Each year Catholic Sisters Week (CSW) is held March 8-14. This year, in honor of CSW, St. Louis Sisters kicked off a year-long online series called Exploring Intersections: Catholic Sisters on Racism, Migration and Climate. The series engages panelists in conversations about societal concerns facing the community.
Exploring Intersections deals with issues that religious Sisters across the Archdiocese of St. Louis are tackling in response to their vocational calling.
The events are held on the second Wednesday of every month from March 2021 through March 2022. Anyone can join the live conversations or watch the recorded video and podcast versions on YouTube.
Sister Glynis speaks about racism
The St. Louis Review, a newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, ran a story during Catholic Sisters Week about the Good Shepherd Arts Center and its director Sr. Glynis McManamon.
The Review reported how GSAC’s mission and diverse art exhibits dovetail with the themes being explored in the yearlong series Exploring Intersections.
In the article, Sister Glynis said, “The arts help to build bridges in our understanding of one another. It’s fear of the other, the person who is different from me, the situation that is unfamiliar, that causes us to build barriers instead of bridges.
Art builds bridges across racial divides
Art can take something that is unfamiliar and build that bridge. This person’s experience is not my experience, but I look at that (art) and it draws me in. The humanity is what it speaks to.” Read the story.
Exploring Intersections features a different issue each month and explores how it intersects with racism, migration, and climate in a thought-provoking and engaging conversation. Three panelists across different generations bring unique perspectives to each session.
- The series is a project partnership between Region X of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and Communicators for St. Louis Sisters (CSLS). The aim of the series during Catholic Sisters Week and beyond is to provide a forum for a constructive conversation on some of the biggest social issues of our time, and the complex intersection of these topics with racism, migration, and climate. Topics for the series shape us as humankind. Among them are
- food security
- human trafficking
- gun violence
- health care
- affordable housing
- climate change, and much more.
Helping one another along the quest for deeper understanding
Charish Badzinski hosts the live-streamed series Exploring Intersections. She is a writer, public relations consultant, and founder of Rollerbag Goddess Global Communications.
“We live in a time when so many of us get our information in bite-sized pieces from social media. But, in truth, all of the issues we will be talking about are highly nuanced and interconnected,” Charish said.
“The topics require much more than a tweet, meme or TikTok to understand. It all comes down to educating ourselves and helping one another along in our quest for deeper understanding,” she said.
CSLS manages the monthly live-streamed conversations and records each session for video playback and as a podcast on YouTube.
The presentations of Exploring Intersections are offered as free webinars at 3 p.m. (Central Standard Time) on the second Wednesday of each month. In addition to the conversations with panelists, each episode includes suggested action items for how we can help one another move forward.
Exploring Intersections launches with the topic of Gender Equity
The first episode of Exploring Intersections: Catholic Sisters on Racism, Migration and Climate addressed the issue of gender equality on March 10. Panelists were Beth Allen, Director of Affiliation for the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration; Ga’nea Jones, a student at Missouri State University; and Sister Joan Mitchell, CSJ, a teacher, writer, and the editor of Good Ground Press.
You can find the video recording and podcast of the episode on gender equality at https://exploringintersections.org/2021/01/20/exploring-gender/
Angela Aufdemberge, President and CEO of Vista Maria, will be among the panel presenters for the July episode on Anti-Trafficking on July 14, 2021. Don’t miss it.
Visit exploringintersections.org to learn more about the conversations, and to obtain links to the recorded video episodes and podcasts.