.ohio.edu/eastern  The DA this year includes interfaith workshops as well as a panel discussion on Standing on the Side of Love for Racial Equity and Justice.
(In 1997 at the General Assembly in Phoenix, AZ, delegates voted
to work toward becoming an anti-racist, multi-cultural Unitarian Universalist Association. Congregational commitment is an essential part of our journey toward wholeness. Leaders from the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kent, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charleston and West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church will describe their congregation’s anti-racism and anti-oppression work and reflect upon the impact their efforts have had.)
We can find more info on the District Assembly at
http://www.ohiomeadville.org/annmtg/index.html
____________________________________________ 

Columbus' Hyatt Regency
EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION DEADLINE FEB. 15
Transforming-Race conference registration open 
More details, including link to online registration, are at http://transforming-race.org/index.html

There are millions of religious young people in the world interacting with greater frequency.  That interaction tends either toward conflict or cooperation. The Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) aims  to introduce a new relationship, one that is about mutual respect and religious pluralism. Instead of focusing a dialogue on political or theological differences, we build relationships on the values that we share, such as hospitality and caring for the Earth, and how we can live out those values together to contribute to the betterment of our community.  Read the inspiring story of the founder, Eboo Patel.

  

Editors' Challenge

Let us strive to do at least one activity outlined in this newsletter
--attend an event, read the featured book or learn about the featured organization. RDTF work (with Columbus Literacy Council, East Side Fellowship of Churches, the interfaith youth project, Metropolitan Area Council of Churches, etc.) will be in full swing in the coming months. It will be good to equip ourselves with not only theory but also practical strategies for building bridges, healing wounds and furthering justice.

 

From Publishers Weekly: "Wise, a white anti-racism activist and scholar (and author of White Like Me), pushes plenty of buttons in this methodical breakdown of racism's place in the wake of Barack Obama's victory. In the first of two essays, the author obliterates the canard of the US as a post-racial society; bigotry and insititutionalized discrimination, he contends, have simply morphed into "Racism 2.0," in which successful minorities are celebrated "as having 'transcended' their blackness in some way." While racial disparities in employment and income, housing, education and other areas persist, Obama has become an amiable sitcom dad like Bill Cosby, putting whites at ease by speaking, looking and acting "a certain way"-not to mention avoiding discussion of race. In his second, more incendiary essay, Wise concludes that whites must take responsibility for racism. What the majority of whites fail to grasp, he says, is that they continue to benefit from a system of "entrenched privileges" centuries in the making, and that racism remains a serious obstacle for millions of African Americans."

---