Christ Seminar Spring Colloquium on "Organizing, Movements, and Activism"

"Christ and Water" 

Here are the presenters:

Sigríður Guðmarsdóttir, Associate Professor in Practical Theology, University of Iceland

Carmen Lansdowne, Moderator, United Church in Canada 

James Perkinson, Professor of Social Ethics, Ecumenical Theological Seminary

Description: 

This talk probes the "spiritual potency" of water and of stone, as the biosphere ramps up its response to our continuing geocidal re-organization of the planet in a high-tech prosthesis trying to secure our survival at the expense of so much of the rest of the Earth's reality. It riffs on a book entitled Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars, arising out of the on-going struggle over water shutoffs in Detroit, as well as the poisoning of Flint and the grave threat Line 5 presents to much of the Great Lakes Basin, to probe questions about water not only as a "human right', but even more fundamentally ( and more "indigenously") as a living creature having rights of its (Her, Their) own. Moving from the Great Lakes Basin to the melting sea ice and glaciers of the Arctic, the talk will ponder the meaning of water rituals, such as baptism, for this context. Can rituals serve as expressions of lament, as subversive discourses, as actions of resistance, as spiritual agency, or all of the above?