Welcome to the Free to Be Faithful learning community!
Connecting faith and life together
Welcome! We’re so glad you’re here.
This Substack will be the hub for Free to be Faithful (F2BF), where we’ll share information and get to know each other.
Perhaps by the time you’re reading this, you’ve already participated in our event today with Kristin DuMez and Nick Wolterstorff - either in person or via the livestream. (By the way, we will include a link to the video of the event in a future post.) The response to this first event has been amazing, beyond our expectations—and we can’t wait to see where we go together.
In case things came at you a bit too quickly, we’re providing links below to several upcoming opportunites this spring, summer, and fall.
Our goal? To find our people. To inspire each other. To come together as an extraordinary global community of learners who care about each other and our world, who want to stay connected, dig deeper, and inspire each other.
Here’s what we currently have lined up, our first steps in this direction:
May 14 - If you’re from the Christian Reformed Church, you’ll know that the Human Sexuality Report (HSR) has divided the denomination. Rather than opening up theological conversation, its muzzled that conversation. This isn’t our style. We want to create spaces where all are free to discuss the most pressing issues of our day, in community. There are no litmus tests, no rules about who is in or out. Only a desire to seek truth, to respect the dignity of all, and to model grace.
To that end, we are hosting a conversation between two advocates for an inclusive LGBTQ stance, Sylvia Keesmaat from Canada and Len VanderZee from the US. They will focus on the issue of human sexuality and how they have come to full acceptance of LGBT persons as people who love the Scriptures, and love the Body of Christ. Sylvia will also preview a new Lifelong Learning course on human sexuality and Christian theology that she will be offering online through ICS this September (see details below.) All are welcome.
Register here for the webinar on May 14.
Summer Read - July, TBD - We are thrilled to announce our Summer Read: Kristin Du Mez and Bruce Berglund will be hosting a conversation on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny—one of the most important books of the moment. It’s a very short book that can be read in one sitting, but it packs a punch. You’ll also have a chance to meet Prof. Berglund, a master teacher and expert on European history, who will also be teaching a course for us this fall: Twentieth-Century Authoritarianism: Lessons in Complicity and Resistance (details below). We haven’t yet finalized the date for this conversation, but it will be sometime in July. What you can do between now and then is gather a group—this is definitely a book you’ll want to read in conversation with others. Then, at the appointed time, we’ll host an online book discussion. If you already gathered a group for the livestream, re-gather again! Or, better yet—have each participant form a new group. This is how we grow, how we find our people.
In addition to Sylvia and Bruce, we will be offering courses from two other exceptional, nationally known scholars…Karen Swallow Prior and Angela Reitsma Bick.
Read on for details on our full fall schedule:
Fall course offerings (September and beyond)
One of the great things about enrolling in a course through ICS is that you won’t just have top-notch instructors, but you can also choose to take a course for credit or applied toward degree completion. If you’re just here to learn, you’re also more than welcome in any course. You’re exactly who this is designed for.
The normal tuition rate for ICS Lifelong Learning courses is $600 CDN/$430 USD. ICS provides a $200 discount for your first course, bringing first-time tuition to only $400 CDN/$289 USD. We don’t want tuition to stand in the way of anyone who would like to participate, so we are working to secure grant funding to cover tuition. By registering for the course, we will reserve a slot for you and you will receive more information on payment options and scholarship availability in the coming weeks.
These courses are just the start of ICS’s new Lifelong Learning program, designed with these goals in mind:
The entire program is crafted to challenge ourselves with the following questions:
We would love to have you join us as we form our F2BF learning community!
To register for any of the above events:
Questions? Contact our Director of Lifelong Learning - Hector Acero Ferrer - haceroferrer@icscanada.edu
To support this important work:
We are so glad to have you along for this ride.