Don’t miss your chance to see activist and scholar Dr. Angela Davis, together with Dr. Vincent Harding, activist and founder of The Veterans of Hope Project, as they meet in Denver to discuss issues surrounding oppression and injustice. This public conversation, which will be held on Saturday, August 11th from 7:00 – 9:00 pm at the Colorado Heights Theater, is one of many events scheduled nationally to celebrate the 200th year of the Sisters of Loretto.
The Sisters of Loretto were founded in Kentucky in 1812 by three women teaching pioneer children and a Belgian priest working for the church; pioneer living shaped both their faith and service. The group has since become the Loretto Community, an organization whose interest in peace and justice is both local and global. The group has members working in Uganda and Guatemala, and has also founded a community in Pakistan. The Lorretto Community now has Sister Communities in Ghana and Guatemala. Previously, the group has had a presence in South America and China, and in the 1970’s the Loretto Community sent ten sisters to different third world countries in order to expand their knowledge of the world and the place of North America in creating and perpetuating certain oppressive practices. The organization had members working in Vietnam during the Vietnamese War, and has also had members working in Haiti.
For the past five decades, Dr. Angela Davis has been deeply involved with social justice work. Her work has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. She is the author of eight books, and she has taught at numerous universities. She is currently Professor of History of Consciousness, an interdisciplinary Ph.D program, and Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She has used her own experience of being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List” and spending sixteen months in jail to inform her recent work on the social problems associated with incarceration and the criminalization of communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. Dr. Davis is especially concerned with the fact that society devotes more resources to the prison system than it does to educational institutions. In many of her lectures, she encourages audience members to think about a future possibility of a world without prisons and invites them to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement (Spirit and Struggle).
Dr. Vincent Harding was an active member of the southern Freedom Movement, and later worked with Coretta Scott King to develop the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center in Atlanta. From 1981 to 2004 he served as Professor of Religion and Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. In 1997, together with his wife Rosemarie, he also founded The Veterans of Hope Project, a center for the study of religion and movements for social change that gathers autobiographical accounts of women and men who have worked in spirit-based movements for compassionate social change. He is the author of numerous books, and also holds retreats that focus on the connections between spirituality and social responsibility (Spirit and Struggle).
Tickets for the August 11th event are available for suggested donations that range from $8.50 – $50.50, and can be purchased through Blacktie Colorado. The Colorado Heights Theater is located at Colorado Heights University, 3001 South Federal Boulevard in Denver.
