Rehearsal for Reconstruction
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
|St. Paul, MN and online
Deconstructing Mythologies of Unitarian Anti-Racism, Lecture 1 by Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason
Time & Location
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
St. Paul, MN and online
About the event
"Rehearsal for Reconstruction: Deconstructing Mythologies of Unitarian Anti-Racism"
by Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason
Join us in person or online for this first lecture in the 2025 Minns Lecture Series. Popular Unitarian histories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to focus on our heroic advocates for women’s rights. Without justification, we project backwards a mythology of ongoing Unitarian leadership that carried forward the legacy of Transcendentalist-era abolitionism into a twentieth century white anti-racist identity. Separating myth from reality and identifying the small number of Unitarian leaders who swam against the currents of Unitarian white supremacy culture from Reconstruction through the Gilded Age are the goals of this lecture series.
Rev. Dr. Wayne Arnason retired in 2016 from a forty-year career in parish ministry and governance leadership within the UUA. He has written books, essays and articles on UU institutional history throughout his career, notably We Would Be One, a…