Spring Flannery Lecture: From the Upper Room to Pentecost: Toward an Ethic of Racial Mercy

About This Event

In this lecture, Dr. Maureen O'Connell, Associate Professor of TheoIogical Ethics at La Salle University, will address how the experiences of White Christians in the United States right now, when it comes to crises and conflicts around racialized inequality, are akin to that of Jesus’ disciples who locked themselves away in the upper room in the dark days between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Many of us desire to be followers of Christ, but are trapped by emotions of fear, shame, guilt, frustration, and anger. Like them, if we desire to cross the threshold of that confining space and move toward the empowering – and multicultural – event of Pentecost, we need to be transformed by God’s mercy. In this presentation, she suggests that before White Christians engage in racial justice movements we must first seek racial mercy.

About the Speaker
Dr. O’Connell is Chair of the Department of Religion and Theology at LaSalle University where she is also an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics. She holds a BA in History from Saint Joseph’s University and a PhD in Theological Ethics from Boston College. She authored Compassion: Loving Our Neighbor in an Age of Globalization (Orbis Books, 2009) and If These Walls Could Talk: Community Muralism and the Beauty of Justice (The Liturgical Press, 2012), which won the College Theology Book of the Year Award in 2012 and the Catholic Press Association’s first place for books in theology in 2012.