April 2, 2025 | 10:00 AM - 4:30 PM
This year’s 2025 Unafraid Symposium will be held in honor of Rev. Dr. Dorsey Odell Blake. Presentations throughout the day will feature selections from students in Dorsey’s classes.
We are living in a turbulent time of political upheaval and planetary crisis. The urgency for progressive theological voices and spiritually rooted leaders to respond has perhaps never been greater. The Unafraid Symposium: Emerging Paths of Being, Doing & Disruption invites scholar-activists, faith leaders, and prophetic thinkers—emerging and experienced alike—to courageously engage this moment with creativity, forging new ways of being, acting, and disrupting the status quo.
This year’s symposium explores disruption as an act of justice and transformation. It asks: How can our being and doing embody disruption? How can disruption lead us toward liberation and the realization of what is “not yet here but is coming”?
The theme of emerging reflects a transgressive process of becoming—of waiting, breaking through, and transforming. To courageously ask: “Emerging from what? For what? And to what?” It challenges us to consider how divine paths of disruption, queering, and creating redefine faithful witness in times of upheaval.
Anchored by a keynote on The Theology of the Ampersand by Dr. Susan Abraham, this year’s symposium affirms that disrupting, creating, and leading are inextricably and divinely linked.
Program Schedule
ALL TIMES PACIFIC
10:00 -10:15 AM > Introductions
10:15 – 10:30 AM > Keynote Address, Dean Susan Abraham
10:30 – 11:55 AM > Panel One: Being
12:00 – 1:00 PM > Lunch Break
1:00 – 2:20 PM > Panel Two: Doing
2:35 – 3:00 PM > Message from Professor Lisa Asedillo
3:00 – 4:25 PM > Panel Three: Disruption
4:25 – 4:30 PM > Closing Remarks
Zoom Information: