Invitation to a Webinar
Martin Luther King on Racism and War
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 7:30 p.m. EDT
We invite you to join us in considering the relevance of the April 1967 speech delivered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at New York City’s Riverside Church, entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”
Watch a recording of the webinar
Featuring: Rev. Joanna Lawrence Shenk and Dr. Drew G.I. HartHost: Titus Peachey
Drew G. I. Hart is an assistant professor of theology at Messiah University and has 10 years of pastoral experience. He is Director of Messiah University’s Thriving Together: Congregations for Racial Justice program and co-host of Inverse Podcast. Hart is the author of Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism (2016) and Who Will Be A Witness?: Igniting Activism for God’s Justice, Love, and Deliverance (2020).
Dr. Hart’s dissertation research explored how Christian discipleship, as framed by Black theologies and contemporary Anabaptist theologies, gesture the Church towards untangling the forces of white supremacy and the inertia of western Christendom which have plagued its witness in society for too long.
Rev. Joanna Lawrence Shenk is Associate Pastor of First Mennonite Church of San Francisco. She is an author (Widening the Circle: Experiments in Christian Discipleship and The Movement Makes Us Human: An Interview with Dr. Vincent Harding on Mennonites, Vietnam, and MLK), networker, podcast producer (the Iconocast) and facilitator. She also works part-time with Faith in Action Bay Area as an organizer of faith communities, focusing especially on economic inequality, housing justice, and immigration advocacy. She is a graduate of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary with an MA in Theological Studies, and prior to moving to San Francisco, worked for five years on the national staff of Mennonite Church USA. In that role she founded the Women in Leadership initiative which continues to advocate for justice at the intersection of gender and race.
Titus Peachey served in Vietnam in 1970-73 with Eastern Mennonite Missions, with Mennonite Central Committee in Laos in 1980-85, and Director of MCC Peace Education for several decades. He serves on the Board of Directors of the (Lao) Legacies of War.
Sponsored by $10.40 for Peace, Anabaptist World, Mennonite Central Committee U.S.,and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT)
We encourage you to read and/or listen to the speech in advance of the April 7 Webinar
Other resources: In this blog post, you can listen as you scroll through the text of the speech. Or, just watch a recording on YouTube.
To join in a reading (April 4th) of the MLK April 1967 speech, CLICK HERE