Ripple Conference

ZOOM LINK
Allison Pelyhes & Kiah Glenn

This is an intermediate level presentation. Participants should have prior knowledge of vocabulary pertaining to the Big 8 Social Identities: Age, Ability, Religion & Spirituality, Socioeconomic Status & Class, Sex & Gender, Sexual Orientation, Ethnicity, and Race & Color. A document is included for their review. This course will move fast and involves a large focus on race, religion, and law in the context of history.
Students should be prepared to engage in materials on their screen and in breakout rooms. It will help to be using a desktop or screen rather than a phone.
The interfaith movement has a responsibility to include anti-racist, intersectional ideas and actions into its framework. In this session, we will discuss how frameworks such as Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and Anti-racism build on one another and must be used within interfaith work. Then, we will use this framework to interrogate our history, individual beliefs and the religious spaces we have been or will be exposed to in order to become anti-racist interfaith leaders. We hope that participants will leave with these imperatives:

1. Holding religious institutions accountable to anti-racist actions and policies can happen with pressure from insiders and from interfaith groups and organizations.
2. These institutions much acknowledge white supremacy in their roots and in the new form it takes in the present.
3. Religious organizations need to use social capital for social change. It’s not enough to have statements. Money, social capital, for structural change.
4. Interrogating internal implicit biases as an individual is crucial to further the study of religion and evolving practices for communities. Individuals must be seeking to be anti-racist within their religious practice to hold institutions accountable and vice versa

This presentation is a result of an Interfaith Youth Core “We are Each Other’s Racial Equity and Interfaith Cooperation” Award.