Building Beloved Community Covenant Group
Martin Luther King Jr. famously paraphrased Unitarian Theodore Parker saying, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Many of us wish we had MLK’s certainty (or Parker’s optimism) these days - we certainly need it!
Our principles affirm the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and our responsibility to engage in a democracy that elevates the experiences and perspectives of all people. This is a time that is forcibly demanding “Who is America?” “Who is deserving of dignity and respect and a voice in our nation?” This is a time that needs our principles in action.
Throughout our history as UUs, we have played a role in bending history toward justice, working in solidarity and community with people of color from abolition and the civil rights movement to today’s struggles for justice and collective liberation. We know we can’t take this progress for granted.
From climate change to education and social service to gender justice, healthcare and immigration, living on the side of love and putting our principles into action requires us to better understand how the system of white supremacy seeks to divide us and dehumanize us all. From that awareness we build a foundation for beloved community where we honor the web of life and recognize how our individual well-being is inextricably linked to the well-being of others, our liberation and the liberation of others bound up together.
GNUUC invites you to bring your vision for beloved community and your questions, fears, hopes, and full humanity into a new group that will advance the work of this congregation in building towards racially just, multicultural, anti-oppressive community within and through GNUUC.
First meeting Sunday, 9/9/18 at 9:30am in the Main Room of the RE Building, and continuing on 2nd Sundays each month. Childcare available, please let us know by the Wednesday before if you need childcare (kris.thresher@gnuuc.org).
Group will be convened by Rev. Carmen Emerson and new GNUUC member, Amy Dudley. Amy is an organizer, trainer, and consultant whose experience centers on building relationships and alliances across communities to challenge systems of oppression that divide and harm us while advancing intersectional movement building that anchor and heal the world we are trying to create.
Amy learned to organize in the neighborhoods, small towns, and rural communities of Virginia, Cameroon, W. Africa, and Oregon where she served as co-director of the Rural Organizing Project. Amy documented this work in “ ‘A Struggle for Our Lives’: Anti-Racist Organizing in White Rural and Working-Class Communities: An Interview with the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon ” from Chris Crass ed., Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy.
Amy co-founded and coordinates Creating Democracy with her partner Chris Borte, with whom she also co-founded two amazing children, Cora, 9, and Leo, 7.
Amy and family relocated to the South in 2017 to be closer to her family and roots in SW Virginia and to bring her organizing skills and passions back to the region that raised her.
The Dudley Bortes officially signed the book and became Unitarian Universalists in 2009 at 1st Unitarian in Portland, OR and are new members of the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Church.
Please join us in this important and thoughtful series of conversations!