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Allentown, PA — Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center will, for the third year, host a remarkable mini-series in January about LGBT spirituality. The 2020 theme is “inclusion for transgender people in faith communities” and features two nationally-significant transgender faith leaders.
The mini-series begins on January 6 with an evening with Professor Joy Ladin, a professor of poetry at Yeshiva University, an orthodox Jewish seminary. Professor Ladin is author of nine books of Jewish poetry and also a recent non-fiction book Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective. The series continues on January 13th with an evening with Austin Hartke. Hartke is a lutheran seminarian and author of Transformations: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians. Austen also produces the Transgender and Christian YouTube channel. Both events start at 6pm and take place at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. The miniseries is moderated by Rev. Beth Goudy and is supported with a grant from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and an anonymous individual donor. The series is co-hosted by two programs at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center: The LGBT Library and the Renaissance Transgender Social and Support Group.
“Disturbungly, many transgender people have experienced exclusion from faith communities. This year’s miniseries brings two national faith leaders — both who happen to be transgender — to Allentown to share how our local faith communities can do a better job of working toward inclusion for transgender community members” said Adrian Shanker, Executive Director of Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. “At the end of the day, we want the experiences of LGBT people across the Lehigh Valley to be experiences of inclusion — including in faith spaces. We are proud to produce this miniseries for the third year to raise consciousness of the challenges LGBT still have when it comes to spiritual inclusion in the Lehigh Valley.”
About Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center: (www.bradburysullivancenter.
Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center provides arts, health, youth, and pride programs to strengthen and support the LGBT community across the Greater Lehigh Valley. The Library at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center received the 2018 Allentown Arts Ovation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literary Arts.
Information Provided By:
Adrian Shanker
Executive Director
Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center
