Scapegoats: The Gospel Through The Eyes of Victims - with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, PH.D (webinar)

Scapegoats Webinar Description:

Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims has several goals at its core: to introduce the work of René Girard, who proposed that Jesus’s scapegoat death should be the key to ending human scapegoating; to explore how Jesus’s ministry among scapegoats sets an example for how Jesus-followers should live; and to reveal how the Church continues to scapegoat the vulnerable in society even as it claims to follow Jesus. Scapegoats revisits the Gospel narratives with the understanding that they tell scapegoats’ stories, and that through those stories the kingdom of God is revealed. The scapegoat stories work together to illuminate an essential truth of the Gospels--that Jesus modeled a reality in which victims become survivors and the marginalized become central to the kingdom

This webinar will use Scapegoats as a foundation for discussing the scapegoating rampant in our society today. We will review some of the examples from the Gospels and church history, but our focus will be on how vulnerable groups such as women, the poor and infirmed, and outsiders, are targeted and systematically marginalized as scapegoats under our watch. Finally, we will address practical solutions as to how can Jesus-followers can work toward protecting scapegoats and removing the targets from their backs in this day and age.