jbailey | A study in evil.

I'm finally catching up on my evil course. I've spent the last week reading books, and watching online lectures. Now I just have an essay that's 4 days late. *sigh*.

I've done a bunch of Anti-racism / Anti-oppression work through my Unitarian Universalist job. I'm just finishing up a position with the Unitarian Universalist Association as the Canadian Regional Organising Consultant for Young Adult and Campus Ministry. The AR/AO work that they do is based around the model done by the Crossroads for Ministry, and it's a model I've always been really uncomfortable with. I think with this course I'm finally starting to see why. The Crossroads course defines Racism as Racial Prejudice combined with the misuses of power by systems and institutions. It further goes on to talk about racism's power over people of colour, the power to preserve and maintain power and privilege for the white society, and racism's ultimate power to control and destroy everyone.

This course presents the idea that the concept of evil in western society is based around the notion of sin, and then goes on to define personal sin and societal sin, the concept of oppression over other, etc.

The conflict becomes clear, doesn't it? We take a program, designed by the Lutherins, set in their traditions, distill out the Christianity, and we have a program that's very hard to relate to. The very basis of it is lost. The program makes so much more sense when presented in terms of traditional Christian ideas. There must be a better way to incorporate these notions into a Unitarian Universalist context. Since the JTW presenters didn't bother following up on the feedback forms even when they said they would, it's hard to imagine that I could influence anything from here.