Social Justice and Civic Engagement

Part Four: Ritual is a Form of Activism Engaging ritual as an individual or as a collective act of embodiment challenges ideas about the source and nature of our intelligence and for some it challenges ideas about how we arrive at knowing. As a form of activism, ritual invites us ...

In 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing a story about slavery. Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher, was a pastor of Presbyterian and Congregational congregations in New York and Connecticut before moving with his family to Cincinnati, Ohio, to serve as president of Lane Seminary, a Presbyterian institution, in 1832. As a young ...

I was on educational leave in the fall and working, primarily, on a religion and disability textbook. Of the many things I learned (one of which was how very little it turns out I know about religion, the subject for which I have my doctorate; this was humbling!), the fact ...

I am an activist educator. What this means is that I strive for justice both in and outside the classroom. I utilize critical or liberatory pedagogies as my theoretical bases. As Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said, liberatory pedagogy involves linking the word with the world. In my thirty-three years of ...

At the heart of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy is the dictum of “reading the word and reading the world.” As a literacy specialist who worked with Brazilian peasants, Freire learned from these students the necessity of making the connection with their lived experience. Teaching for social change takes participants ...