Come. Grow. Here.

In the summer of 2020, a group of St Markers gathered on Zoom weekly to talk about race, discrimination, and systemic racism. We used Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility as our text, and we looked deeply at ourselves and at the society that is built up around us.

At the beginning of the Fall of 2020 we resolved that we wanted to keep this conversation going. And so, we are.

Usually, when one thinks of faith, science, and the Bible, the opening pages of Genesis come to mind. However, cosmic themes appear throughout scripture, and perhaps the strangest such appearance is found in the book of Job. When the character Job is beaten down by a series of terrible losses despite his morally unimpeachable life, he pleads to God for justice and God responds with the longest divine speech in the Bible. This speech does not explain or defend suffering, nor is it an apology for Job’s afflictions. It is instead a tour of the cosmos unlike anything else in the Bible. Job is presented with a universe that stands in accord with certain aspects of modern scientific thought: it values experience over tradition, offers a radical critique of anthropomorphic views of God, and removes human beings from the center of all things. Please join the class as we read through Paul Wallace’s Stars Beneath Us, which combines Job, personal narrative, humor, science, and theology as it promotes open and constructive dialogue between the Jewish and Christian religious traditions and modern science.