Speaker's Forum at Claremont UCC

From picket fences and gated neighborhoods to office cubicles and prison cells, we live in a world of walls. We can end up a lonely people...stuck in the ghettos of poverty and the ghettos of affluence. But God is all about tearing down walls. We are not alone. Stories of compassion and reconciliation invite us into the promise that the gates will not prevail. Poverty and injustice become personal, as we gain the keys to see the suffering around us. The Gospel comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable...but is good news to all of us.

The Declaration of Independence is often thought of as a key moment of freedom's expression in world history.  At the same time, scholars have long debated the paradox of such a proclamation of freedom while so many Americans remained enslaved.  Join Dr. Daniel Livesay of Claremont McKenna as he discusses some of the various defenses of slavery in 1776. In particular, the supposed need for slave owners not to emancipate their elderly workers, who were claimed to be too vulnerable without masters.  He will argue that old age was a critical variable in the debates around slavery, and its continuation in the young United States.

Join Pastor Jacob for the second week of a two-part series on how the Biblical canon was formed.  Today Jacob will describe ancient Jewish and Christian spiritual texts outside of the Bible that have been discovered and why these texts were not included in the Bible.