Eager to work toward solutions to the problems of poverty, racism and gun violence, Episcopal bishops, clergy members and lay people gathered for three days last week for a conference in Chicago, the American city that recorded the most homicides in 2016.
The city’s recent surge in deadly violence provided a grim backdrop for Bishops United Against Gun Violence’s “Unholy Trinity” conference held April 20-22 at the Lutheran School of Theology in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. But speakers regularly emphasized that the problem is not isolated to one city, nor is the outlook as bleak as many news headlines suggest.
Workshops offered April 21 in the afternoon featured discussions of how to lobby legislators, how to engage with evangelical Christians on these issues and how to develop community organizing campaigns. In one session, the Rev. Carol Reese discussed her work as a chaplain in the trauma center of Chicago’s John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, while in another session a delegation from the Diocese of Massachusetts explained the diocese’s successes working with youth in a program called B-Peace for Jorge, named after a young man who was murdered in 2012.
Click the link above to read the full story.