Community Muralism and Racial Justice
Date of Lecture: October 30, 2014
About the Speaker: Maureen O'Connell is associate professor and chair of religion at LaSalle University. She is author of "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 and the Catholic Press Association’s first place for books in theology in 2012. She serves on the board of the Society for the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies and is the Vice President of the College Theology Society.
About the Talk: In this talk, O'Connell explores the community muralism movement in Philadelphia through the lens of racial justice. Over three decades, the movement has yielded 3,500 murals across the city. She highlights the collaborative process used to create the murals, often including minority communities and even prisoners, and explores how the murals tell stories that break down boundaries of racial inequality.
The lecture was co-sponsored by the McFarland Center, the Montserrat Divine Cluster, and .
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