By way of introducing the “Just Creation” gathering’s final keynoter, Dr. Tink Tinker, Dr. Mark Douglas of Columbia Theological Seminary said Saturday that the best conferences “deepen what I know and disrupt what I know.”
Tinker, an American Indian and citizen of Osage Nation and a professor emeritus at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, told conference-goers he is “somebody who is working very hard to decolonize my own mind and to speak out of a worldview distinctly different from the Euro-Christian worldview.”
The third and final panel that spoke as part of Columbia Theological Seminary’s “Just Creation” conference Saturday addressed the air we breathe after previous panels had taken on the Earth and water.
After a panel assembled for the “Just Creation” conference put on by Columbia Theological Seminary and many partners took on the topic of the planet we inhabit on Friday, a second panel was asked later that day to speak about water.
A Friday plenary session during Columbia Theological Seminary’s Just Creation conference included panelists remembering a patch of Earth that’s special to them.
Heather McTeer Toney, Vice President for Community Engagement with the Environmental Defense Fund, opened the Just Creation conference at Columbia Theological Seminary Thursday by diving into Psalm 24:1-2, a favorite passage among those advocating for and working at Creation care: “The Earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and those who live in it, for [God] has founded it on the seas and established it on the rivers.”
Gone now more than four years, the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, one of the foremost educators in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the first Black woman ever ordained by a forebear denomination, lives on in the lives of the scholars whose work relies in no small part on what they learned from her.
Following environmental concerns brought about by last month’s train derailment in Ohio, Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, is offering the national conference “Just Creation — Shalom for Our Common Home” March 16-18. The conference is available both in person and online.
The Bible has not always been an ally in the struggle for anti-racist work, organizers of a Union Presbyterian Seminary webinar noted in publicity for their Tuesday event, “Double-Edged Sword: Paradigms of (Anti)Racism in Old Testament Scripture.”
Last week’s webinar hosted by the Center for Social Justice and Reconciliation at Union Presbyterian Seminary looked at real-world examples of how faith communities are working to house some of the unhoused people in their community.