LREDA Professional Days

Keynote Presentation: Catherine Farmer Loya & Erica Shadowsong

Religious educators serving congregations are uniquely positioned to use the spiritual practice of storytelling to foster authentic connection in religious life for all ages. This workshop will help you choose and tell stories with confidence, and offer practices for using stories to deeply engage with spiritual values and themes. Learn how to choose and adapt a story, how to avoid appropriation and tell your story in an engaging and imaginative way.

Keynote Presentation: Rev. Julián Jamaica Soto

Liberal Religious Educators’ Association Professional Day 2024 proudly proclaimed that Accessibility is Love. This online gathering offered us a chance to engage with some of the heart of Disability Theology, to share questions and expertise, and to spend some time focused on the areas of accessibility that matter to us most. We included some worship time, nice big breaks, and  a chance to show off our amazing spaces, for an enriching professional development experience for new and seasoned religious professionals alike.

Keynote Presentation: Dr. Xiomara Verenice Cervantes-Gómez 

If at one time Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “famine of the church” aided in describing the loss of worship for not activating and feeding the souls of our ministry, it is indeed a glutton of inclusion that paints our historical present. For aliveness is no longer the norm to people of color and our transgender communities, inclusion and reconciliation are but an extravagant liturgical waste when souls are not afforded a right to be fed in the first place. In other words, why do we prepare a table for many when we only few arrive? As collective liberation brings together our diversity of humanness, it is also wasteful in the face of times in which certain bodies become less than human, and rather, expendable resources. Dr. Cervantes-Gómez speaks to an apophatic and process theology of the not-fully-human that demands of the church to minister in a time after we have accepted the divine brief to be inclusive. After Inclusion is a theological praxis of being with and alongside the Other outside of the church in a non-inclusive world. This talk meditates on how to rethink what collective liberation might look like for ministry from beyond the unexpected borders of the church.

Keynote Presentation: Aisha Hauser and Rev. Deanna Vandiver 

Unitarian Universalism is a faith that does not promise heaven or hell, only that revelation is ever unfolding. What if our systems of leadership reflected this theology? At our best, we work together in community to make the world a more just and loving place. This ideal does not always manifest itself in our institutional spaces because of the inherited hierarchical and supremacist structures in which we operate.

What experiences of beloved community will be possible when we are willing to change these oppressive paradigms?