Our meals will feature international cuisine prepared by communities connected to CTS through our student body. We’ll enjoy a lunchtime concert by renowned social justice story telling musician Ken Medema. MDiv students Rachel Bahr Attanasie and Tiffany Trent will help us rehearse our future with the revolutionary process of Forum Theater. In the evening we’ll offer up the labors of our day in vespers worship. Sunday morning, we’ll prayerfully name next steps. Our work will be our play.

The student and alum planning team offers this event as a faithful attempt to engage the gifts and needs of our beloved communities. For this reason, we seek to strengthen the community that gathers while exploring ways that the arts can help us confront and undo racism, homophobia and related social injustices.

To help us with this charge, we invoke the question of Augusto Boal in his literacy experiment with People’s Theater of Peru, as described in Theatre of the Oppressed (1979):

Where do you live?

Boal’s question calls forth images, memories, sounds, tastes and smells that are at once intimate, communal, economic, racial, environmental, bodily, and deeply spiritual. We will ask this question of one another and dare to hear, see, and touch the answers.

Sample activities:

The storytelling game
Rehearsing Against Racism
Psalm Writing
Painting meditation

Registrants are encouraged to submit any activities, skills, or interests you would like to share in the space available on the online registration form.

Who is invited?
All who have interest in arts, justice, and community are joyfully invited. The designers of the event particularly wish to encourage students, staff, faculty, trustees, and visiting committee members of Chicago Theological Seminary to participate. The life of the community and institution of CTS will be a major locus of learning and visioning, as we hope that the time we spend together will bear fruit for our ongoing relationships, and strengthen our common commitments. We wish to claim the mantle laid before us during this 150th anniversary year, to confront what divides us and imagine God’s call to us into our future. Sunday morning especially will be devoted to this task. We have adopted a “pay what you can” policy, with free registration for CTS students, because we value your time and presence so highly.