Abolition Advent Calendar

Freedom for All Bodies

Join the Movement toward Racial Justice is thrilled to offer our second annual Abolition Advent Calendar.  This year, our theme is “Freedom for All Bodies.”

Every day we are seeing more and more dehumanizing efforts to limit embodiments of liberation. Enslaving paradigms are being deployed in new and all-too-familiar ways to exert violence and control over bodies that some deem undeserving of freedom.  In this season we are called not only to recognize the strategies and tactics of enslavement as they manifest among us, but also to witness the way they call us anew to the sacred work of abolition.

So this Advent, as we await and prepare for the coming of transformational Love in flesh and bone, we want to again invite your engagement with generative connection between scripture readings for the season and contemporary abolition movements.  To respond more specifically to the mechanisms of enslavement and visions of abolition at work in this moment, each week we will explore a different intersection in abolition movements.

  • Week 1 Intersections: Abolition, Racial Justice and Reproductive Justice
  • Week 2 Intersections: Abolition, Racial Justice and Trans/Non-binary Justice
  • Week 3 Intersections: Abolition, Racial Justice and Disability Justice
  • Week 4 Intersections: Abolition, Racial Justice and Body Positivity

 

We hope you will make these reflections part of your waiting, hoping and preparing this Advent, as you deepen your understanding of abolition as part of the work of practicing antiracism.

We are pleased to welcome movement artist Coke Tani as our Abolition Advent Artist this year. Every Monday during Advent, Coke will offer a way of engaging our intersectional focus and Advent scriptures with embodied spiritual practices. Take a moment to hear a little from Coke about the embodied preparing we are invited to do in this season.

Coke Tani is a liberatory spiritual director, body memoirist and teaching artist. She holds an MSW, MFA and MDiv, and can be found on IG: coketani, FB: Coke Tani and at coketani.com.

Sign up here to receive Abolition Advent Calendar reflections via email.

In addition to engaging these reflections as a personal practice, you could also use them as a group.  Click here to download our Abolition Advent Calendar Discussion Guide for curriculum and ideas about how you might structure an adult education/faith formation discussion group using the Abolition Advent Calendar. 

 

 

 

“Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions…what the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities… Abolition is building the future from the present in all the ways that we can.”

- Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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