Elaine Enns – Ched Myers

“DEEP DIVES” – the 2024 Bartimaeus Kinsler Institute

BKI2024 will focus on two longstanding commitments of BCM:

Building capacity for Decolonizing Discipleship
and
Sabbath Economics.

These four days offer an opportunity for deep dives into both themes for educator/practitioners. Two tracks will unfold in parallel:

a Healing Haunted Histories track facilitated by Elaine, who will be joined by Cree Elder Harry Lafond, Muskeg Lake First Nation (limit 12), and
a Sabbath Economics track examining the Gospel of Luke and contemporary problems of Affluenza and Plutocracy facilitated by Ched and team (limit 25).

Because these themes speak to each other deeply, we will weave them together in plenary sessions to open and close each day.

Preliminary registration opens Dec 1, 2023. Information and registration at www.bcm-net.org/study/bki2024

Articles

The Church Must Change its Thinking about Indigenous Peoples: An Interview with Harry Lafond on what it means to be both Cree and Catholic.

by Elaine Enns and Ched Myers

Sojourners, August 2022, pp 32-37

In April [2022], Pope Francis made a long-awaited apology to a Canadian delegation of Inuit, First Nations, and Metis leaders at the Vatican for the “deplorable” violations children suffered at Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools for more than a century. The pope committed to come to Canada in late July to make his confession personally to residential school survivors and their descendants for “the abuse and disrespect for your identity, your culture, and even your spiritual values.”
In this historic apology, Pope Francis stated, “Clearly, the content of the faith cannot be transmitted in a way contrary to the faith itself.”
This watershed moment comes 25 years after Harry Lafond-a Catholic and then-chief of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan -raised issues of Indigenous faith and culture in a historic audience with Pope John Paul II during the Vatican’s 1997 Synod of the Americas. An educator and Catholic deacon, Lafond and his ancestors have a long history of building bridges between settler and Indigenous communities.

Full Article: The Church Must Change its Thinking about Indigenous Peoples (link) SKU: E22-1-F