Orthodoxy, Race, and American Christianity

a community exercise with St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Davenport, IA, and Grace City Church in Rock Island, IL

This book study will meet online weekly on Tuesdays at 6 PM, beginning on October 6. Registration is being limited in order to facilitate more personal interactions. Please use the registration form at the bottom of this page to sign up. A link for the online meeting will be sent to you in time for the class.

You can click here for links to purchase the books and a full class schedule.

What do the ancient Orthodox Christian traditions have to offer to 21st century American racial strife? What can the Orthodox Church learn from their brothers and sisters in the American Black Church about their historic and current struggles? This joint book study conjoined with St. Nicholas Orthodox Church and Grace City Cathedral is meant to be a dialogue between two communities, where both will learn from one another and struggle to find ways to enact Eternal Christian Truth in our world today. Class discussions will be led by Dr. Lauren Hammond-Ford, Professor of History; Amber Wells, JD; and Deacon Jared Johnson.

Together, we will be reading The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby (BA, University of Notre Dame, MDiv Reformed Theological Seminary). Tisby is president of The Witness: A Black Christian Collective where he writes about race, religion, politics, and culture. He is also cohost of the Pass the Mic podcast. He has spoken nationwide at conferences and his writing has been featured in the Washington Post, CNN, and Vox. Jemar is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Mississippi studying race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century.

Together with this book, we will be reading a series of short works by Nun Katherine Weston, an Orthodox Christian monastic who also operates in private practice as a pastoral counselor and trauma specialist. For more than 10 years she has been addressing topics central to the basic human experience, integrating an Orthodox Christian worldview with perspectives from current therapeutic topics, including loneliness, shame, anger, anxiety, and attachment dynamics. Nun Katherine is an active member of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black, an organization working to equip Orthodox Christians for the ministry of Racial Reconciliation, and a regular speaker at their annual conferences.