Rising Up for Reparations: A Multi-faith Juneteenth Revival

PYM’s first Juneteenth event in collaboration with the Mayor’s Commission on Reparations, held at Friends Center.

Rising Up for Reparations: A Multi-Faith Juneteenth Revival
June 20th from 2 to 4 p.m. at Friends Center, 1501 Cherry Street

Join the Mayor’s Commission for Faith-based and Interfaith Affairs, the Truth Telling Project, and Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in a vibrant, multi-faith worship service that proclaims the urgent call for reparations today.

On the occasion of Juneteenth, when slavery did not truly end but instead transmuted, we explore the delay of reparations and reparative justice for the Black community. Through story, song, ritual, and poetry, we invite the multi-faith community in Philadelphia to commit to work, congregation by congregation, co-creatively and conscientiously for true redistributive justice and the complete and final abolition of slavery.

In an event inviting Black and white (and non-Black) people of faith (and none) to examine reparations as a deep faith commitment of spiritual repair and redress for intergenerational harms arising from slavery and its afterlives, we will explore the spiritual case for reparations in music, spoken word, and stirring testimony.  This is a city-wide call for the joyful commitment to the transformation – spiritual, relational, and material – that reparations offers.

We will invoke the sacred texts of many faiths and demonstrate the way that reparations is a promise and spiritual balm that crosses faith traditions and invites us to deeper community, built on authentic relationship and true repair. Together we can create a future built from care and from justice, rather than from exploitation and extraction, one person of faith at a time.

Join us for a rousing event to lay the seeds for a reparative movement in the city! We will send you forth to engage those in Philadelphia in this deep and hopeful work to heal the multi-generational wounds of our country’s past.