This panel looks at the increasingly diverse and multi-cultural society that the United States is moving toward: 2013 is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 50th anniversary of both the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
Panelists
Harlon Dalton (moderator) is currently the Priest-in-Charge at Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from Yale University. He has served as a public interest lawyer in New York and worked for the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. He also taught at Yale Law School, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Aracelis Vazquez Haye is the assistant pastor of the Primera Iglesia Bautitsa Hispana de New London, a fast growing American Baptist Latino/a congregation in New London, CT. She also serves as the Protestant Chaplain at Connecticut College in New London, CT, and at The Waterford Country School. Aracelis holds a Master of Divinity from Yale University, with special emphasis in youth and young adult ministry. Aracelis obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Eastern Connecticut State University in Latin American Studies, and a Master of Education in Higher Education Administration from Loyola University Chicago, Illinois.
Dr. Khyati Yogeshkumar Joshi is an Associate Professor of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Dr. Joshi is the author of the book New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (Rutgers University Press, 2006), which received the National Association for Multicultural Education’s 2007 Philip C. Chinn Book Award. She is co-editor of the collections Asian Americans Down South (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and Understanding Religious Oppression and Christian Privilege (Sense Publishers, 2008). She is the Religion, Schools And Society section editor for the Encyclopedia on Diversity in Education (Sage Publications) edited by James Banks, and has authored numerous book chapters and articles on race, immigration, and religion.
Reverend Dr. Frederick J. Streets is the Senior Pastor of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ in New Haven, the oldest African American American Congregational Church in the known world, founded in New Haven in 1820. He served as the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Professor in Pastoral Counseling at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, New York City, from 2007-2012. He also served as Chaplain of Yale University and Senior Pastor of the Church of Christ in Yale 1992-2007 and is the first African American and Baptist to hold this position.
Tisa Wenger is Assistant Professor of American Religious History at the Yale Divinity School. Her research and teaching interests include the history of Christianity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States (especially the American West), the cultural history of the categories of religion and secularism, the politics of religious freedom, and the intersections of race and religion in American history. Her book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom(2009) shows how dominant conceptions of religion and religious freedom affected the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico as they sought to protect their religious ceremonies from government suppression, and how that struggle helped reshape mainstream views of religion and the politics of Indian affairs. She is now writing a history of religious freedom as an American ideal, tracing its multiple and shifting deployments throughout U.S. history. These scholars, religious leaders and activists take a look back, and also enrich our thinking about the next 50 years of race in America. Presented in collaboration with Yale Divinity School.