CHICAGO, IL (April 4, 2012) – Audio recordings of workshops presented at the North Park Justice Summit and Chicago Reload conference are now available for purchase.
More than 900 people attended the event. The Justice Summit portion of the program began the conference Friday, March 23, followed by Chicago Reload March 24, a continuing education event for urban youth workers the university has hosted since 2005. Many attended both days.
The workshops addressed broadly diverse topics that included Hip Hop and Youth Development, Social Entrepreneurship 101, and the Art of Bible Storytelling. Click here to complete online orders.
Featured speakers included Cornel West and Jim Wallis. Attendees packed the North Park Gymnasium to hear West, a well-known author, speaker, commentator, and professor at Princeton (N.J.) University, deliver a rousing commentary on Christianity, love, and justice. Declaring that his tradition “looks first to the cross,” West said, “I know who I am because somebody loved me, somebody cared for me, somebody sacrificed for me … and they’re still doing it.”
He expanded on the theme and said, “justice is what love looks like in public.” Christianity, he said, is “anti-injustice.”
West urged the attendees to live out of their own uniqueness. “When I see young people, I see too many copies – not enough originals,” he said. “How empty, how shallow, how hollow. Jesus, because he loved so, and sacrificed so, was measured not just by what he said, but by what he did, what he enacted, what he embodied.”
Wallis, president of Sojourners in Washington, D.C., said, “Injustice is broken relationships, and shalom is about restoring it.” He added, “Justice means doing whatever it takes to make it right.”
Videos of all the main speakers, with the exception of Cornel West, will be available on the North Park website for free as some point soon, although a date has not been set. Audio downloads of the speakers are not available.
