Rising to Life: Christian Public Witness in the Age of Coronavirus

by CWM Communications Team

As churches reach out to their faithful through online platforms and live-streamed worship services during the pandemic, the nature and meaning of the body of Christ has been radically changed. The coronavirus has presented an opportunity for us to contest our conventional models of being the church, and search for new forms of being the church.

To enable us to rediscover the church afresh, Council for World Mission(CWM) is organising a Web Talk Series for a Life-Flourishing Economy, Ecology and Communities, around the theme “Rising to Life: Christian Public Witness in the Age of Coronavirus”.

Held on 17 July, the second Web Talk brings together Dalit scholars, theologians and activists from South Asia to discuss the topic “Coronavirus and Caste”, and to empower churches to engage in radical public witness, informed by unheard and silenced voices.

Far from being an equaliser, COVID-19 has a caste in South Asia, with the casteist mindset considering Dalit lifestyle and occupations as “unhygienic” and “impure”. People practice casteism and untouchability even when they are in quarantine, refusing to eat food touched and cooked by Dalit cooks. The lockdown reinforces casteist values, ethos and practices, and we also ignore the question of how different vulnerabilities are produced during a crisis. Coronavirus may go away, but there is no vaccine which can cure the disease of caste.

Register to hear from our panel of speakers this Friday, 17 July at 5pm (IST).

 

Event details can be found here, and you will receive a Zoom link when your registration is accepted.

 

 

You may also like

Leave a Comment