2021 Hosanna Project: Featured Speaker

This year we pivoted from a preaching award to hiring a featured speaker, the unmatched Dr. Taurean J. Webb and our organizer friend in the movement, Johnathan Brenneman, who supported our weeks-long online learning behind the scenes. Our teaching collective returned this year as the Hosanna Preaching Project, and we met over a series of weeks online instead of for our usual one-day, location-locked seminar in-person. We were able to host 25 participants this year due to our online capacity!

The Hosanna Project 2021 expanded our reach to include church educators as well as preachers. Black religionist Dr. Taurean J. Webb’s ground-breaking curriculum, “Journeys Toward Justice”, originally prepared for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, was the basis for our virtual conference this year.

“Journeys Toward Justice” explored the profound, intersectional connections and divergences between the Black and Palestinian freedom struggles. Webb and the Hosanna faculty lead us in an experiential pedagogy, with prayer and worship, presentations, discussion and breakout groups, and creative arts. Our learning experiences were oriented toward personal deepening and transformation. Topics included Black liberation theology, the Kairos Palestine document, the importance of interpreting Scripture in social, historical, and cultural context, as well as the social location of the interpreter, and intercultural, interracial, and interfaith dialogue.  We delved into Christian Zionism, parallel systems of oppression and supremacy, concepts of chosenness, racism, and settler-colonialism. Grounded in faith and equipped with anti-racist tools we sent forth our participants to engage our liberation work in a spirit of “loving resistance.”

Journeys Toward Justice Curriculum

You can access the curriculum here and follow Taurean’s work here.