As Episcopal Divinity School at Union welcomes the first class of students to Union’s Anglican Studies Program, they were asked to join in a Community Read read of the Bryan Stevenson book, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which will be the focus of several public events this fall.

Please join us on Wednesday, September 12, at 6:30 PM, for a conversation about the book with The Very Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, Dean of EDS at Union, and Michelle Alexander, Visiting Professor of Social Justice at Union and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

This event is sold out.
Please click here to view the live stream.

About the book: We often forget that mercy and justice are not incompatible. Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption lets us know that they are not as he tells the stories of people who have become trapped in a merciless criminal justice system, namely people of color—especially children. Through these stories, Stevenson indicts not only a broken criminal justice system but also a broken society and nation, and by implication a far too silent church. He reminds us that “the true measure of our character, ‘is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.’” In addition, Just Mercy is the story of a man discerning and discovering his vocation in community. Stevenson writes movingly of how the faith of the prisoners and families he works with shaped his sense of call, and how that faith sustained him through the darkest moments of his nearly thirty years of work and witness at the Equal Justice Initiative.