2025 Sacred Season
We celebrate the Sacred Season from Juneteenth through the end of Black August as a way to encourage reflection, consideration, and movement toward reparative action. It is an opportunity to gather our community reflect on our dreams of freedom, heal from our collective trauma, and engage in education about our shared history.
this year,
we are adding a new element to our Sacred Season, Divestment as a Spiritual Practice.
Key Dates
We begin on Juneteenth (June 19th), a sacred day within the living theology of Black liberation. On this day and well beyond, we encourage our communities to seek education and learn more about the history of this nation.
On July 3rd, 1852, Abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave his most famous speech, “What to the Slaves is the Fourth of July?” which subverts the mainstream narrative that the American Independence Day is a celebration of freedom for all. July 4th is a day to reconsider our history that remains largely unquestioned. The 1619 Project and decoloniality literature interrogate the presumptive, untroubled waters that leave out the brutal violence of enslavement and colonization against African and Indigenous peoples and their homelands and neglect to consider the heavy impact of this history on us today.
Black August originated in 1979 following the murder of George Jackson to honor political prisoners and Black freedom fighters. Throughout this month, with which we close out the Sacred Reparative Season, we encourage religious, faith-based, spiritual, healing, and ethically-centered communities to choose a date to host a Reparations Sabbath/Saturday or Reparations Sunday and adapt either their usual service to include the theme of reparations, hold an event outside of their usual service, or host a special event on a designated day.
UPCOMING EVENTS
UPCOMING EVENTS
May 15
Sacred Season Teach-In
6-7 pm EST, Virtual
This one-hour educational event will go over the history and intention of the Sacred Season told through the framework of this years theme: Divestment as a Spiritual Practice.
Learn how to be part of the season and the change. Join thousands of others who are transforming spiritual practice by looking at what our core beliefs say about our past and how we may progress beyond current social norms toward a level of accountability that makes reparations possible.
Free and open to the public.
May 18
Sacred Season Teach-In
6-7 pm EST, Virtual
This one-hour educational event will go over the history and intention of the Sacred Season told through the framework of this years theme: Divestment as a Spiritual Practice.
Learn how to be part of the season and the change. Join thousands of others who are transforming spiritual practice by looking at what our core beliefs say about our past and how we may progress beyond current social norms toward a level of accountability that makes reparations possible.
Free and open to the public.