It’s a word that currently evokes intense reactions in America: reparations. Taking the simplest meaning of the word, reparations is not particularly threatening or scary. ‘Reparations’ has as its root ‘repair,’ which simply means fixing something that is broken. When something is broken, how can you help fix it? How can it be repaired?
From the earliest days of America, relations between White folks and Black folks have most often been typified by profound brokenness. Even to our present day, this brokenness continues to manifest in many forms– ongoing tensions and separation, unhealed wounds, and persistent inequities. When something is broken, how can we fix it, how can we repair it? And more specifically, how can we as Christians be God’s agents of repair when something is broken– we who follow a Christ who not only repairs but redeems?
I’m so very grateful to my friends and dear brothers, Greg Thompson and Duke Kwon, for writing their important and groundbreaking book: Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair. I appreciate how they offer a distinctively Christian approach to this conversation that has (encouragingly) taken up more space in the civic arena lately. I appreciate how they frame the issue and broaden its implications. And I very much appreciate that since the book’s release it has spurred ongoing, substantive dialogue– for example here and here.
As part of Coracle’s “Toward the Beloved Community” initiative and in light of such a good resource to engage such an important question– how we as Christians can help repair what is broken regarding race in American– I’m delighted that Coracle is offering a five-week, online reading group on Reparations starting Wednesday, September 8th. This group will model respectful dialogue across a range of opinions and will be great for those who have thought about reparations for a while, for those who are curious and want to learn more about it, and for any who are listening to God for an answer to the question, “What can I do?”
With discussions facilitated by Christine Buchholz (Coracle Board member) and Max Finberg (Coracle Advisory Board member), we’ll read a couple of chapters each week and then talk about them and hear from each other and pray. Max and Christine are not only longtime friends of Coracle, they’re also longtime friends of each other! During the final session, we will be joined by the authors to discuss the book with them as a group who has just journeyed through it. And then, on October 14th, we will be hosting Greg and Duke once again, this time for a “Soundings Seminar” open to anyone interested in exploring this topic more deeply!
REGISTER FOR THE READING GROUP
REGISTER FOR THE SOUNDINGS SEMINAR
Coracle is all about inspiring and enabling folks to be the redemptive presence of God in whatever brokenness surrounds each one of us and coming alive in the process. Through this study, we hope that those of us in America will be all the more equipped and empowered to joyfully be God’s redemptive presence in the brokenness that is our painful racial history and present. Ultimately, we hope that God’s love, desire, and power might be revealed and that God’s kingdom might break in just a little bit more, to the glory of Jesus the Christ, who makes all things possible.