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Deprivatizing SufferingHow is your personal sadness, trauma, or woundedness
connected to the social and political forces that shaped your family? Try this exercise to gain more understanding of the sources of your "personal" pain and to find potential solidarity and mutual support
from hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
There Is a Balm in Gilead How is it that those of us in liberal/progressive
circles have marched and petitioned and organized and written letters and rallied, and still there is so much suffering? Listen
to the audio file of this groundbreaking sermon by Rev. Lynice Pinkard of First Congregational Church of Oakland.
Love's Labor What can today's social change activists learn from the prophet
Jonah? (Yes, he's the one who got swallowed by the whale.) Click here for the audio file of a sermon by Seminary of the Street founder Nichola Torbett.
Toward Intimacy and Solidarity with All Life: A Seeker's Guide to Lent We all
know that Christianity has been used to do tremendous harm and to further imperial aims. Is there anything worth salvaging
from this tradition? We think that the deep reflection and “getting-real-ness” of Lent may be. Like Ramadan for
Muslims and the month of Elul (the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) for Jews, Lent is a season for taking
a hard look at how well one is doing at “acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with one’s God.”
Many people choose to “give something up” for Lent (chocolate, television, etc.). When this is done, not as an
empty exercise, but as a means of stripping away the mechanisms we use to avoid intimacy with ourselves and others, the practice
can foster incredible spiritual transformation.
Seminary of the Street has developed a workbook for Lent (February
25-April 11) that offers exercises, practices, and reflections designed to help you move toward intimacy and solidarity with
all life. You don’t have to be Christian to benefit from the workbook, though it does use Christian and Jewish scripture
as a tool to stimulate reflection. Although the book is geared toward a particular season, it could be used for any six-week
period.
To order the workbook, send a check for $5, plus your name and address, to Seminary of the Street, 329
41st. St, Oakland, CA 94609. Any additional money you send beyond the $5 cost of the book will be tax deductible.
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